Study finds people are fucking disgusting. September 15, 2010 Jill Seriously dudes, that shit is gross. Wash your hands.
When there aren’t enough paper towels, or decrepit hand dryers that take forever and still require one to wipe wet hands on pants, I can understand why some people would opt not to wash their hands afterward. And, the general smell and filth in a public restroom could also make one want to rush out as quickly as possible.
Are there people who go eeeew about anyone not washing after peeing, but who are willing to have oral sex? Folks sure are crazy.
If you’re going number 1, and you’re a dude, you really don’t need to touch anything besides your twig, and/or berries. Ergo, is this really that disgusting? Tei Tetua’s point holds: I’d be curious if those “ewww” ers immediately wash their hands after touching genitals in sexual activity. I certainly don’t, because I don’t think of genitals as being particularly unclean or “disgusting.” To believe so strikes me as being really pretty sex-negative. I’m also trying to think of the last time I went into a bathroom and urinated on my own hand. For most men, it just doesn’t happen. If we were talking about numbers 2, well, that might be a little different, but even so, do you ewww-ers usually get dookie on your hand? I think those showing disgust are just being prudes!
I pee a lot. Not to the point where I need to take medication, but at least once an hour, sometimes more if I drink a lot in a sitting (and I do tend to gulp the liquids down since I’m at risk for kidney stones). And washing my hands after every encounter, especially at home, would take up soooooooooooooo much time. I do try to run them under the tap, but I miss enough of movies and life running constantly to the restroom without the addition of hand-washing (I have learned methods of going to the restroom rather quickly because of all this).
Like Kevin says public restrooms (and from what I’ve heard its not just men’s rooms either) can be pretty grimey. That comic that Lauren links to might be a joke but sometimes that’s real thought process going on. And I’m curious about what other figures they had since they only mention the site with lowest rate.
OK, there’s a difference between agreeing to touch a lovers genitals – be it with your mouth or your hands, and having a problem with folks who don’t wash their hands after using the washroom. I mean, come ON! just because I don’t mind touching my lovers’ penis, and taking the risk of sharing HIS germs and wanting You, random stranger’s germs on my hot dog. Or furthermore, half a dozen random strangers germs. Konkonson, sorry, I, too, pee at least once an hour and wash my hands thoroughly afterwards. On my own curiosity, I wonder how many of those 98% of women who wash their hands actually wash them properly. The number of women I see delicately dip their fingertips under a stream of water for a few seconds as a nod to hygiene disgust me, too, and make me wonder why they bother.
Another thing is that if you are in a restroom that has only dryers and no paper towels, then it becomes very difficult to turn the water on without touching the nasty faucet handles, or to open the door w/o using the nasty doorknob. I think it can be permissible not to washup, assuming you 1. aren’t going to be putting your hands in your mouth/eating before you can cleanly wash your hands and 2. use hand sanitizer, which should do a good job of killing the truly nasty stuff anyways.
If you’re in food preparation, wash your hands, or better yet, carry some Purell and use it liberally after you leave the public restroom. Otherwise….if we’re talking about urination, the fecal-oral route of disease transmission is unlikely to be carried through by women patting their vulva with clean TP or men shaking off their (hopefully) clean penis. The rest is just American mental cooties. FWIW, urine from a healthy individual (esp a male individual) is relatively sterile.
i suspect most people just recontaminate their hands when they turn off the tap (unless it’s motion sensitive) or when they open the restroom door to leave. in my many years of using public restrooms i’ve only seen one person turn off a tap with a paper towel and open a restroom door with a paper towel.
Michael: in my many years of using public restrooms i’ve only seen one person turn off a tap with a paper towel and open a restroom door with a paper towel. Michael Elbows…elbows. Also, I’ve been in men’s restrooms and while I knoe my SO washes his hands…he also gets a dose of organic hand sanitizer as soon as he comes out of the bathroom. Men’s bathrooms are gross.
I have wondered how many times a day people need to wash their hands to significantly reduce the number of colds that are passed around. Maybe it would be a more effective campaign to tell people to touch their face less or to just wash your hands before touching food. I saw a poster that was saying all the times you should wash your hands and it included after you touch a pet and seriously, if someone washed their hands in all the instances that poster said, I think they’d be washing their hands 20 times a day. And I think if you tell someone to do something too much, they might just not do it at all.
Ha ha, “American mental cooties”, I love it. The point about oral sex is obviously that if infection (gastro-intestinal type) spreads easily from genitals to mouth, we’d undoubtedly know about it from that. We’d have to spray our partner with Lysol first, which might take a lot of the fun out of it! So when people talk about infection from genitals to hands to surrounding objects to someone else’s hands, the transfer is way more tenuous, and fair to assume, even less harmful. Therefore, I claim that this whole thing is psychological, not practical. It says something about our attitude toward the human body, that so many people are eeeeew-sayers in this regard. Now how about debating whether we really need deodorant?
Tei Tetua: Now how about debating whether we really need deodorant? You wouldn’t ask that if you’d sat under a straphanger who wasn’t wearing it in the summer.
Um, male urine is sterile and sweat is, well, non-unique to urinating. I’m curious as to whether there was any distinction between men using urinals and men who actually were cleaning up after defecation (who had DAMN well better wash their hands). And men’s restrooms are freaking gross and unless you have those completely hands-free doorways, sinks, and hand dryers… The reasoning in that comic mentioned up top is probably a major reason here, but it’s impossible to tell for sure unless there’s a breakdown between “#1” and “#2”.