What Ladies Need to Know About Taking a Whiz al Fresco

When we were offered press passes to yet another outdoor festival, we seriously weighed the pros and cons. These whole day-long summer music blowouts are always a commitment and a dice roll: while seeing a band you like with 10,000 other dirty, sweaty, disgusting people is not everyone’s cup of tea, sometimes they’re actually fun. If you’re lucky, you discover a new band that doesn’t suck, you get a little lightheaded from being drunk and mildly dehydrated, and if you’re reeeeally lucky you get a beejer (or fingerblasted, if you’re a lady) behind a mist tent sponsored by some tragic soda company. If you’re unlucky, the stage will fall down and kill you, or the whole thing will become a hellish burning rape-fest.

Of course, one thing you can always count on is that going to the bathroom will be a terrible, nightmarish experience. Especially for girls. Everyone knows the problem with girls and peeing in public—not just at concerts—is that the line up to the womens' washroom is always impossibly fucking long.

It's sad that something as natural and beautiful as the act of urination becomes an inconvenience to females, especially someplace where everyone is drinking a lot and that shit’s inevitable. But what many of you might not know is that confident women have been secretly squatting to piss in the woods for ages, and ladies, it’s about time we expose ourselves to the free pissing world. Consider the following.

PORTA POTTY IS BEST
First of all, I'm not advocating pee anarchy. When a Porta Potty presents itself, make good use out of it. Pee like there’s no tomorrow–heck, pee blood, empty your Diva Cup, adjust the socks in your bra, finger yourself, rub your vulva against the toilet seat, whatever… use the privacy when you can get it and just be thankful you’re not in the middle of a mud-caked crowd who only know half the words to that Gotye song but still insist on trying to sing every excruciating one.

PEEING OUTSIDE IS OK
Women, as a whole, and especially women born and bred in urban spaces, have a lot to learn about peeing properly in the wild. And by "the wild" I mostly just mean parking lots, alleyways, ditches, bus stops, banks, and pretty much everyplace where guys are frequent to release. The myth that girls can't pee outside is obviously false. So here is the truth: for a girl to pee outside she requires nothing other than a vagina and legs and a private little nook that ideally features a downward gradient and pretty foliage to stare at while you “shake the dew off your lily.” There is nothing biologically disabling about female urinary anatomy when it comes to the art of pissing outside. Girls and boys just do it differently.

LOCATION
While searching for your secret spot, walk with purpose and don't dally. Look for well-protected areas that aren't too far off the beaten path. Shrubs are ideal because you can get low and hide while you do your thing and allow you to re-emerge into the broad collective quickly, elegantly, and safely. Three walls of protection are best, but two will do just fine. Remember you can also use your clothes as a barrier, sometimes so effectively that you can become your very own bathroom stall. Skirts work especially well for this, but so will your shorts or purse. Or if you’re cool, scratch everything I said, maybe just wear a skirt and go commando.

TECHNIQUE
Activate your glutes and quads, bend your knees, drop your ass like your name is Diamond, and voila. Get as low and close to the ground as possible to minimize spray and noise. One last thing, and this is important: aim your urethra away from your feet.

CLEAN UP
Put a little epilepsy into your pelvis and shake. Not too violently though, so as to avoid further splash back. If that discomforts you, try straddling a bush, or some shrubs, and hump the fuck out of it. Make sure it’s not poison ivy, unless you’re into that kinda thing. If you did happen to get pee on your feet during your live-stream session, simply rub your feet against something absorbent. If you can’t find anything, it’ll probably be dry by now anyway, so just pretend that nothing happened. It’s your little secret.

THE BOYS' BATHROOM
My own personal philosophy on pee and liberty is that urinating is a biological necessity, and as long as I behave reasonably and with genuine respect, no measly gender wall is going to stop me from getting to where I need to pee so I can get on with my life. If there is no line in the boys' washroom and you feel like your urethra is two seconds away from eruption, don't be self-destructive in the name of saving face. That said, the boys bathroom is only an option when everyone around you is not a rapist. How do you know? Well, I guess it’s just hope in the human race, and after that, the luck of the draw.

PISSING IN PUBLIC AND THE LAW
First world countries like ours tend to believe that third world countries have it bad when it comes to personal freedom, but actually they have far more freedom and liberty than we do in the sense that they can pull their pants down in the street and take a shit wherever and whenever they want to. We in the US, on the contrary, live in a policed society that enforces the belief that peeing in public is shameful and dirty and disgusting. Cops give out tickets for public urination all the time on account of it being "obscene." And that's a real shame, because often times peeing in public is done out of necessity, not pleasure, and you don't have to be a law grad to know that it's a bad thing when your government makes a human necessity punishable. In the UK, a judge recently ruled that urinating in public is not a public nuisance if nobody sees it, which seems not only reasonable, but pretty cool. What we should be practicing is pee respect. Respecting ourselves and respecting the pee. Wow, I did a lot of drugs last weekend.

Want more pee pee? Check these out:

Deep Inside the Chain Pub Piss Dungeon

The Perils of Piss Tests

Pee in my Mouth