Forget spiders and heights—when it comes to things that women are afraid of, the toilet takes top honors.
People think of toilets as steaming cesspools of filth, too covered in germs and bacteria for any self-respecting lady to put her butt on. Most bathrooms now offer disposable seat covers to protect our precious posteriors from the onslaught of death that surely lurks under the lid. Little girls are taught never to sit directly on the toilet seat, resulting in a lifetime of perfecting the “hover” maneuver, sometimes with messy consequences.
This fear seems to be only limited to public toilet seats, as if the toilets in our homes have some magic germ-repellent powers. I don’t know about you, but I can guarantee that the toilets in my office building are cleaned a LOT more often than the ones in my house. Truly foul toilets, like those in gas stations and bars, are usually the outliers, with most public restrooms being pretty innocuous and unthreatening. Bathrooms in office buildings and department stores are notorious for their attention to cleanliness, with many maintained hourly. Toilets are one of the great public health innovations, so why are women so afraid of taking a seat?
Unfounded Fears
Bathrooms are a place where germs congregate and public bathrooms tend to have more germs simply because more people use them. The most common bacteria and viruses found in public restrooms tend to be E. coli, rotaviruses, hepatitis A, the common cold, salmonella, and MRSA. It’s conceivable that if some of these organisms were alive on the toilet seat and a person sat down, she could risk contracting a disease.
However, our fears of contracting terrible diseases from toilet seats are, for the most part, unfounded. In fact, no health organization considers toilet seats to be dangerous vectors of infection. The biology of bacteria and viruses make transmission of diseases highly unlikely. These organisms are highly unstable outside of the human body, so they could only live for an extremely short time on a toilet seat (or any surface, for that matter) before they die. Viruses that cause diseases such as HIV, herpes, and hepatitis B are so unstable that they perish immediately after leaving the body, so the chances of contracting them is virtually zero. Furthermore, germs can’t invade our body unless they enter through a mucous membrane, so unless the virus or bacteria were to come into direct contact with the genital area or an open cut or sore, it would not be able to enter our bloodstream.
