Urinals, the Shewee and peeing standing up

This article is dedicated to the anthropologist Nadine Beckmann, without whom I would never have known about the existence of the Shewee and who provided insights into German attitudes towards peeing, including the Michael Manoeuvre. ™

Modified Salvador Dali collage ‘The Lovers: Adam and Eve’ (1978) reproduced under fair use exemptions for satire

One of my earliest memories is of attempting to wee standing up. Contrary to Freudian theory, I don’t recall wanting a penis, but I was definitely envious of my younger brother’s ability to urinate while standing. I think I was either three or four years old when I conducted this experiment and the results were predictably messy: I peed all over the floor of the toilet.

However, it may surprise you to know that in some cultures men don’t pee standing up. I first learned this in an undergraduate anthropology class in the mid-1990s, where we read Ian Hogbin’s The Island of Menstruating Men. Based on his fieldwork in the 1930s, it explores conceptions of gender amongst the Wageva of Wogeo – part of the Schouten Islands in Papua New Guinea.

According to Hogbin, sex was considered to be both pleasurable and dangerous on Wogeo. Through sex, bad blood built up that, if left unchecked, was believed to sicken and kill the person. Women had a natural advantage in dealing with this problem – via menstruation, their bodies naturally expelled this bad blood.¹ Men, on the other hand, had to resort to removing it artificially. This began at puberty, with a tongue cutting ceremony, and continued periodically throughout men’s lives in the form of ritualistically cutting and bleeding their penises. These beliefs meant that men typically avoided holding their penises too much, because their genitals had penetrated women’s bodies and were therefore intensely polluted. For this reason, men habitually squatted to urinate.

I remember being surprised by this statement when I read it, because it suggested that peeing norms were not driven exclusively by biology, but were influenced by culture as well. In fact, thanks to an international YouGov survey of over 7,000 men from Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Poland, the USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and France, we now have evidence of significant cultural variability in men’s peeing.

According to the survey results, German men are by far the most likely to sit while peeing, with 40% of respondents indicating that they always sit down to urinate. Australian men are the next most likely to sit down, at 25%. At the other end of the spectrum are Singaporeans (5%), Mexicans (6%), Brits (9%), Poles (10%) and Americans (10%). Germany aside, it’s clear that only a minority of men in the survey regularly sit to pee. Still, the German case is highly instructive, because how men pee has been the source of considerable controversy in the country in recent years.

As the expression sitzpinkler attests, sitting down to pee has negative connotations in German. Literally meaning ‘someone who sits down to pee’, the term implies the subject is a ‘wimp, wuss or pussy’. Of course, the Germans are far from alone in viewing sitting down to pee as emasculating, as the following scene from the nineties’ film Playing By Heart attests. In it, a young Angelina Jolie suggests that her ex-boyfriend’s preference for sitting while urinating is a symptom of broader character deficiencies, including his lack of prowess and imagination in bed. However, unlike the US, where rates of sitting while weeing remain notably low, in recent years, German men have been actively encouraged to pee sitting down.

According to The Atlantic writer Uri Friedman, the stated purpose of the push is hygiene and sanitation, but there is little question that part of the context is the fact that it’s mostly women who deal with the aftermath of men’s urinary carelessness – i.e., the fact that men frequently miss the bowl and piss on the floor.² For example, signs have been posted in restrooms stating: Hier wird sitzend gepinkelt (‘here one pees sitting down’), followed by an explanation highlighting the more sanitary nature of the practice and the fact that it eases the workload of mostly female cleaners. Companies have even got in on the act, creating devices that attach to toilets and scold users whenever they lift the toilet seat.

Many men, especially self-declared stehpinkler (‘those who pee standing up’), have flatly rejected the demand to pee sitting down, which has become such a hot-button topic in Germany that an academic book has been written about the debate titled Standing While You Pee: The Last Bastion of Masculinity? (‘Stehpinkeln—Die Letzte Bastion der Maennlichkeit?’). In consequence, how men pee in Germany (or, at least, how they will admit to peeing) has become heavily politicised. To quote from Friedman’s article: ‘While some men have taken pride in accommodating this demand, others have vehemently resisted, going on talk shows, publishing editorials and cartoons, and forming Facebook groups of “Stehpinkler”’.

Still, the effect of these debates has clearly been to change peeing norms – Friedman reports that in 2015, a Duesseldorf landlord refused to refund a man’s security deposit because of the damage the uric acid in his urine had caused to the marble floor in the bathroom of his flat. Although the man successfully sued his landlord for a full refund, in his ruling on the case, the presiding judge referred to peeing while standing as a ‘previously dominant custom’ whilst also acknowledging that ‘despite the increasing domestication of men in this area, urinating while standing up is indeed still common practice’.

But as Sarah Hampson observes in her discussion of the German furore around urination, this isn’t just a matter of ‘custom’ and the symbolism of peeing; male anatomy does play a role. After all, peeing while standing merely requires one to whip out one’s willy, but sitting down or squatting to wee requires partial disrobing, which is presumably why the former seems to more common amongst men across the globe.³ As Hampson notes, in contrast, ‘Women understand that our anatomy doesn’t come with the best equipment for idle peeing by the roadside or easy elimination in a forest. We must squat behind a bush’.

