Seat Up, Seat Down: The Porta-Potty Edition

Hygienically inclined reader Joseph D. writes the following:

I recently attended a festival with Port-a-John facilities. These seats are always pee-covered. In fact, pretty much the entire area inside the John is pee-covered, which causes a hazardous situation for women who must hover while standing on the slippery plastic floor or worse, the area that extends from the toilet opening.

Whenever I use one of these, I try to put the seat up. Why? Because a woman (or #2-ing man) would much rather go through the trouble of putting the seat down than hovering for the duration of the deed or creating a T.P. barricade on the soiled seat. Most often, in Port-a-Johns, T.P. is absent anyway. (suggestion: Bring your own T.P. to these events.)

This toilet seat etiquette should extend to unisex restrooms as well. Why? In a perfect world every guy would lift the seat, do the deed, and put it down. This is not the case. Guys, no matter how accurate the aim, leave pee-droplets. Pee droplets should be wiped and the seat raised so that gravity removes the remaining liquid.

These suggestions are not from a lazy guy, but a hygiene-concerned guy.

As a brief aside, I always call those damnable contraptions porta-potties. I wonder if there is some regional dialect associated with what we call them? But I digress.

First of all, my sympathies for having attended such an event. No fun, from a bathroom point of view. Men fare okay in such a situation, but women should never be forced to endure a poorly-maintained porta-potty (I have been in some sparklingly clean ones from time to time).

However, we need to take a moment to discuss etiquette vs. reality. Etiquette is what you should do, and therefor deals with precisely the kind of “perfect world” scenario that you describe. Proper etiquette dictates leaving the seat down in all situations where a woman might reasonably be expected to use the bathroom. It also dictates you should not pee all over the seat. Realistically leaving the seat up might help, but that doesn’t make it good etiquette.

That said, this is one of those situations where etiquette is pretty much thrown out the window. Anything that effectively helps keep the seat clean may well be appreciated by women, and is probably fine to do.

One more note on the seat up vs. seat down issue. This is a bigger deal in a home, where a woman is going to have a reasonable expectation that the seat is already down, especially in the middle of the night in the dark. I think that all women are going to check on the seat status in a public bathroom, and so effectively the seat condition will be less of an issue in these venues.

Oh, and great tip about bringing your own TP!