Remain seated, please

From the More-than-you-need-to-know-about-Doug department, with a warning that the following does reference natural bodily functions (that everyone does):

I've shared a bathroom with women most of my life. As a teen it was with my sister, and when I first moved out on my own my first roommate was a girlfriend. From that I developed the habit of putting the toilet seat down when I'm done with my business.

It's not that this makes me better than other men who aren't thusly inclined. I'm just admitting that I was conditioned early on to do this, and it's become something I don't even think about. I feel neither pride nor shame about it; it's just what I do.

Most of the time, at least.

A recent night I woke up in the wee hours of the morning, with the world still very dark, and had to answer the call. I got out of bed and strode the few steps to the bathroom. Enough light came in through the window to allow me to identify the toilet without turning on the light, and I had no desire to expose my eyes to that level of brightness, so I made my way to the toilet in the relative dark.

I started to sit down to pee so I wouldn't have to focus on aiming. (At that hour I could care less about seeming emasculated.) And as my hand grasped the side of the bowl I realized that the seat was up. Apparently I'd failed to follow my habit when last I urinated.

So I stopped my sitting action, stood up, turned and put the seat down. I then resumed the sitting, and proceeded with the task at hand.

I don't mean to sound dismissive of what women have been telling me most of my life, but I have to say: It wasn't difficult, even without full cognition, to identify the difference between the seat up and the seat down.

Just like when I'm walking through a darkened room I will reach my hand in front of me to detect any object before walking into it, feeling for the existence of the toilet seat before attempting to sit on it, even though I almost always would have it down anyway, just struck me as being in my best interest.

Even one such as myself who's good about this sort of thing can slip up. It's not an attempt to pull a prank on anyone; it's a slip.

All I'm saying is: I'll continue to put the seat down, but it strikes me as prudent for both sexes to verify that the seat's down prior to putting the posterior in its proximity.

If you do it enough, you'll make a habit of it.

~

And now, some more on this topic (not that anyone wants to or needs to know)...

Upon reflection (during that tilde), it has occurred to me that despite having been conditioned to put the seat down (to such a degree that it's usually unconscious behavior) I have never actually investigated why the onus was on men to accept responsibility for putting the seat down. At no point when the women who requested I put the seat down have I ever stopped and asked why they couldn't put it down.

This is because, even in my teens, I was not a complete idiot. And just to be clear: I am not asking now. (I am still not a complete idiot. A partial idiot, sure, but not a complete one.)

I certainly understood the importance of lifting the seat before I urinated standing up; neither of us want that. However, with the seat always down when either of us enters the bathroom, that obligates me to lift it over half the time I go in. Would a proper compromise not be that the woman exert the effort to put the seat down half the time?

That's a rhetorical question. Don't answer. The point here is not to persuade any women that they should stop training men to put the seat down. Nor am I suggesting men should argue when the women request the seat be put down. (Men, it's not standing up for yourself. It's actively making your life more difficult for an insignificant reason. You earn far more brownie points—yeesh, that term takes on a whole different connotation in this scenario, doesn't it?—for doing it than any benefit of delusion of self-assertion will grant if you fight over this.)

Even though I've never asked—and, I repeat, I'm not asking now—logically there must be a reason why women have issue with putting the seat down themselves. I could speculate about what the reason is (and I imagine the conclusion would be somewhere in the "it looks nicer if company drops by" area), but to do so would be folly undertaken only by a complete idiot. As we have already established I am not a complete (only partial) idiot, I shan't speculate thusly.

Were I not a partial idiot, I would have refrained from even mentioning what I have above. Clearly it implied some things about women that are less than complimentary, although I merely wished to highlight some of the quirks of the situation. And in a pathetic attempt to save my butt, I will offer this sincere belief (in the form of an overly glib generalization): Men, left to our own devices, will eventually screw everything up; women are the only hope for our species.

If they can get us to put the toilet seat down today, perhaps tomorrow they'll keep us from killing each other.

~

Let me have it in the comments, ladies.