As anyone who has ever had to queue outside a women’s restroom (i.e., every woman ever) can attest, these anatomical differences create clear gender inequalities in access to public toilets. Indeed, because of the ease with which they can pee, men have historically had much readier access to public toilet facilities – of either the official or unofficial variety – than women. For example, according to the BBC, while public urinals had become commonplace for men in London by the mid-nineteenth century, women, in contrast, were subject to the ‘loo leash’ (the carrying capacity of their bladders).⁴ It wasn’t until 1905 that women got their own public facilities – after intensive lobbying.

But that, of course, was before the Shewee. Made right here in the UK, the device promises to give women urinary freedom. ‘Places to visit? Things to see? Don’t forget your Shewee!’ is its Dr Seuss-esque tagline. As the following video illustrates, it’s basically a funnel that you place at the entrance to your urethra to expel urine without having to remove your clothes – although it clearly requires a degree of skill to use if you want to avoid peeing all over yourself.⁵

The problem is that most women find standing up to wee anatomically challenging, with or without the Shewee, in part because their muscles have been trained to pee in a certain way, but also because of the location of their urethra. Indeed, an article about the rise of the Shewee quotes a gynaecologist as saying ‘Standing is not a natural position for women to be emptying their bladder in’ – a point reiterated in a post on this topic in the Conversation by two physiologists.

Still, it’s worth noting that some women do master the art of peeing standing up.⁶ My dad, a retired geologist, talks of a female geologist he once met who had this ability – although few women develop the sort of muscular control it presumably requires,⁷ most of us being able to direct our urine stream with the accuracy of a sprinkler rather than a hose. Indeed, Hogbin noted in passing that women on Wogeo, in contrast to men, peed standing up.

This would suggest that while urinating is about anatomy, it’s also about peeing differently from the opposite sex – i.e., peeing ‘like a woman’ vs peeing ‘like a man’, whatever that happens to look like in your particular cultural milieu. I suppose this is why the correct position of toilet seats is such a source of contention: because it symbolises precisely this distinction.

While the common view is that the ‘correct’ position for the toilet seat is down, a letter in the Guardian published some years back argued that this was a patronising and outdated view that unnecessarily favours women. According to the author,

‘As a general principle, it’s best to leave the seat in the position in which you yourself used it, with the responsibility being on the next user, whatever their gender, to put the seat into the appropriate position to suit their particular anatomy. Thus there is no onus on the members of any one gender to leave the seat in any specific configuration’.

Alternatively, you can take the rather more extreme approach of installing a urinal at home,⁸ which the Guardian columnist Adrian Chiles suggests as a potential solution to men’s declared incompetence in the use of conventional toilets (e.g., poor aim, failing to put the seat down, etc.)

I guess the bottom line is that, as Sarah Hampson notes, ‘it’s wrong to instruct others on how to use the parts of their package’ (although I suspect such instruction would be rather less frequent if men spent equal time cleaning the loo⁹). Ultimately, men and women pee differently and that’s okay. As the late John Lennon once said, ‘All we are saying is give pees a chance’.

Related posts

The case of the missing areolae

If it's yellow, let it mellow

1. Within the anthropological literature, there is more evidence to support the idea of vaginal envy (or womb envy) than penis envy. The psycho-analyst Bruno Bettelheim drew extensively on this literature in his book Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, which I read as part of the same course. Taught by the Irish-Australian anthropologist Michael Allen, its core content was later published in his book Ritual, Power and Gender: Explorations in the Ethnography of Vanuatu, Nepal and Ireland.

2. Growing up, my father had a propensity to pee in the middle of the night without turning the toilet light on, causing my mother to complain in the aftermath of one particularly egregious pee incident that my dad thought he had a ‘psychic cock’ that could see in the dark.

3. That said, it occurs to me that this would very much depend on the nature of men’s garb. For example, disrobing is presumably not required if the man is wearing a kilt in the traditional way (if, that is, The Sun can be trusted on this topic, which, let’s face it, it probably can’t). Conversely, if long tunics are the norm, I imagine that squatting would be easier than standing. Sadly, anthropologists have not seen fit to study this topic in depth, so I am left to speculate on exactly how anatomy and dress interact when it comes to the act of male urination.

4. This is often framed as a means of restricting women’s access to public spaces, but that’s only part of the story, because the creation of public urinals for men was primarily a means of getting them to stop pissing in the street. Urine deflectors were installed in London during the same period in a bid to end the practice of public urination. As their name suggests, they were ingeniously designed to deflect urine back onto the pisser’s shoes and clothing. You can learn more about them and see the examples still dotting London buildings on London Living History.

5. As it turns out, most of us don’t have a clue where our urethra actually is – a phenomenon I have encountered myself many times when asked to provide a urine sample. I’ve learned the hard way that you’re not getting out of that experience without piss all over your hands.

6. In point of fact, I have mastered it myself, if peeing in the shower counts.

7. I assume that Kegels are involved – that mythical exercise that women are always told will cure all urinary ills (like ‘snissing’, or ‘sneeze pissing’), but no one actually knows how to do.

8. Believe it or not, this is not a (ahem) pisstake. In the article, Chiles actually includes a picture of his own urinal, which has pride of place under a stained glass window featuring West Brom’s crest. Whether this reveals his abiding love or deep hatred of West Brom is anyone’s guess.

9. In fairness, in my household this is primarily the result of my husband’s exponentially greater tolerance for a dirty loo than mine. In the name of liberated womanhood, I’ve tried to endure his ‘pee it off’ strategy for dealing with skid marks, but I always break eventually.