A Ban on Standing Urination?

[Jester]

Back in Germany, men are losing their last bastion of masculinity: "German men are being shamed into urinating while sitting down by a gadget which is saving millions of women from cleaning up in the bathroom after them. The WC ghost, a £6 voice-alarm, reprimands men for standing at the lavatory pan. It is triggered when the seat is lifted. The battery-operated devices are attached to the seats and deliver stern warnings to those who attempt to stand and urinate (known as 'Stehpinkeln')." Why not instead manufacture toilets with the seat permanently attached down? And won't the WC ghost simply make German men urinate standing but without lifting the seat?


Aug 18 German men were being admonished to pee sitting down by a gadget called the WC ghost; when the device detects a lifted toilet seat, it says, in German: "Hey, stand peeing ("Stehpinkeln") is not allowed here and will be punished with fines, so if you don't want any trouble, you'd best sit down." It was reported that the term for a man who pees sitting down, "Sitzpinkler," is a synonym for "wimp."


US News 8/21/00 John Leo "Now sit, Ingvar, sit. Young women in Sweden, Germany, and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating. This demand comes partly from concerns about hygiene-avoiding the splash factor-but, as Jasper Gerard reports in the English Spectator, "more crucially because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women." One argument is that if women can't do it, then men shouldn't either. Another is that standing upright while relieving oneself is "a nasty macho gesture," suggestive of male violence. A feminist group at Stockholm University is campaigning to ban all urinals from campus, and one Swedish elementary school has already removed them. In Australia, an Internet survey shows that 17 percent of those polled think men ought to sit, while 70 percent believe they should be allowed to stand. Some Swedish women are pressuring their men to take a stand, so to speak. Yola, a 25-year-old Swedish trainee psychiatrist, says she dumps boyfriends who insist on standing. "What else can I do?" said her new boyfriend, Ingvar, who sits."

Can this really be true??