Toilet Seats: An Argument in Favor of Leaving Them Up

Let me say up front that I understand why women want the men and boys in their life to put toilet seats down. falling-toilet-seatI’ve got two sisters, three daughters, a mother, and several ex-wives, all of whom reminded me more than once about the unpleasantness of falling into the toilet. So, yeah, I get it. But I just came across a study that makes a pretty good case for why leaving the seat up may be necessary.

Researcher Benjamin Breyer, from the University of California, San Francisco, and his team, found that between 2002 and 2010, genitourinary injuries relating to toilets resulted in 13,175 Emergency Room visits around the U.S. About 68 percent of those were cases of a toilet seat falling and trapping someone’s penis between the seat and the toilet bowl. Ninety-seven percent of the victims were boys seven and under, most of whom were learning to urinate standing up and/or didn’t have the reflexes to get out of the way of an unexpectedly falling toilet seat. (In case you were wondering, only five adults sustained toilet-seat-related injuries during the same period. I find it hard to envision what, exactly, they were doing just before the accident).

Read the full article on MrDad.com.

Scroll to top