Women, Facing Closed Bathrooms and Fearing the Virus, Embrace Peeing Outside
Sara stands outside on a summer day in the countryside, and feels the urge. She looks: The coast is clear. She squats, pulls her underwear aside, and pees.
Peeing outside: It’s been a man’s game for so long. For people with vulvas, peeing outside, like many other things—becoming president, screaming during a work meeting, wearing comfortable but fashionable shoes—is just not extended to us as a social norm.
Peeing outside isn’t legal in any state in the U.S., but that’s never seemed to stop people with penises. Now with public bathrooms and restrooms in private businesses—often inaccessible in the best of times—overwhelmingly closed, women are faced with a challenge: to do any sort of safe socialization, a good old-fashioned nature pee may be necessary.
Perhaps it’s the fact that the idea of entering the confined shared space of a public park bathroom feels like a COVID horror story. Perhaps it’s a refusal to potentially raise your chances of getting a urinary tract infection in exchange for having a socially distanced picnic. Perhaps during a year with so much upheaval, being demure about our bodily functions feels stupid. Or “perhaps the cabin fever from quarantine has made me go a bit feral,” Sara says.
Perhaps women are beginning to mark our own territory.
I would like to officially declare this the age of women peeing outside, social norms be damned. Internet evidence suggests that this is very much a thing. On July 23, Amy Schumer squatted just outside a car in a prairie dress, a black band of underwear strapped around her kneecaps, confidently peeing into the night. The “pee-your-pants” challenge has, nonsensically, become a mini-trend on TikTok. “Pandemic Spike in Public Urination Turns NYC Into the Big Toilet,” the New York Post reported. A Reddit “Am I the Asshole” post from March, about a woman whose boyfriend pressured her to pee next to passing cars rather than risk entering a gas station bathroom, went viral, dividing commenters. “We are not going to spend the summer peeing outside,” wrote Henry Grabar in Slate, in an article about the danger of using shared bathrooms during the coronavirus pandemic.
Sure. Rather, we may spend the summer, fall, and even early winter peeing outside.
Emily*, a 35-year-old living in the U.K., says she would never have peed outside before the pandemic, but times have changed. When she needs to do it, she finds “a cheeky tree and woodlands.” She recommends taking your kid with you, if you have one, so people will assume that you’re just helping your child pee outside, a lesser etiquette breach.
“I have exclusively been peeing outside during COVID, specifically in Central Park,” says Sally, a 27-year-old living in Manhattan. “I don’t think I will ever go back.”
“A lot of places are closed right now because of the virus, so when I gotta go, I gotta GO,” says Kailey, an 18-year-old in Castro Valley, California. She’s the kind of person who happily peed outside sometimes before the pandemic. But now she doesn’t always have a choice. “Pick a tree or something to hide behind and pop a squat,” she advises.
Evangelizing about peeing outside is usually the purview of men who are talking just to hear themselves speak, or people of all genders who are annoyingly enthusiastic about hiking and camping. What woman or gender nonconforming person hasn’t stood in a long bathroom line while a man smirkily extols the glory of peeing anywhere at any time? Who among us hasn’t frantically searched Google Maps for rest stops, while a male companion jeers, “Take this empty soda bottle! Or I can just pull over!”
The need to pee is a long invisible leash tethering women to home, especially in the age of manic hydration culture. Holding in your pee isn’t healthy and can have long term effects. And even when bathrooms are available, using a shared toilet carries a different risk in the age of COVID-19. “Toilets should be regarded as one of the infection sources” for coronavirus, research published in June in the journal Physics of Fluids found. When a toilet has been used and then flushed by a person who has the virus, a “massive upward transport of virus particles” can occur.
I had no sooner imagined the plume of toilet particles hanging around the park bathroom before I was outside, freely urinating into a bed of clover. It’s one thing to accept that using shared bathrooms means likely inhaling aerosol particles expelled by recent users. It’s another thing to take on a potential extra health risk right now.
Candice was recently on a four-hour West Coast road trip and didn’t feel comfortable going into a rest stop to pee. Instead, she settled for some bushes next to a parking lot. “I am extremely pee shy, like it just simply will not come out if I think I’m being watched, even if I’m in a stall with a friend at a bar,” she says. Hidden behind greenery, she started peeing, but halfway through, she realized that she was exposed to the highway. “And yet,” she says. “my pee flowed on, much to my surprise. It was liberating.”
Liberation: It comes in many forms. Sometimes it comes in a carrying case. Cleo, a 25-year-old living in the San Francisco Bay Area, identifies as “a fan” of peeing outside. She mostly does it when she’s spending time with friends in nature, hiking or camping, but she tries to avoid shared bathrooms everywhere out of fear of COVID particles. Like several women who spoke to Glamour for this article, she took her outdoor peeing to the next level: “I did some research and ended up purchasing a Pibella, which is a female urination device, or FUD,” she says. “I practiced a few times at home and then loved it so much I bought a Pibella for three of my friends and my mom.” She uses hers to pee out in the open, as well as in bottles in some circumstances. The FUD is a product category characterized by unfortunate names and compact designs: you have your Shewees, your pStyles, your Freshettes, your Tinklebelles.
Before the pandemic, I have never been anything more than a when-absolutely-necessary outdoor pee-er, less because of propriety than because I lack the core strength. Unless you want the experience of both sitting on a bidet that streams pee and also being the bidet, squatting to pee is tricky.
My pandemic peeing protocol involves no squatting. If I am going to an outdoor area or on a long car trip, I wear a skirt or a dress. When the time comes, I take off my underwear, stuff it in my pocket, and pee standing up, essentially fully dressed, like I’m playing a one woman game of tunnel tag. Down with squatting, butt exposed, trying to aim your stream away from your jean shorts. Up with peeing fully upright in a minidress.
The women I spoke with confirmed outdoor peeing is an art, not a science. Sara recommends three techniques: “One, squat and pull underwear to one side, best in a skirt. Two, squat against a tree. Three, standing up (experts only).” Emily’s recommendation is to “wait until you’re desperate; then you pee quicker.” She carries baby wipes with her at all times.
But there’s a dangling-toilet-paper drawback to the glorious golden stream that is outdoor peeing—it is illegal, with a range of serious consequences, depending on the laws where you are. It’s not okay to expose other people to your genitals, even if you’re not doing it on purpose, but public urination is illegal in the same way smoking pot or going five miles above the speed limit is—if you are white and well-off, you are probably more likely to get away with it. Pee privilege, I imagine, is very, very real.
For those of us who are just pandemic-era tourists in the world of outdoor peeing, this time should be a wake-up call to the lack of public bathrooms, and the way our public spaces and law enforcement systems are set up to ignore human needs and marginalize people at every turn. Normalizing peeing outside for women doesn’t mean peeing indiscriminately: Don’t do it on private property, don’t do it on someone’s beautiful and labor-intensive garden, don’t do it in or near a stream or a river, don’t do it in plain sight. It’s ideal to pee somewhere like the woods or a friend’s backyard, rather than next to historic houses of worship, such as the stone foundation of the Ulm Minster church in Germany, which is being eroded by urine.
As the rules of polite living rewrite themselves for an unprecedented age, so do the rules of polite peeing. Cleo, the woman who bought five female urination devices, puts it best—“Spoiler alert: MEN HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A LONG TIME.”
*Some names have been changed for privacy.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
