Toilet Seats: Up or Down?

Have you seen this? I saw it on a friend's Facebook wall.

Now, if you read all of these, plenty of them are based on lame gender stereotypes. In the second column, for example, there is the comment about colors and how subtle shade differences are lost on men. Guess what? They are lost on me too, and I have a vagina. Also, I get my oil changed exactly when it needs to be changed. Every time. And for my boyfriend, a living, breathing male, Saturday=books or Saturday=sleep (actually these days Saturday=work but that's beside the point), but Saturday=NO Sports.

However, I do really enjoy and appreciate the first rule (henceforth known as The Toilet Seat Rule). I myself have done some complaining over the years, that might have sounded something like this: "Why can't you put the toilet seat back down after you use it?" "If you do that, I'm gonna fall in!" "It's not that hard to put it back down."

But I also remember one moment of gender-equality consideration on my part. I was hanging out at a guy friend's apartment, and I asked to use the bathroom before we left. Since he lived alone, and he was (and still is) a male, I chose to put the toilet seat back up when I was done. I'd never done that before (or since, I don't think...), but for whatever reason, in that moment I was very aware that I was in a guy's apartment, and that guys usually want the toilet seat up. So I put it back up. When I told my sister that I had done this, she laughed at me as if I were so silly. But if we expect them to put it back down in our bathrooms, why shouldn't we put it back up in theirs?

Let's be honest ladies. For most of us (at least those reading this), it's been a long time since we were small enough to truly fall into the toilet. I can only remember one occurrence of walking into the bathroom and sitting down without realizing the seat was up, and I caught myself before coming anywhere close to bare bottom meeting toilet water. Yes, I would say the toilet looks better with the seat down, and usually looks cleaner, and that is the image that I personally would prefer for visitors to my bathroom to see, but that is how I feel about my own home.

Now, I definitely am not endorsing the stereotypes in most of these rules. The "Crying is blackmail" and "Yes and no are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question" are just reworded versions of "Men don't have emotions. We don't understand women and their crazy emotions. Stop crying--we're not allowed to, and seeing you do it freaks us out!" In fact, 2/3 of these rules are based solely on "Women talk too much, feel too much and buy too much" and "Men are superior and therefore above those silly words, feelings and consumer products."

But I do find the toilet seat rule to be funny and to ring true. I feel like I learned to complain about the toilet seat more from movies and TV than anywhere else. I've been wondering where this started. Maybe it started when work moved out of the home and women became primary homemakers; they had control over the home and how it looked, and therefore the home was subject to their demands and needs. But however it started, I think it's interesting how it has persisted, and even come to symbolize, in a way, the little, frivolous arguments of a married (heterosexual) couple.


And the rule gets one more thing right: I've never heard men complain about having to put it back down.