The Man's Guide to Public Restroom Etiquette

Bring a match with you

Not to suggest that most men can’t handle some stink, but honestly – sometimes deuces are dropped that offend the nose in such a way that they stick with bystanders for the next few hours. Quite simply, this collateral damage is unnecessary: just bring a book of matches into the john with you and, should you feel a particularly heinous bit of excrement coming on, simply strike a match.

All things considered, this isn’t particularly difficult – it’s not as if we’re asking you to bring in an entire bottle of air freshener into the shitter. Matches are cheap, effective, and serve many purposes outside of odor masking. Technically, you should carry a box of matches anyway – taking a particularly heinous dump should merely represent another opportunity to open it up.

If you’re going to jerk off, raise the toilet seat first

Nobody’s got a problem with having a mid-work wank (except for your boss, anyway), but when you do it, make sure that you (A) make sure you do when you are alone and (B) make sure your spum doesn’t land on the goddamn toilet seat. Having worked at a Blockbuster Video full of employees with dead souls and even worse sex lives, the possibility of finding jism on the toilet seat in the employee restroom was disturbingly high. The offenders would often try to wipe up with a paper towel, but the damage is already done -- people put their asses there, after all.

Should someone accidentally sit on a toilet seat you’ve jizzed on and subsequently catch a rare form of gonorrhea from that Latino prostitute you picked up a few weeks ago, you might be at least peripherally responsible. Why take the risk?

Do not make eye contact with, or talk to, anyone else in the restroom

The public restroom is a place for two things, and two things only: removal of human waste products, and a place to engage in anonymous, quickly-regretted sex.

It is not a place for socializing, making jokes, or, indeed, communicating in any way. For all intents and purposes, men are supposed to feel totally alone whilst in the bathroom: we have to unzip ourselves, we feel mildly vulnerable, and we don’t need to engage in amiable bullshit conversation as we do in the other 99% of our lives.

Far too many men in far too many public restrooms have attempted to make ironic small-talk, or make silly one-liners, or express loud personal pleasure over being able to relieve themselves (I’m not talking about groans of relief, which are completely acceptable, but rather a man who once burst into a restroom I was in at LAX, cut his way to the front of the queue, dropped all of his luggage, and loudly exclaimed, “THANK GOD FOR PUBLIC RESTROOMS” as he excitedly peed into the nearest urinal). They consider the restroom a place of community, not unlike bars or sporting events – a place where men of all creed, color, and shape must inevitably go as a result of their genetic makeup. These men are not to be trusted.

Learn the rules of urinal use

The specifics of how to choose a urinal in a public restroom were wonderfully explained in The Urinal Game many years ago, but for the purposes of summary:

-Always optimize the amount of space between you and any other person in the restroom

-If it is impossible to pee without a buffer of at least one empty urinal between you and the next man, choose the urinal closest to the door for purposes of making a quick exit

-Generally, choose a urinal farthest from the door so as to minimize the amount of people who have to look at you peeing as they try to find their own urinal

-If you have to pee next to someone, always pee next to a group versus a single man: subconscious assumptions of homoeroticism will follow if you choose to pee next to only one guy, standing by himself in the farthest corner of the restroom

Or, to summarize the summary, always show the utmost respect for other peoples’ personal space, and try to make urinal arrangements as unawkward as possible.

If someone else is around, wash your hands

So long as someone else is in the restroom with you, washing your hands is something of a societal obligation. Though no one outside of obsessive-compulsives and “healthy” people actually wash their hands regularly, one must do so in the presence of another so as to look somewhat respectable. Whether you like it or not, all men judge all other men, even if only subconsciously, on whether or not they wash their hands.

Really, think about it: how many times have you taken a whiz in a public restroom and watched another guy leave without washing his hands? How many times have you, for no real reason, silently thought: “what a disgusting jackass”? Really, there’s no reason why we should feel this way toward other men who wash their hands considering none of us really enjoy doing it, but it’s been repeatedly nailed into our heads from a young age that if you don’t wash your hands, you’re basically a pervert and a menace. All things considered, better to just wash your hands in front of the other guys and be on your way.

