Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge: Naked World
Malaysian vice cops nabbed
"Religious" officers allegedly request bribes and sex from couple arrested for being too "close."
By Jack Boulware
[05/19/00]

Urge: Naked World
Vibrators on the stock exchange
Sex-toy firm has high hopes for Australian IPO.
By Jack Boulware
[05/18/00]

The dream and the coming disaster
AIDS threatens to ravage the hopes of South Africa's young democracy. Don't expect leaders to get excited because a few companies cut the cost of HIV drugs.
By Sabin Russell
[05/18/00]

Prozac indignation
How a little-known Harvard clinician needled sleeping giant Eli Lilly
By Craig Offman
[05/17/00]

Urge: Naked World
English doctor likes to watch
A fertility physician is arrested for monitoring patients' sexual activity.
By Jack Boulware
[05/17/00]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Ladies who spray
If you sprinkle when you tinkle, cut it out!

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mary Roach

May 19, 2000 |  Let's say you are afraid of contracting VD from a toilet seat. You are misinformed, but we'll get to that later. What do you do? You use a disposable toilet seat cover. There. Perfect. All is good with the world.

But all is not good with the world. In maybe a third of the stalls in women's rest rooms these days (according to my desultory research), the toilet seat is liberally puddled with piss. Somewhere along the line, germ-phobic women began crouching above the toilet seat rather than sitting on a paper seat cover. Women have begun peeing like men, but they lack the courtesy to put up the seat. And since women cannot aim like men -- they have nothing to aim with -- a good many of them end up hosing urine on the seat. Very few, it would seem, bother to wipe it up.

Now when the rest of us come along and want to use this toilet, a seat cover is no longer an option, for it will soak through, forcing us to sit down on paper sopped in someone else's excretions. So we are forced to either wipe up said excretions, or stand ourselves.

Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives

There is no rational reason -- other than avoiding someone else's mess -- not to sit down on a toilet seat. You cannot catch venereal disease by pressing the back of your thigh and butt cheeks to a piece of plastic where someone else's thigh and butt cheek have been pressed. Catching VD requires direct contact. In order to catch VD from a toilet seat you would have to rub your crotch on the toilet seat in precisely the same place that someone else has previously rubbed her contaminated crotch.

"It's a lovely thought," says Alan Copperman, director of reproductive endocrinology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, "but it doesn't happen."

To be absolutely certain, I called the American Social Health Association -- "social health" being a euphemism for sexually transmitted diseases (STD) -- to see what they had to say on the topic. I had been referred to them by an editor at Self magazine, which recently ran a piece advocating crouching above the toilet seat to avoid contracting trichomoniasis, a common bacterial vaginal infection. (Thank you, Self magazine!) But neither ASHA nor the CDC's STD hotline said they knew of any study documenting the transmission of trich in this manner. They said it might be possible to catch trich from sharing the wet towel or bathing suit of someone who's infected, but not from sitting on a toilet seat.

Next page | The god of bathroom filth gives the last word