I Used to Be Surprised by How Filthy Men Can Be. It’s Worse Than I Ever Imagined.

This is part of r/Farhad, in which Slate contributor Farhad Manjoo delves into the Reddit communities that bring him peculiar joy.

Here’s a terrible fact I wish I could unlearn: Countless men—otherwise respectable husbands and fathers and brothers and boyfriends, perhaps even yours—never bother to wash between the cheeks when they bathe.

And that’s if they get around to bathing at all—plenty of men rarely do. Neither are men cleaning up when they use the toilet: not the seat, not the floor, not where the sun don’t shine. Many men aren’t brushing their teeth. They’re wearing dirty clothes, sleeping on dirty sheets, and eating from dirty dishes. Some men are peeing in the sink. More than you’d guess are shitting in the shower.

As a guy who long ago fell in with the cult of the Japanese washlet bidet, I’ll concede that my expectations of the next fella’s nethers may once have been a tad overrosy. Not anymore. Not after my years on Reddit.

In this column, r/Farhad, I, Farhad, explore the bottomless curiosities of the internet’s most freewheeling discussion site. One of my favorite things about Reddit is the way it illuminates latent social phenomena; because it’s pseudonymous, allowing people to post about delicate problems from behind the veil of a clever username, Reddit is terrific at helping people navigate the private dramas they may have trouble talking about with folks in real life.

These issues are often quite serious—things like illness, addiction, or abuse. But Reddit also reveals a lot about your fellow humans that you’d rather not know. On no issue have I felt this more powerfully than on the state of men’s hygiene. Reddit reliably undermines even my lowest expectations of my fellow dudes’ cleanliness: However gross I thought men were yesterday, today, on Reddit I’m bound to find they’re even worse.

Sure, #NotAllMen! But #NotJustAFewMen either. What first clued me in to the remarkable frequency with which complaints about men’s cleanliness appear on Reddit was repeatedly encountering one of the most awfully evocative euphemisms in the English language: skid mark.

I’d wager that outside the grounds crew of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, nowhere is the problem of what to do about grown men’s skid marks discussed more often and in as much detail as on Reddit.

“My husband is one of those men who has skid marks” in his underwear, wrote a 25-year-old woman last November about her 25-year-old husband. Not just his underwear; on a couple of occasions he’d also left stains on the bed and the couch, but he still bristled at her restricting his “freedom to sit in his underwear on the couch or other furniture.”

Though she offered him a range of ideas for addressing the issue—wiping better, washing better, seeing a doctor—he treated the whole thing as a nonproblem, insisting she was being overbearing.

Another woman, 29, wrote last month that after moving in with her 33-year-old boyfriend and baby daddy, she realized he didn’t brush his teeth and showered so infrequently that he somehow smelled like cat food. These things she could almost live with; she didn’t even really mind the stains she found in his underwear and in his pants.

“But a skid mark on THE BED?!?!” she wrote. “Multiple times I have gone to make the bed and notice a nice smear of shit on his side.” She’s raised the problem with him several times, but “it has continued to happen again.”

Though it did them little good, these women at least raised the problem with their partners; lots of women are so flummoxed by their partners’ dirty drawers that their main question for Redditors is whether to bring up the issue at all. One woman, who found three different brown stains after her boyfriend sat on her sheets and towels, wondered, “How do I talk to him about this without embarrassing him?” Another woman wrote that over 15 years of sexual activity, she’d had “three partners leave skidmarks on the bed on four separate occasions.” She was too stunned and grossed-out to broach the issue—all she could do was ask herself: “What is going on here? Why is this happening with such frequency (meaning ever)? Is this a wiping problem? Is this a leakage problem?”

There are two common reactions from Redditors to questions like these. One is wounded shock—many react to complaints about other men’s filth with indignation that men aren’t being given the benefit of the doubt (maybe he “trusted a fart he shouldn’t have”!) or that all men might be tarred with the same soiled brush (“men have a lot to answer for … but do we really need to be up in their faces about their f’ing underwear and blanket statements about ‘all men’ ”?). Considering how common these stories are, though, men ought to can the outrage. A former assistant at a urology office said on TikTok last year that “seven times out of 10,” men who visited her office left a “poop stain” on the exam bed; if those numbers are anything close to reality, it seems fairer to assume that a random man’s skivvies are closer to brown.

Some Reddit posts about men’s hygiene do elicit deeper introspection over the state of men, including getting at the fundamental question: What is it about how men are reared and socialized that they are going out into the world believing that it’s OK to be skidding wherever one sits?

One theory is that men just aren’t taught about the finer points of hygiene—that because cleanliness is dismissed as a feminine trait, parents give boys only the barest instruction in why and how to clean.

“My husband only just started washing his butt with soap!” a woman posted in 2022. She explained, “His parents just told him to get in the shower and shampoo his hair and rub soap on his body with a sponge.”

Another, less kind suggestion is that many men simply think that keeping clean, especially keeping their butts clean, is a little gay. But I’m skeptical that anyone truly believes this in 2024. Although there have been some anonymous viral Reddit posts arguing that wiping isn’t for “real men,” they sure seem like trolls to me.

Still, Reddit has cautioned me never to overestimate the next guy’s commitment to sparkling underwear. Let me leave you, then, with a word from the comedian Redd Foxx, who once made an album to deal with just this very specific problem. He called it You Gotta Wash Your Ass.

“The toughest thing in the world is to have to turn to your mate one night and say, ‘You’ve got to wash your ass!’ ” Foxx joked. “Knowing how difficult it is, I said it for you, in this album.”

And I’ll say it for you, in this article. I’m begging you. Your partner is begging you. Reddit is begging you. I promise you, fellas, it’s not gonna hurt. You might even like it. Just wash your ass.