I Pee Sitting Down. No, That Doesn’t Make Me Less Manly.

How many grown men pee sitting down? It depends on where you live. According to a survey by the market research firm YouGov, a whopping 40 percent of German men say they pee sitting down every single time. Plenty of guys in France, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and Canada also regularly take a seat. But here in the good ol’ U.S. of A? Not so much. Only about 10 percent of American men say they always sit down, and nearly a third (31 percent) claim to never sit at all.

Spend five minutes diving into the topic on Reddit, and you’ll quickly notice there’s still plenty of stigma around men peeing sitting down. Just look at the search results: posts about “peeing sitting down” have popped up at least three times in recent years on the “r/tooafraidtoask” subreddit. And in 2025 alone, the subject appeared in “r/confessions,” “r/unpopularopinions,” “r/askmen,” “r/nostupidquestions,” and “r/doesanybodyelse,” each time drawing hundreds of comments. Clearly, the subject strikes a nerve.

For the latest installment in our series on The Secret Lives of Men, we talked to Charlie (name changed to protect his anonymity), a thiry-seven-year-old accountant who started peeing sitting down after getting sick of cleaning up splatter. He has zero regrets.

When I was a kid, I used to love peeing outside in my backyard. I remember playing with my neighborhood friends and feeling bad for the girls because they had to go all the way inside to go to the bathroom. Meanwhile, I could just go behind the shed, drop my pants, pee, and come right back. It was awesome. The world was like one big urinal. It never occurred to me back then to pee sitting down, especially because actual urinals were everywhere. In stores, in schools, in locker rooms. It’s like I was conditioned to pee standing up, so it just became my default.

But sometime after college, maybe in my late twenties, when I moved into my own house, I started noticing the splatter. When you stand up to pee in a toilet, you hit that big bowl of water, and pee splatters everywhere. Especially in my house because we have really short toilets. It just creates a mess. Also, when you’re standing above a short toilet, sometimes pee dribbles onto the floor. If you’re a decent guy, you’ll clean it up. I try to be courteous, so I always clean up after myself. Even if no one is coming in after me, I still clean up. I don’t want to live in a pigsty. At the same time, I’m inherently lazy. If there’s a way to avoid cleaning, I’m going to take it. When you pee sitting down, there’s no splatter. There’s no mess. There’s nothing to clean up. It’s a very easy and logical way to keep your bathroom a little bit cleaner.

I still pee standing up when I’m out in public because most places have urinals, and they’re convenient. At home, though, especially at night, sitting down is a no-brainer. Why the hell would I risk either peeing all over the place in the dark or turning the lights on and completely waking myself up? Sitting down, I don’t have to worry about either of those things. I can stay sleepy and go right back to bed.

My wife is also a lot happier when I sit down to pee. Because, again, I don’t do it 100 percent of the time. If we’re heading out the door, and I need to pee quickly, I’ll stand because it’s faster. But whenever I do, and there’s dribble on the floor, she gives me flak for it, especially if I forget to clean it up. She’ll notice and be like, “What the hell?” The fact that I often pee sitting down prevents those fights from happening more frequently. It also eliminates worrying about putting the toilet seat down or getting yelled at if I forget to.

I think the main reason more men don’t pee sitting down is because they are insecure. Everybody, regardless of gender, is insecure. However, men have specific insecurities related to their masculinity. There’s a definition of a man you learn about as a kid—the action hero, the macho guy, the football player, whatever. Peeing sitting down definitely grinds against those masculine ideas. I assume some guys think it’s girly, so they won’t do it no matter how much sense it makes.

I don’t think peeing sitting down is unmanly, and I don’t feel like less of a man when I do it. That’s probably because I don’t care about masculine stereotypes. I’m not worried about my masculinity, and I’ve never been attached to traditional gender roles. I think that goes back to my childhood as well. I grew up around a bunch of girls. My next-door neighbors were all girls. We played Pretty Pretty Princess together all the time. We played dress up, and I’d put on rings and necklaces. My best friend would always bring her Barbies over to my house, and we’d marry them off to my GI Joes. I played football and games in the backyard, too, but maybe less than the average boy. My parents didn’t care about gender stereotypes either. They didn’t force me into sports or anything like that. They let me find my own way. Looking back on all that, I guess it makes sense that I’m comfortable peeing sitting down.

There is one stereotypical dude thing I do, though, and it’s a little controversial. If I’m in a public bathroom, I purposefully don’t put the seat down after I pee. I always lift it up! (Believe it or not, not every guy does that). But I don’t put it down afterward. It’s not out of spite or laziness. It’s me thinking logically about what might happen next.

My hope is that if a girl comes in after me and sees the seat up, she’ll know there isn’t any pee on it because I put it up. She can go to the bathroom in peace. But if I put the seat back down, she might wonder if there’s pee on it because I didn’t put it up. I guess the whole thing depends on whether girls know that some guys don’t lift the seat up to pee.

Do they know that?