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“I think I may have found a good candidate for the urinal of the day,” writes Slog/Urinal tipper Rachel B. “If you are looking at the picture and finding yourself confused, don’t worry, so are we. This toilet is actually in the women’s room of a building at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (and there are others like it in some bathrooms across campus). Do you squat? Do you sit? Was it installed the wrong way? Why is there no seat? Needless to say, the ladies avoid these toilets, and even when the lines are long, only the brave attempt to figure it out. I know it’s not a urinal (well, I’m pretty sure anyway), but it’s as close as you’ll probably get in a ladies’ room!”

Nominate a urinal for Urinal of the Day by sending a picture and a few sentences about the urinal to urinals@thestranger.com.

43 replies on “Urinal of the Day: The Mysterious Case of the University of Massachusetts and the Gender-Nonconforming Mystery Urinal Mystery”

  1. Weird. Gotta be a squatter. No woman I’ve ever met would ever willingly sit on that thing. Slip and fall and dunk, sure, but not sit.

  8. I guess if women/penis-not-having-persons generally wore skirts/dresses without underpants, one could squat, point, and shoot, but having panties around the legs/knees/ankles/whatever seems like it would get in the way. Maybe one is not supposed to pull the underpants down, but just pull the crotch section sufficiently to the side?

  9. I am truly impressed by the industrial design engineer who came up with this, and by the institution with courage enough to try it out. As implied above, other cultures might be more comfortable with this, but I like the idea of including one (with a standard toilet) in one of those single occupancy uni-sex facilities we see everywhere….

    I could hit that, drunk.

  10. Just got back from 6 weeks in China – the floor mounted ones are actually pretty decent to use, once you get the hang of it, and a lot less gross when you think about not sitting where who knows how many people have been since it was last cleaned. I’m not so sure about these though, since pants and regular underwear would definitely interfere….

  11. They used to have those things in road-side rest pit toilets. You squat to use them, and as far as I know, you don’t face the wall – at least that was the way my mom used them. You squat over them in the same way that many women do in filthy toilet stalls that they don’t want to sit their ass on the seat of and are too lazy to at least lift the seat and then they end up pissing on the seat. Gross….

  13. When you have to go, it’s just not right they throw you into a confused frenzy of pee puzzles. There should be a diagram on the wall.

  15. What novabird @14 said.

    Seriously, Dan. There is already at least one website devoted exclusively to urinals- urinal.net.

    Send them your urinal pics. You’ll rule that roost in no time.

    Here on Slog, we like to discuss more noble things, like urbanism, civil rights, and santorum.

  16. My (suburban, public) high school had those! We were entirely confounded by them and I think everyone was embarassed to acknowledge they existed. Certainly no one used them or talked about them.

    It was only about a decade later that it finally occurred to me that they must have been the female equivalent of a urinal. As a woman who never sits to pee in public restrooms, I’d love to try one now.

  17. Oh for heavens’ sakes. You straddle it and semi-squat. It’s a hell of a lot easier than half-sitting over a standard toilet bowl, and a lot cleaner than sitting in someone else’s leftover piss.

    I swear, some women are as squicked by the idea of peeing standing up as some men are by the thought of peeing sitting down (yes, there are men who think that makes them less manly. No, guys, it just makes the bathroom cleaner.) It’s very possible for a woman to pee standing up; you just have to learn how to aim, just like a little boy does when he’s learning to potty. You have to use your hand. It’s apparently a big deal to women who are horrified by the idea of touching their own parts.

    (I spent too many years backpacking not to have learned the technique. Piss on your shoes enough times, you’ll learn.)

  18. I was going to guess that it was some kind of handicap-accommodation type of fixture, but never mind. Oh, and now I notice that the stall is a narrow one, so never mind again.

  21. @19,

    I know men who piss sitting down when they’re drunk, which just seems like common sense/decency to me.

    @10,

    They’re apparently a lot better for your colon than sit-down toilets.

  22. @17 I have seen women pee man-style before but frankly it’s not for everyone. I have prominent outer labia and there is no way that I could spread far or wide enough to prevent a good amount of piss from dribbling down my asscrack and onto my legs. No fucking thanks.

  24. @19, I piss sitting down all the time, at home. That’s why there are magazines there.

    @17, I knew a gal who could outpiss any man, and regularly defeated challengers. She would typically beat them by three times the distance; twenty-five feet, no problem. It’s all about finger pressure in the right place.

  25. The (hippy dippy liberal) Catholic Church I attended as a child had one of these. I totally forgot about this til I saw this photo. I remember being a little kid and thinking “What on Earth is This? Maybe they put it in for nuns?”. Although the hippy 1970s nuns there wore regular clothes for the most part.

    I encountered one of these more recently, though I’m forgetting where. I remember it being kind of complicated to use. Let me try to explain: if you drop your pants and underwear and try to squat over it,you basically have to stand really wide and slide your trousers and panties underneath it. This is the case whether you are facing forward or backwards. (I tried it both ways.)

    If I was wearing a skirt and no undies, then it would of worked just fine.

    Um, do nuns wear underwear?????

  26. 5280, when my husband started sitting down so I wouldn’t have to clean his piss off the walls he noticed a sharp uptick in blowjobs.

  27. I don’t think that would be enough to get me to sit down.

    It might, however, get me to run a sponge across the walls every now and then.

  29. It isn’t necessarily “feeling emasculated” by sitting down to pee. Some of us men can’t really pee sitting down even if we wanted to. If you are a larger dude there isn’t room between your thighs. Even when I wasn’t overweight I found it an unnatural angle to point, bending the urethra backwards like that tended to cut off the flow.

    Get sick of people telling me I’m just too afraid to piss like a woman.

  30. I’ve always been confused by those, yeah. It doesn’t help the the bathrooms (in the science buildings, anyway, which is the only place I ever spent time in on that campus) are murky and echoey and smell even more than you’d expect college bathrooms to smell. It’s very confounding.

  31. I’ve never posted on Slog before but I really can’t pass this up… American Standard manufactured this under the name Sanistand. I saw one as a kid and was incredibly disturbed by it. I never saw one after that but I would wonder from time to time what the hell it was. Years later I happened to have a conversation about it with someone who was writing her thesis on them. Yes. Someone out there wrote her dissertation on these things. I have no idea, don’t ask me how that was ever approved by her program. Posts like this make me love Dan even more.

  36. Hey Mile High – I thought you were old like me. When you have to pee in the middle of the night (sometimes twice) and you want to stay asleep, the best way is to stumble around in the dark, plop yourself down without turning on the lights, piss, and stumble back – sort of like a waterfall dream….

  37. Urgh! If suburban bitches would just sit down on the toilets to pee like everyone else, we wouldn’t have to worry about pee on the seats. That happens because you squat over a seat you aren’t supposed to squat over. Now those female urinals? Built for the squatting. Squat away. Squat to your heart’s delight. But for reals, just bring some hand sanitizer and wipe down the seat if you’re that nervous about germs. Stop splashing pee on the seat for us women who have confidence in our immune systems to sit down in.

    (as for japanese squatters… just try using those when you’re wearing a bizarrely 1980s uni-gaucha-tard. I don’t know how to describe my college concert band concert blacks, but they were one pieces with a long zipper down the back and wide leg pants and puffy sleeves… puke!)

  43. I encountered some old literature about these once. They are unisex urinals that were apparently created at the behest of the military–for speed and convenience of the user, and so that facilities such as barracks could be used interchangeably by either sex without retrofitting all the damned plumbing.

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