Men and women have a lot to argue about when it comes to bathroom etiquette. From stall-to-stall chit-chatting to poopy graffiti that’s almost always erotic, men have some weird habits in the bathroom.
For example, they’re more likely to sit down when peeing for various reasons, including avoiding splashback and the need to reduce noise. They also have different preferences when it comes to folding versus crumpling toilet paper.
- The Height of the Seat
For many men, the bathroom is a quiet hideaway where they can escape from spouses, kids, and roommates. According to a recent survey, 33% of men said they use the restroom as a place to collect their thoughts and retreat from their hectic lives. But this toilet-based isolation isn’t necessarily healthy.
In fact, it’s probably one of the unhealthiest habits you can have. Spending too much time on the toilet can increase your risk of bowel cancer and other health problems. In addition, prolonged sitting on the toilet can cause hemorrhoids—a condition that causes itching, swelling, and bleeding in the anal canal.
That’s why it’s important to consider the height of the seat when shopping for a new toilet. Standard-height toilets have a rim that’s 14- to 15-inches from the floor. But if you’re taller, you may need to invest in a chair-height toilet that’s 17 inches from the floor.
Another thing to think about when choosing a toilet is the distance between the seat and the urinal. If the urinal is too close to the seat, it can cause splashback. To reduce this problem, you can buy a urinal with a lower rim. Or you can install a urinal divider to create separate spaces for males and females.
Men tend to hang the toilet paper roll vertically, and there’s a good reason for this. In a 1981 study, BYU researchers discovered that hanging the roll horizontally—like most people do today—caused it to break more easily. When the TP was hung vertically, however, the paper held up better.
Also, the research found that women were more likely to hang the TP horizontally than men. This could be because women’s bathrooms don’t usually have urinals, which require full stalls and make it difficult for men to sidle up to them.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you hang the TP vertically or horizontally as long as you do it correctly. In order to avoid spills and tears, you should always fold or crumple the ends of the toilet paper before hanging it.
- The Distance Between the Seat and the Urinal
Men’s bathroom etiquette is complicated by the fact that they’re often sharing space with strangers. While women can get away with talking to other females in a stall, men are usually forbidden from chatting in the presence of women, and they shouldn’t talk to any strangers at all while using the urinals (or any stall, for that matter). Men also tend to use the end urinals because they don’t have to share a wall with a dude who might spray them with urine.
When it comes to deciding how close to the urinal a man should stand, the answer is closer than you might think. A classic study on bathroom rituals concluded that “Stalls serve as a temporary hideout for the individual occupying them,” and this privacy can be disrupted if other people stand too close. In order to avoid this, the urinal should be at least two feet from the seat.
The same study found that when a person stands too far from the urinal, they can lose track of where their stream is going, and it could unexpectedly shoot to the left or right, leaving splashes on the walls and floor. This is why, for etiquette purposes, most experts suggest that a person aim for a fly painted on the urinal’s inner rim—this will help them track where their stream is.
In addition to avoiding a puddle on the floor, aiming for a fly may also reduce pee spray. The scientists who conducted the aforementioned study found that by aiming for a fly, a man can cut down on the amount of splashback by up to 70 percent.
Another bathroom etiquette rule that most people follow is the one about whether or not to fold or crumple toilet paper. Some people are firm believers in a no-crumpling policy, while others are more likely to crumple the paper than not—and some people are just more likely to fold, period. Younger people and those with two X chromosomes are more likely to fold than not, but it really depends on how much time you spend in the bathroom.
- The Distance Between the Urinal and the Wall
If you’ve ever stood in the men’s room of a major airport or walked past urinals in the halls of a sports arena, you might have noticed a perfect facsimile of a house fly adorning one or more of the drains. It could be a drawing baked into the porcelain or a peel-and-stick decal attached to the toilet bowl itself. In any case, a glance at this little insect will reveal that the bathroom is a guys-only experience.
In fact, a classic paper about bathroom rituals observed that men consider the urinal “a temporary hideout” where they can “be quiet and unobserved.” As long as no other patrons enter their stall, it acts as a private, albeit short-lived, retreat. That’s why talking across stalls is frowned upon, and men don’t like to poop in front of people.
This male-only bathroom experience also explains why men’s bathrooms have such oddities as a perfect housefly on a urinal or a double urinal where two guys can urinate side by side. It’s also why you never see any female urinals in the same room as men’s; it would be difficult to balance the number of men and women using the bathrooms.
But despite the oddities of men’s bathrooms, the basic rules of use remain the same for everyone. Guys generally squat in their seats and aim downward toward the floor of the urinal, not at the wall itself. This reduces splashback and makes for a more pleasant peeing experience.
However, aiming directly at the urinal wall produces a lot of kickback. To reduce the amount of spray, Hurd and his team recommend standing slightly to the side and aiming downward at a narrow-angle.
Men’s bathroom habits are a complex mixture of biology, psychology, and physics. But they’re also very personal, as evidenced by the fact that many men consider their bathroom break an opportunity to evade work demands and spend some time alone.
According to Caldwell, her patients often view their bathroom breaks as a chance to watch videos and scroll through social media on their phones. They’re not the only ones, either: A study found that nearly two-thirds of Americans have texted or emailed while on the toilet, and men are more likely than women to text or tweet.
- The Angle of the Urinal
The slope and angle of a urinal, the height of its user, the force of the stream, and other factors can all affect whether urine splashes back. When a man’s aim is off, splashback can spray dribble all over the bathroom walls and floor—and possibly anyone standing nearby. A team from the University of Waterloo used dyed water and a mock urethra to test different urinal designs. When they fired simulated urine streams at the urinal target, the scientists observed that some angles produced much more splashback than others.
The physics behind the phenomenon involves Plateau-Rayleigh instability, where a falling stream of liquid breaks up into droplets before impact. The bigger the droplets, the more likely they are to splash back. The researchers decided to optimize urinal design to minimize splashback, and they came up with an interesting solution: a nautilus shell-like shape with a curved opening called the Nauti-loo. When they tested the urinals with a simulated urine stream, the Nauti-loos performed the best and generated almost no splashback at all.
Another way to reduce the amount of splashback is to encourage people to stand slightly to one side rather than directly in front of the urinal, which reduces the angle of attack. It also helps to have an arch over the urinal, which can absorb the force of the stream and limit its impact.
It’s an unspoken rule of men’s bathroom etiquette to avoid choosing a urinal next to someone else’s, so if there are multiple urinals in the same room, it’s good to choose a spot far enough away from anyone already using a urinal.
Men often spend more time in the bathroom than women, but this doesn’t have to be a waste of their precious life energy. There are several things that can make a restroom more comfortable and enjoyable, from the best ways to fold toilet paper (folders outnumber crumplers by a wide margin) to the importance of checking for leaks before you leave.
