Christopher Shaw 

On the Ethics of Putting Down the Toilet Seat in Public

Standing over a toilet at my local Starbucks, I zip up my pants and go to put the toilet seat back down, but I pause as my foot rests on the ridge of the toilet seat, considering the decision I am about to make. An ethical dilemma constrains my movement and engulfs me in inaction. When I first entered the bathroom, the toilet seat was already up (making it convenient for me, as I only needed to pee), but since this is an all-inclusive bathroom, with the worldwide data suggesting that there is a little over 50% chance that the next user of the bathroom will be someone who sits to urinate, I don’t know if I should leave the toilet seat as is. If this were a bathroom marked “penis only,” I would not even consider putting the seat down as the rate of public-standing-penis-having-pissers significantly outweighs the number of public-sitting-penis-having-pissers and public-sitting-penis-having-poopers, by a wide margin. However, this is one of those shared, one seater restrooms, that’s all inclusive along the gender spectrum, which, as resident of North Carolina—the state of the bathroom bill fiasco—is definitely a good thing on the macro level, but on a micro level raises more questions like this one.

More than the average human being, my clinical anxiety, self-diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome, and smallish bladder causes me to spend more time than the average human being in public restrooms. As bathrooms go, I’ve seen it all, from sneaking into a Hilton on the fourth of July to handle a case of my own fireworks, to side of the road gas stations on roughly 75% of any road trips I’ve ever taken, to a subway restroom in upstate New York that almost certainly contained a ghost.

With all my experience, I’ve seriously considered starting a Yelp style app where users review bathrooms and recommend them to others. Yet, how can I be trusted with such an important app if I can’t even decide if the toilet seat should be down or not? Up until this moment of indecision in my local Starbucks, I had considered myself an expert in the matter of restrooms, but now my identity feels broken, pieces of it falling into the toilet’s gaping mouth. If my inaction were ever discovered, I would be lambasted by those in the bathroom field as a charlatan and fraud. Besides these issues of credibility, the next user of the bathroom might know that I last used the restroom, and depending on their toilet seat predilections, would either judge or praise me for my foresight. Whatever choice I make, I know I will face judgement, but I want to have the reassurance of ethical superiority. So, how to choose? Still standing over the toilet, I run through the criteria that I might judge my next action.

I first turn to the topic of bathroom oppression, as I generally consider Sartre’s statement that we must be on the side of the oppressed, because “the only human group in a position to conceive a human ethics is the oppressed,” to be a way to guide my actions. The topic of bathroom oppression along the gender lines is a messy one, but by determining it, I hope to come to some course of action. Oppression in the typical penis-having, or more traditional, male bathroom centers around making men perform beside other males as the bathroom community expects them to be able to pee in a urinal with a man to their left grunting/farting/moaning as he pees and a man to the right trying to make conversation (and who you expect might be trying to take a peek at your very average penis). This toxic masculinity causes peeing in a stall to be only acceptable if the urinals are crowded and even then, alpha males often leave the stall door open to keep their masculinity intact. The coded message being, “My dick is out, and you will hear it roar.” For men who don’t quite identify with this alpha behavior, the public restroom reaffirms their perceived beta male stature. For non-penis-having, or more traditional, female bathrooms, this performative aspect of pissing surely is lost (though my subjectivity as a penis having, male identifying bathroom user may render some of this information slightly inaccurate), but the increased bathroom wait time and lack of pissing freedom (non-penis-havers for the most part must sit, whereas penis-havers can sit or stand) adds its own amount of oppression. For the most part, I think privacy outweighs the time spent waiting, but as I look at the toilet bowl from a standing position, I feel the weight of my privilege as I reflect on all of the piss and shit splattered toilet seats over the years, and surely, I am not a part of the more oppressed group. Point one to putting the toilet seat down.

I hook the toilet seat with my foot, beginning to return it to a position best prepared to receive a human buttock, but then a droplet of piss on the toilet seat makes itself known to me and I wonder if my initial, well-meant action might actually cause more problems to the most oppressed than help them. Based on my learned experience of both public and private bathroom use by those of the gun slinging variety, I know that their aim seemingly contradicts the fact that they have been practicing shooting their gun for most of their lives and that this lack of giving-a-piss often results in the total de-sanctification of porcelain thrones all over the country. With roughly half of the world’s population falling into the gun slinger camp, and, within that camp, approximately 85% identifying with the trait “fires indiscriminately and does not lift up the seat in public,” there is a statistically high chance that if a penis-haver uses the bathroom next, they will spray the seat and cause either a non-penis-haver or penis-having-pooper to have to clean the toilet, thus making me somewhat culpable for their discomfort. By leaving the seat up, I could have completely avoided the whole sordid business. Point to leaving the seat up. The score is now tied.

I return the seat to its upright position, trying to reflect on the penis-to-non-penis-ratio in Starbucks, as I may just have to base my decision on the likelihood of a non-penis-haver using the bathroom next. If it’s over fifty percent, I will put the toilet seat down, and if it’s under, I will leave it up. I close my eyes and try to picture how many people I identified as either penis-having or non-penis-having on my walk to the restroom, but my mind fails me, throwing up a roadblock at every turn. I’m almost certain there was a table of four non-penis-havers, but I can’t quite remember the other two thirds of the coffee shop, which really isn’t enough information to go off of. Additionally, I have an inability to really know for certain if each of these people that I do remember and can identify really do or do not have a penis, as I can only identify them based on their performativity. On top of all of this, I am feeling uncomfortable keeping my eyes closed in a Starbuck’s bathroom as if it were the hot, new meditation spot in town. I open my eyes with the knowledge that I do not have enough evidence to make a data-supported judgement on the likelihood of the next user of the restroom, and so, I’m stuck where I started. There are certainly an infinite number of variables I could consider, but they all escape me.

I decide to go with my gut. I pull the toilet seat down and wipe off the seat with some toilet paper to dry it. Next, I turn on the faucet, wetting part of a wad of toilet paper, which I then put soap on and scrub the seat with. To finish, I use another wetted wad of toilet paper to rinse off the seat and then I dry it with even more toilet paper, which I then deposit into the toilet. I have over corrected but feel good about myself because I’ve left the toilet in pristine condition for anyone who needed to sit on it. While ethically this may not be the right choice and it may represent an over correction, I feel satisfied on my part, as I think I’ve found a somewhat happy medium between the two choices. However, as I go to put my hand on the door handle to return to the outside world, I wonder if I only have done this to just appear ethical. Unlike multiple stall restrooms, in these one-seater restrooms it’s easy for the next user to identify who last used the restroom and then judge them for whatever smell and/or sight they are left with. And how many times have I merely wiped off a toilet seat of some- one else’s piss (or even my own!) without actually cleaning it, rationalizing that ignorance is bliss?

A new question embeds itself:

Do I really want to be ethical or do I only want to appear ethical?

I do not physically stay in the bathroom to answer that question, but to this day, I mentally languish away on a metaphoric dirty toilet seat of my own making. There are some questions that cannot be answered, and there are some toilet seats that can never be cleaned.

Christopher Shaw is a graduate of the University of North Carolina Wilmington and has a master’s degree in English along with a B.A. in English and a B.F.A. in creative writing. He currently works as an associate copywriter for a digital marketing company. Read more of his work at https://chrisshawblog.com/.