Urinal Etiquette

I have been meaning to write a post on urinal etiquette for some time.  It is an underserved topic.  After all, the usual etiquette books, such as Miss Manners, Emily Post, and Amy Vanderbilt, ignore it because those books are written by women.  Understandably, very few women are aware that there are rules of urinal etiquette, aside perhaps from the obvious point of making sure one doesn’t pee on another guy. 

Apropos of this, 1930s-eraUS Senator Huey P. Long was rumored to have gone to a roadhouse in Maryland and found the urinal occupied.  In a drunken stupour he peed through the legs of the man occupying the urinal.  And, as anyone who has peed while drunk can tell you, his aim wasn’t too good.  He ended up peeing all over the guy’s pants, starting a fight.

But I digress.  The urinal etiquette I’m discussing today is more subtle than merely avoiding peeing on another guy.  It concerns which urinal to use.  Most guys keenly observe a set of rules governing which urinal to choose when there are several available. 

These rules don’t really come into play when there are only one or two urinals.  One simply takes the one that is vacant.  If both are vacant one takes pretty much either one.   The rules come into play when there are three or more urinals vacant.   If there are three urinals in the bathroom, all vacant, one is obligated to use one on  either end, avoiding the middle one.   The reason for this is what I’m calling the penis proximity principle (PPP).  A guy wants to create as much distance between his penis and another unsheathed penis.  Or, as my friend G. put it, he doesn’t want “some dude looking at his wiener.”

Thus far, the rules are fairly simple and straightforward.  But what happens when things become more complex.  What if there are four urinals.  The first and third as you walk in are in use.  Does one go to the second, or the fourth, or just stand there trying to inconspicuously kill time until one of the two people in front of urinals are finished?  One acceptable answer is to proceed to the fourth urinal, against the wall.  The guy in front of the third urinal will be next to you, but there will only be one guy next to you.  If you had chosen the second urinal, you would have a guy standing on each side of you.  Of course, for the squeamish there is always the option of going to a vacant stall or just holding it and returning later.

It is a serious violation of urinal etiquette to use a urinal that is right next to someone else, unless there are no others available.  If, say, there are three urinals and one guy is using one on either end, it’s a no-no for a guy to walk up and use the middle one right next to the other guy.  This is seen a possible attempt to look at the first guy’s penis, which is, in the public restroom code, only a step or two away from the Senator Larry Craig wide stance in the next stall gambit.

I will be happy to entertain questions regarding urinal etiquette and the PPP.

 

Would you eat ice cream made from breast milk?

PETA Urges Ben & Jerry’s To Use Human Milk:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow’s milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

http://www.wnbc.com/news/17539627/detail.html

This sounds like it came from “The Onion”, but it didn’t.  I’m not making this up.  PETA does things like this that seem like self-parody, but they are serious.

Does familiarity breed contempt?

Or at least dislike?  Apparently the answer is, generally, yes.

I skimmed the writeup of a study by the always-interesting Dan Ariely, a behavioral scientist at MIT (for our overseas readers, this is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the leading universities in the US).

Professor Ariely concluded that, on average, people like other people less as they get to know them more.  This is counterintuitive.  We’re always taught the opposite: that people like each other more as they get to know each other better.  This is true with long-established friendships.  But it apparently isn’t true for most twosomes.

The study focused on couples who had first dates.  On average, the more the two people found out about each other, the less they liked each other.  Professor Ariely theorized, based on previous research, that when we first meet we fill in the blanks about the other person, generally making assumptions that they are fairly similarl to ourselves.  But when we get to know them better we see the dissimilarities with ourselves.

The study also showed that people generally don’t realize how often their initial liking for other people will deteriorate.  This is consistent with my own observation that people seldom realize why they think what they think about other people.

Although people believe that knowing leads to liking, knowing more means liking less.

Another fascinating result was a sex difference: after the first date women’s opinions about the men went down considerably more than men’s opinions about the women.   Women seem to be, on average, harder to please than men.  It makes me wonder how any couples manage to get together and stay together.

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/less.pdf

Exotic Italian Sports Cars Get Women Aroused

I came across an article discussing a study that found women were turned on by the sound of luxury performance cars:   

“A study commissioned by a phallically named insurance company proves beyond all doubt that the unbridled roar of an Italian supercar turns women on but the soft purr of a fuel-efficient econobox doesn’t stimulate anyone’s MPG-spot…

subjected 40 men and women to the sounds of a Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari, then measured the amount of testosterone in their saliva. He found everyone had higher levels of the stuff — a measure of their arousal — after hearing the revving exotics, but the amount the women had was off the charts…

To test the theory that high-performance cars get people hot, Moxon had 40 men and women  listen to recordings of the three Italian exotics and a Volkswagen Polo. Everyone had significantly more testosterone after hearing the exotics, and all of the women were turned on by the Maserati…

‘We saw significant peaks in the amount of testosterone in the body, particularly in women,’ Maxon says, noting that even women who said they had no interest in cars were turned on. ‘Testosterone is indicative of positive arousal in the human body so we can confidently conclude from the results out today that the roar of a luxury car engine actually does cause a primeval physiological response.’

As for the Polo? Everyone had less testosterone after listening to it. That means the acceleratus interruptus of a Prius going all-electric in traffic is automotive equivalent of skin flicks starring previous secretaries of state, despite General Motors’ claim that nearly nine out of 10 women would rather talk to a guy in a hybrid than a Porsche.”

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/09/weve-got-some-b.html

It wouldn’t have surprised me to find proof that seeing a luxury performance car made women more attracted to its owner.  Women are, after all, drawn to wealth.  But it was a surprise to find that the mere sound of these cars’ engines made women hot. 

The last part of the excerpt contains an interesting insight. GM claimed nine out of ten women said they would prefer to talk to a guy in a hybrid rather than a guy in a Porsche.  This confirms what I have long surmised: there is a huge gap between what people say they want and what they actually do want.  As psychological researchers say, it’s the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences (those the person reveals by her action).

It’s like when someone asks women what they want in a guy.  Most women will give a short list that contains contains things such as being sensitive, having a great sense of humor, etc.  But when women pick guys they mostly don’t seem to be looking for these qualities.  They pick guys who are very good-looking, have money, or have game.   What watch they do and not what they say.

Another example of a wife’s soft-core contempt for her husband

Last week I wrote a post about Michelle Obama.  It wasn’t political; it just illustrated a mindset that many women have.  They see it as perfectly acceptable to criticize their husbands in contempuous ways.  Usually they do this in small groups, sometimes just among their female friends but sometimes around their husbands and other couples.

I came across another article touching on how Michelle talks about her husband (and in public):

“Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. ‘I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,’ she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

‘For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.’ New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time…”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html

Just think how it would be received if husbands complained this way about their wives.  Their wives, and nearly any woman within earshot, would be appalled.  It’s a double standard.  And I think it’s corrosive to relationships. 

It engenders bad attitudes among women.  It makes them think it’s perfectly ok to talk about their husbands with this soft-core contempt.

I wonder whether this attitude is common among women in other countries?  If not, then it’s another example of a way women from many other countries have a better attitude about guys and about marriage than US women have.  Culture and attitudes matter.