Toilet Joy

My old friend Charlie used to say that the pleasure of having a really big shit was "almost as good as sex". This may say more about his love life at the time than about the real joy of taking a dump but there's no doubt that it's one of the small pleasures that separates men and women.

For a real man, taking a shit is best accompanied by something good to read. Maxim magazine. Car and Driver. Viz. In fact almost anything is preferable to having to enter the smallest room devoid of any reading material. It's worth noting that I'm referring here to the process of shitting in your own home. Taking a dump in a public toilet, while occasionally unavoidable, is best executed with the minimum residence time and sitting down with a paper attempting to make a day of it is just wrong. People who don't read on the toilet at home, however are either illiterate or women.

In America there must be a particular problem with men hanging around too long in public toilets. There can be no other explanation for why they build toilet cubicles over here with doors you can look over and limbo under, which don't stay shut properly and have two inch gaps either side. Is this the only way to get American men to leave, or is there a fear that, given actual privacy, men might be driven to acts of gross indecency? Detroit Airport, which has about the best bathrooms of any US airport I've seen, has this type of metal door. I was recently engaged in curling one down there when someone entered the cubicle adjacent. The act of them locking their door caused mine to open (outwards, obviously - the only time doors open inwards is when there's no space in the cubicle, causing you to have to climb over your bags in order to get in) and prompted a mad pants-down scramble to get the door back with minimum further loss of dignity.

Anyway, back to home base. It could be that the main attraction of the bathroom to the typical male is that it's fast becoming the only place you can go and expect complete peace while you're there. Think about it - outside the bog you have jobs to do, a spouse who'll look at you as if to say "are you going to watch football all weekend?", telephone calls, bills and all the other crap that life throws up. In the bog you enter a world of suspended animation; the problems stay outside. No decent wife will actually shout through the door to remind you about cutting the grass (here's a hint - if yours does, get the fuck out now). E-mail and phone calls cease to impinge. (Again, if you take the phone into the toilet, go and get some therapy - you're not that important that people want to talk to you while you grow a tail). The toilet is the last bastion of male freedom.

Sooner or later, however, you have to leave. Preferably before you cut off the blood supply and lose the use of your legs. At this point you reach for the bog roll and, interestingly, you really don't care if it's the brand from the TV ads where the cartoon bears shit up against the tree (who the fuck thought that was an appealing idea for a commercial??). You're just grateful that there's some left on the roll, but if you could ask for one thing from your toilet paper, here's the deal: It's not softness. Or quilting. Or extra long rolls. You just want your finger not to go through when you're dealing with a particularly fudgy one. Is that too much to ask?

Copyright 2007 Edward Bison