“Wipe or vazi, pee sitting down. » The order is given to us by a cartoonish raccoon drawn on a poster in the toilets of Drunken, a beer bar in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis). On a rather quiet Thursday night, most customers didn’t notice the poster. But, for Margot (she prefers not to give her surname), 28, a waitress, the message is important. “It’s a question of hygiene, of respect. I don’t feel like sitting on someone else’s pee drips at all, whether it’s in my house or where I work. The toilets belong to everyone, and I have the right to ask myself how I want to be treated in this shared space”insists the brunette with a boyish cut, installed behind the counter.
If, in France, this kind of inscription may surprise, in Germany it is not uncommon to come across signs asking men to put their buttocks on the toilet bowl of airports, museums or restaurants. There, there is even a word for someone who sits down to relieve their bladder: Sitzpinkler (“sitting piss”). A practice that is not only current in the country of the Oktoberfest. According to a Panasonic survey conducted in 2020 on a small sample (155 respondents), 70% of Japanese men say they urinate while sitting at home, compared to 51% five years earlier. The reason given by those who prefer to put their butt down to pee is almost always the same: cleanliness. According to a study by mechanical engineering researcher Tadd Truscott, when a man relieves himself standing up, the splashing, what the Anglo-Saxons call backsplash, spread up to 3 meters around – a distance that is all the more important to know for those whose toothbrush or towel is installed in the same room as the toilets.
To guarantee the cleanliness of the sanitary facilities, should everyone be required to pee while seated? Or would it be yet another wokist crusade against male freedoms? Already in 2003, in his essay Wrong Way (Odile Jacob), dedicated to the criticism of a feminism supposed to be “obsessed with the trial of the male sex”Elisabeth Badinter castigates Swedish mothers who teach little boys to sit on the toilet seat. When, on TikTok, Doctor JFK, a pharmacy student, publishes a video to explain that “peeing while sitting increases your maximum urinary output”alarmed netizens rush to comment: “The guy is made to urinate standing up! Look at the dogs: males and females don’t pee the same way either! »
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