If you're a true gentleman, you should pee sitting down

According to leaked information from household staff, Ryan Gosling likes to pee sitting down. Of all the misdemeanours that his maid could have squawked about to the press, this could well be the most damaging. Hollywood's leading ladies' man goes to the toilet like a woman! Next step a remake of Tootsie!

Peeing sitting down is a highly contentious act for a male sex symbol. Back in the Nineties I once heard a footballer complaining that his room-mate urinated sitting down, as a result of which he didn't trust him. What is it about sitting down to take a leak that men hate? What makes it a cause of suspicion? Does it reveal some secret yearning to be female? One step away from wearing tights under your jeans?

Most men feel that there is something decidedly unmasculine about it: What’s wrong with standing upright and giving the lav a good blasting? What about the act of urination do you find so tiring and dizzying that you have to take the weight off your legs to do it?

I say this because a year ago I made a policy decision to only urinate sitting down. I do this not because I am prone to fainting spells or am inexcusably lazy or because I would like to be called Jennifer, but because after 42 years of urinating standing up, I've had enough of the constant cleaning up. The effort. The mess. I have dabbed my last toilet bowl.

What have I learned in the last 12 months? I've learned that men who stand up to urinate in a toilet which is designed to be sat on are probably psychotic. This action alone is one of the great misuses of technology. It’s like using a super computer to play Pong. Like tipping a bottle of 1945 Pauillac into a boiling pot of spag bol.

Thomas Crapper's invention is not some avant-garde porcelain canvas. I can understand spraying like a broken hydrant in front of a pub urinal, but hosing down a domestic toilet suggests a kind of dunderheaded obstinacy that we associate more commonly with cavemen.

Discovery number two (no pun intended etc) is a newfound empathy with my long-suffering sisters. How rage-inducing must it be to live with some dolt who: a) leaves the seat up so that you repeatedly plunge downwards into the bowl as if seating yourself in a very poor sports car or b) leaves the seat down, but extravagantly coated in wee?

As a man in the process of being usurped by three sons - all conventional lean-back and stare at the ceiling types - I wage this battle daily. If I sit down in one more ice-cold puddle, I’m going to fit them with colostomy bags.

While this all seems like a bit of a joke, the health benefits of relieving yourself from a seated position can be quite profound. In 2014 researchers at the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands found that sitting down to pee helped men suffering from Lower Urinary Tract disease symptoms to pee with greater force. Sitting creates “a more favourable urodynamic profile”, which helps ward off prostate problems.

Standing to wee, however, apparently activates a host of discreet muscles in the pelvis and spine which prevent proper urination. Apparently the problem is more pronounced in public toilets where men flex these muscles more often, mainly to prevent themselves from letting go enormous and embarrassing farts. This whole dog and pony show disrupts healthy urine flow. Yes, you heard it here first.

This is such a big public health issue that governments in countries such as Sweden, Taiwan and Japan have all encouraged men to sit. It took Taiwanese health officials just 100,000 toilet visits to officially confirm men’s toilets disgusting and advise its citizens to sit down or else.

Meanwhile in 2012, the Swedish Left party of Sormland Country Council put forward a motion that all male employees should sit. They contended that fellow employees should not be forced to walk through nasty splatter. A few Neanderthal refuseniks fought the motion and were rewarded with their own toilet (probably far away from the building) where they probably continue to let rip like incontinent zoo animals to this day.

Naturally, this being Sweden, politicians added that sitting down to wee might also benefit employees' sex lives – though this statement possibly says more about the shenanigans acceptable in leftist Scandinavian toilets than it does about men’s health.

Women want it. Doctors swear by it and janitors demand it. We are not savages and men's loos no longer need to resemble the first tiled ring of hell. The next time nature calls, answer sitting down and take a moment to smell the roses, not the tinkle on the carpet.