On the long road trip home, perhaps you think of the scene as part of the Canadian landscape: a car by the side of the highway, a lone figure with his back to the traffic. Initially, you wonder if something is wrong. A flat tire? A cranky child? Someone picking berries? You rubberneck. But then you notice the specific telltale stance – tall and rigid, an arm angled in front of the body – and you catch the expression. The man is looking out into the middle distance as if serenely contemplating the state of the universe. There's a sense of complete impunity about him – never a suggestion of shame. You're the one who feels embarrassed. You might even read it as an act of male privilege; an entitled form of outdoor leisure sport.
For an act of excretion, urination sure can accrete a lot of meanings. One has only to think of the 2011 video of U.S. marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to appreciate the powerful significance it can have – in that case, an act of ultimate denigration. Consider, also, its use in language – and in art (Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal; the satirical musical, Urinetown).
But in the everyday, seemingly benign, event of it, should we be adding to its stream of meanings?
In Germany, a long-running debate centres on stehpinklers (men who stand to pee) and sitzpinklers (men who sit to pee). The new custom of sitting to pee is more thoughtful, gentlemanly and sanitary, many say – decreasing potential wall-and-floor splash for those who clean toilets. Some public toilets have signage, instructing men to sit. Several German companies have even invented devices that attach to toilets, admonishing the user when the seat is lifted – music to women's ears everywhere, one imagines.
But some men see the move as a threat to masculinity; evidence of the increasing feminization of Western culture; a cultural castration if you will.
Sitzpinkler is often used as a synonym for wimp. A German academic, Klaus Schwerma (who prefers to sit), wrote a critical essay about the debate.
In Standing While You Pee: The Last Bastion of Masculinity? Identity and Power in an Everyday Masculine Event, he examines the socio-cultural, scientific and psychological aspects of upright urination as a symbolic exercise of male power and phallic obsession, among other things. (The book is 144 pages long.)
And sure, he may have a point.
But might this just be feminist-leaning pissing in the wind? I think so.
Women understand that our anatomy doesn't come with the best equipment for idle peeing by the roadside or easy elimination in a forest. We must squat behind a bush.
One night, when camping on Devon Island in Canada's High Arctic a number of years ago, I was at a serious disadvantage in the middle of a July snowstorm. I didn't want to go out and squat in the blizzard. My tentmate, a pragmatic German woman, had a solution. Men can go in a bottle; women can use a Ziploc bag, she said, giving me specific instructions on how to position it. It was not going well, let's just say. In tents on either side of us, the men in our hiking group could hear our laughter.
In the end, I went outside. It was the only time I've had penis envy.
But, hey, there are lots of body inequalities between men and women. We get to have the thrill (or burden, depending on how you see it) of giving birth. We come equipped with portable milk for babies. To my mind, it's wrong to instruct others on how to use the parts of their package. It's a form of body shaming, really – something women are quick to complain about when it's aimed at them.
Where public urination can be a problem, though, is in the city environment. When men indulge in the free-willy movement to pee anywhere with impunity, that does suggest, if not sheer laziness, a lack of respect for others who use the same public space. And there have been several attempts to deter the habit.
Earlier this month in San Francisco, the public works director, Mohammed Nuru, who tweets as @MrCleanSF, ordered nine walls in the city to be painted with a clear repellant material called Ultra-Ever Dry. The inventive idea sounded like some delightful public art installation. Pee on the wall and the spray will bounce back at you. Literally, piss on you, you reprobate! (In Germany, the pee-repellent paint has also been used in Hamburg's St. Paul Quarter to discourage late-night, stein-hoisting stehpinklers.)
And recently, in Zurich, an architectural firm installed a pink-marble public urinal in an outdoor car park. Called a pissoir – the name for a public urinal once widespread in Paris – it's composed of four large marble panels, imported from Portugal. Urine runs down, mixed with water, into a small trough at the bottom, which leads to a little pothole filled with plants and gravel. This is progress, I say. There's no shame, just an honest acknowledgment that if you gotta go, you gotta go, so let's make it pleasant for everyone involved.
Of course, a pissoir is not an equal excretion opportunity. Women can't use it. But, hey, life isn't fair.