The men's room gets a bad rap for being smelly, disgusting and unsanitary. But take it from me, the ladies' room can be just as bad, if not worse!

It's all because of this silly little irrational behavior that many women engage in, called "hovering".

Hovering is a method of urinating (usually in a public toilet) by holding your thighs and buttocks above the toilet and not letting your skin touch the seat. Unsurprisingly, this method results almost 100% of the time in a pee-drenched toilet seat, an unsanitary mess which most hoverettes apparently feel no compunction about leaving around for the next gal.

Ladies, STOP IT!

This is a disgusting, rude habit, not to mention completely unnecessary and perhaps even bad for your physical health. I know you get the heebie-jeebies when you think about your paper-thin, baby-sensitive thigh skin touching a piece of plastic that was touched by other people's thigh skin before you. Your germophobic sensibilities are reeling in horror at the possibility that there might be some deadly catching disease sitting on the toilet seat. But I'm here to tell you that unless you are licking the toilet seat, the chances of you contracting an illness from peeing in a public restroom are basically nil. You are far more likely to catch something handling the doorknob on your way out of the bathroom than you are sitting on the toilet seat.

I think this ridiculous phenomenon may have gotten started during the 80s, when the media was busy convincing everyone that HIV was a pandemic that would kill us all. I remember back then, people being hesitant to use public restrooms for fear of "catching AIDS". (It seems like every American decade needs its national potty panic. The 60s had bathroom integration trauma, the 80s had HIV hysteria, the 90s had rampant urban legends about toilet stall kidnappers, and now it's folks getting all worked up over the prospect of having to pee next to a transgendered person. Come the fuck on, people. Get it together.) Anyway, now most of us are more educated about HIV and the fact that it's transmissable mainly through blood and seminal fluids. So unless the person before you had HIV and bled on the toilet seat, and then you came along and scooted your gaping bullet wound right on top of it, you're not getting HIV.

And this is the case with most illnesses, from flu to Ebola. You can't get them from skin contact alone. The most dangerously communicable diseases are those that are carried through airborne particulates, and if one of those has made its way into your stall, I'm sorry, but hovering ain't gonna save you. You might want to try wearing a surgical mask instead.

"Oh, but Starr, I'm not one of those hoverers! I wipe the pee off the seat before I leave!"

Lady, you just made the toilet seat more disgusting than it was when you came in. You were scared the toilet might have germs, so you put germs all over it and smeared them around. Just STOP!

If you're still unconvinced--if you still think that you are somehow protecting your health by hovering, I've got news for you. Hovering negatively impacts the health of your bladder AND it can weaken your perineum over time. That means your sex life will also be impacted, and you will eventually begin to pee a little bit when you sneeze or cough. See? I'm not just mad at you for getting pee all over the seat. I care about your reproductive health.

Now that we've warned you about the dangers of hovering and dismissed all of the popular reasons for hovering for the codswallup that they are, allow me to provide you with some alternatives.

1. You can just sit on the damn toilet seat like a normal woman.

It's okay. You're not going to die.

2. You can cover the toilet seat with toilet paper and then sit on it like a normal woman.

This is environmentally destructive, but far better than peeing all over the seat.

3. You can get one of these crazy prosthetic penis contraptions that allows you to stand and pee.

Great, as long as you don't have to go #2.

Whatever you do, just STOP HOVERING. Do it for yourself. Do it for the cleaning lady. Do it for all of womankind.

/rant

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Hi! I'm Leslie Starr O'Hara, but my friends call me Starr. I live in the mountains of North Carolina and I write fiction, satire, essays, and musings here on Steemit.

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