If you’re alone, of course, fuck it. If you’re on a date or something and you feel like the chick is judging you really closely, then maybe give them a quick rinse in the sink so they look wet, but there’s not that much reason to actually wash your hands unless you’re trying to save face, socially. All things considered, you should probably be more likely to wash your hands after touching a doorknob or another person than peeing in a public restroom – anal sex notwithstanding, the outside of the penis is probably one of the cleaner places on the male body (how often do you touch it to anything other than your underwear or your own hand?). So long as you don’t hit the flusher with your bare hand, accidentally dribble a bit of urine on your fingers, or take an accidental, full-on shit into your open palm, washing your hands should be a tertiary concern whilst in a public restroom.

This is also why you never, ever eat bar peanuts.

If at all possible, steal the couch from the women’s restroom

At the very least, saw the damn thing in half and bring it into the guy’s restroom. I’d love to have a place to sit on a nice cushion and bitch about the world for fifteen minutes at a time. I still believe the whole “menstruation” thing is a hoax perpetuated so women can get out of work.*

Don’t bother using the sanitary toilet seat covers

Not necessarily because they’re girly (though they most assuredly are), but because a lot of men seem utterly unable to use them, and subsequently make the toilet seat that much more unsanitary for the next user.

For instance, I’ve walked into urinals where the person neglected to punch out the middle of the paper toilet seat cover (you know, the place where the shit travels through), and then managed to take a deuce that was – in terms of velocity and speed – just weak enough not to break through the perforated paper in the seat cover. This considerably large piece of fecal matter, instead of punching through the paper and dropping harmlessly into the toilet, was deflected by the paper and somehow missed the fucking toilet completely.

You may rightfully ask how I know all of this happened, and the answer itself is more horrific than the actual story. Evidently, the guy who couldn’t learn how to properly operate a fucking millimeter-thick piece of flimsy paper was so panicked by dropping a deuce and failing to hit his intended target, he just left it there. Along with the unbroken, shit-stained paper toilet seat cover and a few haphazardly-torn pieces of toilet paper, this guy decided to leave the evidence of last number two on the restroom linoleum, sitting there like some sort of dead animal. Like some sort of feces-driven version of Sherlock Holmes, I simply stood there, flabbergasted, and attempted to mentally connect the dots with the clues that lay before me. To this day, I do not know why I did so: perhaps the horror of seeing the pile of excrement initiated some deep-seated survival instinct, and in an effort to distance myself from the horror that lay ahead of me, I took a detached, analytical perspective (Tom Savini did the same thing when he saw the corpses of women and children in Vietnam).

While many, many men know how to use these covers properly, I feel that even the mere possibility of some illiterate asshole leaving a steaming pile of human waste on the floor outweighs the relative hygienic benefits of properly using one.  If you’re really worried about catching something from the seat, just don’t let your ass touch it. Hovering presents some dangers of its own, but rarely – if ever – will it result in the sort of atrocity I was forced to bear witness to a few years ago.

Larry Craig joke

Everyone will have forgotten about him in three months, so – to save both of us a little time – insert your own joke here.

Do the Post-Pee Wang Shake correctly

We’ve all hopefully heard the playful (yet painfully true) rhyme,

No matter how you shake and dance

The last two drops go in your pants.

Not only does this little poem apply to the trials and tribulations of pumping gas at your local Exxon, it also still remains extremely relevant when it comes to public restroom hygiene. The idea Post-Pee Wang Shake consists of two sharp shakes, the second of which should ideally be combined with the act of placing said wang back into one’s underpants and zipping up.

Too frequently have I tried to shake the living daylights out of myself in a defiant attempt to keep my underwear totally dry. After roughly a year of attempting this, the only conclusion I came to was that, if you try to shake your dick more than twice, you will look like you are either (A) insane, (B) masturbating, or (C) both A and B. It’s a tough price to pay, but it’s one we all must suffer equally: no matter what, we will be tortured by an irritating little spot of moisture near the end of our willies for the next fifteen to twenty minutes following a good piss. There is no way around this – best to just take it like a man and move on.

*I don’t actually think this. Don’t send me angry emails.