The West Hollywood gay community may like to think of itself as being progressive (Report, 17 January), but its attitude to toilet-seat position (“Gentlemen, remember to lower that toilet seat”) is far from such. It’s stuck in the 1970s. As a general principle, it’s best to leave the seat in the position in which you yourself used it, with the responsibility being on the next user, whatever their gender, to put the seat into the appropriate position to suit their particular anatomy. Thus there is no onus on the members of any one gender to leave the seat in any specific configuration.
The current “seat-down” convention means that in order to relieve their bladders, males have to first raise then lower the seat no matter who uses the toilet next, while females have to do nothing. Surely a discriminatory practice. Maybe the seat-down convention is based on an erroneous assumption that down is the “natural” position of a toilet seat – a prejudice that is possibly boosted by an inappropriate extrapolation from the fact that men do need to have the seat down once, maybe twice, a day (though relatively infrequently in public toilets). Or maybe it’s an outdated example of good manners, in the same vein as “ladies first” – and thus the sort of patronising activity we must discourage.
Josh Mackay
London
