I Pee Sitting Down

It's not easy being a man who longs for a woman's world. Which is why, when VICE offered me this column, I decided that it had to be written anonymously. I hope that that doesn't lead you to take me any less seriously.

Yours,

Logan Stuart

There's nothing worse than waking up in the morning and knowing you're going to be a patriarch all day. I can't help it, obviously—society is constructed in such a way to deliberately disadvantage women all the time. But I play my part in that. The sad fact of the matter is that I buy newspapers owned by men. I ride in cars designed by men. I clumsily pay for my groceries at the automated checkout points installed by men, aided by the kind but weary women these horrid machines will eventually come to replace. Men are aware of the inherent injustice in this, but most simply don’t care. And why should they? For thousands of years, an unpleasant alloy of capitalism and Darwinian logic has kept them in the driving seat of chariots, warplanes, and F1 cars. And you don't have to be an insurance analyst to know that men are always worse drivers than women. People often ask me about my conversion to radical feminism. I tell them it was one of the easiest decisions I ever made. Just look around you—the world is a throbbing pink glans being wiped across every surface. The truth is that testosterone is so dangerous it should be a controlled substance. A few people get their faces gnawed off because of bath salts and we're galvanized into a moral panic. Yet millions of people die every day because testosterone has warped the judgement of those around them and we do nothing. Why?

Which is why I always sit down to pee because I am a man, not in spite of it. Being a man means I have my foot on the throat of womankind every day, regardless of my intent. I have often thought that to remind myself of this fact, I should paint the faces of asphyxiating women on the tops of my shoes. But I don’t. Instead, I retreat to the private darkness of the toilet cubicle to register my solidarity with their struggle. There is no shame in peeing sitting down. Only a weak, selfish man would think there was. And I honestly believe that if most women could see me evacuating my bladder seated, they would see a strong man. A real man. As my member limply drained its contents onto the inches-close white porcelain, they would see that not all men are bastards. That some of us can overcome our programming. That the only real bastards remain the sort of men who would inconvenience the women in their lives for no more pressing reason than they don't like the idea of their flaccid penis being dangled in a toilet bowl. I simply take up this duty as a mark of respect to my wife. To my unborn daughters, even to the daughters of my unborn daughters—a Russian doll of wombs.

For those who say it takes too long, well, the fact is that the sitting down method is far more convenient. It allows for full evacuation of the bladder, lowering one's risk of prostate cancer. It instantly eliminates seat-spray, a saving not only in excess toilet paper, but a positive boon to hygiene, all at the price of a little bit of splashback (which I really don't mind at all—it tickles quite pleasantly). And it allows me to see the world from a woman's point of view. From that vantage point, I don't mind telling you that it becomes easier to speculate on what it would be like if I had a vulva of my own. A chilling yet exhilarating thought more men ought to dwell upon more often.

More on pee:

Pee in My Mouth

What Ladies Need to Know About Taking a Whiz al Fresco

We Found a Piss Dungeon in a Bar