The Unfortunate Physics of Male Urination

You are not alone.

In Japan a large proportion of men also sit at home (based on a recent survey) for the very same splashback complaints from their wives.

A lot of men don't like to admit to sitting down to piss but as you age your hydraulic pressure seems to decrease and you wake more during the night to piss. Sitting down while half asleep prevents a mess and empties your bladder more thoroughly.

I too sit at home. I have done it for most of my adult life, basically as soon as I had to start cleaning my own bathroom.

I find that when I sit down to pee, my penis can touch the rim of the toilet if I'm not careful, it's kinda uncomfortable. It's also very space-inefficient in an office environment. My office is mostly full of men, and we would have serious problems if we didn't have the urinal in addition to two toilets on every floor. A urinal can relieve twice or three times as many people in the same time it takes for a toilet stall to relieve one.

Back when I was a kid, on some mornings, I did try sitting down to urinate a few times (basically whenever I was feeling too tired to stand), but I stopped doing that after a while since it would usually hurt (I’m guessing due to the force of all the urine coming out (quite a bit does accumulate after sleeping for 8 – 10 hours) combined with my sitting posture). Since it never hurt while I was standing, I ended up just sticking to that after a while.

I sit, too, but sometimes it goes through the space between the seat and the bowl.

The one trick urinal physicists don't want you to know about!

If you ever do that somewhere other than home, be careful. I ran into a toilet at an office where some idiot had installed an elongated seat on a regular sized bowl. It was not difficult to end up in a position where you felt properly positioned based on previous elongated toilets, but in fact your penis was in front of the bowl, aimed right down into your pants.

> People think I'm weird for doing it

I only think you're a little weird for telling them.

Sitting for a pee was one of most unexpected and difficult cultural barriers I had to deal with when I lived in Germany.

My German flatmates were very serious about it, and most houses I visited, most of them multi-nationality, had signs imploring visitors to always sit. Took me a while, and quite a bit of 'public shaming' to remember to sit.

The weirdest part was that whenever I'd have non-German male visitors, we'd usually end up in an argument about the practice because it was perceived to be emasculating! And more than once my guests, otherwise perfectly polite, would just pee standing up anyways.

Toilets seem to come in a ridiculous amount of shapes, at least where I'm from. There's the difference between splash and have-your-poop-on-display type toilets, there's the pull-cord-to-flush, push-a-button-on-the-wall, and more common push-button-on-top-of-basin types of toilets. And then there's the squat toilet.

Urinals, on the other hand, are all basically the same and only differ slightly in shape.

And now I'm wondering why I bothered to write a comment defending toilet varieties.

One of the manufacturers in the article, Duravit, is mentioned as using this approach to indicate where the "sweet spot" is for aiming to reduce splash.

Also available with bushes and trumps.

It's also why some people leave 'trail marks' for the next toilet visitor. Just a common courtesy, really.

They still exist. You can also find several at fairgrounds.

Troughs are great! I'm impressed by the simplicity of it, "this thing must be a cinch to clean! ten seconds of hose, air dry!" I despise the frequent click bait articles about "how to use maths to choose which urinal to use." Use any urinal! Grow up and don't mind your fellow men satisfying their natural impulses just like you. Overcoming "stage fright" is a marker of growing up; I for one admire the old guys who turn into the brass section of a marching band once they enter the bathroom. If you can't let loose in the bathroom after 2 hours at the mall, where is the safe space? The food court?

I don't think that being a total priss about these things is the obviously correct way to move forward. Not every man needs the toilet of a Japanese emperor (especially when your half acre of fescue hidden behind your picket fence is the ultimate urinary domain).

Also bidets are a joke, end up using twice as much paper just to dry off.

troughs are so much better than urinals, gets you in and out without waiting for a specific size unit to open up, way more people peeing at once, much bigger target to aim for.

I've seen troughs at festivals and quite a few bars around here. Reminds me of this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InR7tip2Izk

Can you elaborate on "pull to open" and why it's a problem. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

"Pull to open" is ambiguous, as doors that pull to open are push to open when you go the opposite direction. Which way does the door swing (into the room or out)?

The "open inwards" issue is due to building codes prohibiting doors from blocking traffic in a hallway. I think you'll find that most doors that aren't in hallways actually do open outwards.

[citation needed]

Isn't that exactly what Kohler did with that Steward urinal at the end of the article?

Those plastic mats you find in urinals don't seem to do much to prevent splash back in my experience. It seems like the urinal shown at the end of the article with more of a vase or jug design has a better chance of preventing urine splashing back all over your shoes and pants.

At the university that I attended, there used to be sinks in every dorm room. However, the sinks were removed from the men's and co-ed dorms after too many guys were using them as urinals.

Sit down... at the sink?

Wow

Most office and public restrooms (for men) have a ratio of 2:1 or 3:2, urinals to stalls, from my estimation. Sitting down isn't an option when there's a line.

I do sit. But those guys I know who refuse to sit, do so on the grounds of manhood. Sitting is not manly. Obviously.

They found the right woman for the interview!