The Battle of the Toilet Seat

I recently got into a very silly argument with a friend of mine about whether or not I should have to put the toilet seat back down after I wiz. Our surprisingly heated, Gingrich-level debate was stupid for a variety of reasons:

1. I am not dating the girl, 2. I don’t live with her, 3. whenever I visit I put the seat down anyway (because it’s her house and her toilet), and also 4. I don’t care that much about the epic Battle of the Toilet Seat in the first place. I get far more worked up about corn subsidies.

So we weren’t discussing my personal habits at her home, wherein I adhere to local custom. Rather, we were debating toilet seat regulation in a universal capacity, with all of its societal and moral implications. This was a tactical blunder on my part, as I don’t particularly like my own gender and generally try to disassociate myself from other men to present myself as a sort of third party option. (I don’t think it’s a good idea to think of men and women as “teams,” because if they are, I’m pretty sure I’m on the dumber of the two.) Somehow, by means of the porcelain throne dispute, I had inadvertently rendered myself spokesman on behalf of all humans who can piss standing up.

Despite the absurdity of the loud and nearly friendship obliterating altercation, good came of it. Because after utterly thwarting my friend’s faulty logic (which itself was leaky and wont to clog–  much like the commode we repeatedly pointed and yelled at), solid ideas emerged from our quarrel. Specifically my newest proposal: the Pregnancy Tax.

To explain my policy I need to walk you through my friend’s tortured logic. In a nutshell, she posited that all men have a moral obligation to leave the toilet seat down after usage because women incur pregnancy and this is inconvenient. Men can in part pay back women for their birthing services by acquiescing to whatever my friend arbitrarily wants at the time.

This includes determining which television shows to watch and a provision of the Magna Carta ensuring that she never pays for dinner. But above all else it enshrines the sanctity of proper toilet seat resting positions. To not accede to this seat commandment is to renege on an ancient pact forged by Adam and Eve, and if broken will result in Aslan being shaved and slaughtered on a stone table.

I’m summing up on her behalf, incidentally. Her actual wording was something like, “Because someday I have to get knocked up and go through nine months of vomiting, mood swings and weight gain, and you never have to lug around an entire human being inside of you so maybe you should shut the hell up and just put the stupid seat down!”

In case you’re curious about tone, I would call it “elevated.” It also had a tinge of bitterness to it, as if there is some sort of pregnancy roster I had personally ducked out of (like avoiding jury duty) and now the inconvenient task of gestation fell to her.

I disagree with the Prego Defense line of reasoning. The argument only works if you’re actively planning to impregnate whoever is pitching it. Otherwise the point is moot.

If I buy a girl dinner because of potential pregnancy, the entire deal is turned on its head if she winds up barren. Her uterus stays in mint condition and I’m out $120 on mojitos I bought like a sucker. As far as bathroom protocol is concerned, by the time a couple goes through infertility specialists and adoption paperwork, latrine conduct is far too entrenched for the dude to resume leaving the seat up again.

The argument was even more invalid in our case, as over the course of our verbal dustup we both made it abundantly clear that we had no intention of ever dating, shagging or marrying each other under any circumstance whatsoever.

She stipulated that this includes the death of all other men on the planet and the subsequent extinction of our species, and I noted various quadrupeds I ranked above a hypothetical flesh collision with her. (In retrospect I think we might have been working through some unresolved emotional issues wholly unrelated to toilet seats or pregnancy.)

In a weird way, agreeing that we would both rather build robot mates out of spare parts and questionable mail order catalogs than jointly copulate lead to a sort of consensus from which we could move onto verbal detente. This is when I came up with my Pregnancy Tax idea.

Here’s how it works: Everyone buys their own meal on dates from now on. Women hold onto all of their receipts. (This is a good idea anyway, because a lot of meals can be written off as a business expense if they pertain to work.) When a man eventually fertilizes a woman, she then tabulates all of the meal expenses incurred on dates with her particular sperm donor. He is then required by law to reimburse her for every dinner and drink leading up to insemination.

The Pregnancy Tax takes care of both the labor-for-toilet-seat treaty, and it encourages males to put more into their savings accounts. It would increase smarter condom usage as well. Women still get credit for carrying babies, but not all men are indebted to all women collectively, thereby treating our race as what it is: one team composed of individuals and couples. The only loser is Grover Norquist.

My friend and I made up by the end of the evening and agreed that my Pregnancy Tax is a good idea. We hugged, took back all of the terrible things we’d said about each other’s parents, siblings and faces, then she walked to her front closet to fetch my coat.

That’s when I made a dash for the bathroom and lifted the seat up.