This is a companion piece to that snore-fest of a misogynist classic, Scent of a Woman, starring tired old typecast actor, Al Pacino.

Soooo, let’s pretend I’m blind. All my other senses are heightened. I’m not going to go so far as to say I can identify individuals, unlike the Pacino-pornhound, but I will say this: no matter where I go in the world, my nose knows when I’ve entered or passed a place where men go. And by ‘go’, I’m not just talking location, but also the euphemism.

Yep. I mean urine.

Male urine is one of the worst smells in the world, up there with male jizz and dead bodies/rotting meat. (I’d rather smell poop or farts than those other three, actually.) But you don’t need to be blind or bolstered by heightened olfactory powers to know when males are lurking and leaking. First, they piss everywhere! Not just in washrooms, but in public. On my most recent trip to the US, the very first smell to greet me when I alit from the public transport from the airport was male urine. And the first thought to go through my mind as I choked and tried to breathe was first ‘Welcome to America!’ but I quickly revised it to ‘Same smell, different country’. Interestingly, that smell was the last one I experienced before I boarded public transportation in China on my way to the US. Only my location had changed. The smell was the same. I realized that male wee is the great globalizer. McDonald’s or Walmart may peddle the globalizing shit, but male bodies, literally, produce the globalizing piss. And while all serve to make you feel a sense of familiarity no matter where you are, the urine does so more than anything else because olfactory memory, especially paired with fear and disgust, tends to be one of the most powerful mind-fucks. That scent alone will remind you who is in charge (men), who is destroying the world (men), and of whom you need to be afraid (men).

There are reminders of this power in the form of piss and pissing everywhere you go. One example from my world: I was walking down a busy street in China two days ago in broad daylight, and a dude ahead of me stepped off the sidewalk, unzipped his fly and let loose right then and there under the trees lining the walk. No shame. Just pure, unadulterated male privilege. The privilege to be completely safe while uncovered. The privilege to go unquestioned while exposing genitals. The privilege to filth up common space with human waste. Imagine a woman doing that. Wouldn’t happen. She’d end up raped, beaten, shamed and/or arrested. Children, as well, are given a free pass, especially if they are male. Chinese mothers teach their boys from a young age that they don’t need to learn to control their urges. Male urges must be given precedence over everything else, including public health and safety. I don’t wish to see cock in public EVER, yet I see little-boy dick absolutely everywhere I go in China, even in ‘civilized’ places. Little-boy dick pissing on the sidewalk, on trees, in the street from the curb. Who the fuck wants to be reminded of their masters’ presence on a constant basis?

But let’s get to the toilets. Even in countries where males are sort of required to limit their urination to designated areas (like that is possible…), these places often stink much more than women’s toilets. Part of it might be the spray factor. This need to stand and spray isn’t human, but rather, pure, unthinking animal. Men really should sit down to pee. Basic logic. But given the world we live in, men don’t have to think about their grossness and entitlement because either a woman is cleaning up after them or they just live in their own filth without noticing. I can’t imagine ever again sharing a residential space, including a bathroom, with a male.

In China and other places without a strict cleanliness mentality or understanding of basic hygiene, and with out-of-control populations (meaning high volume male urinating), and with poor plumbing systems, the bathrooms are absolutely disgusting. I even find the women’s bathrooms in China horrific. They stink. Part of the problem is cleaning mentality. People very much believe that if someone is employed to clean, then they can be as filthy and inconsiderate as they want. They leave urine, blood and shit everywhere – for someone else to clean up. But unfortunately, the cleaners seldom know how to clean properly or care about cleaning properly. Another part of the problem is the design of squat toilets. Unlike with the Western sit-down toilet, the squatter bowls are open and shallow. Unless you can force your piss stream to a trickle or position yourself directly over the small hole at the very end of the long and very shallow bowl, urine bounces off the porcelain and sprays absolutely everywhere. Gross.

But the male toilets in China? #$%@! Unlike the women’s, I can smell them from 100 feet away. Directly passing by them is an eye-watering, brain-cell-killing, throat burning, lung-emptying experience. My swearing reflex, much like a gag-reflex, is triggered every time. When I taught high school in the Chinese countryside several years ago, my poor American colleague’s classroom was situated right beside one of the male toilets. Her room was permanently tainted by the smell of wee. Male wee. It must have gotten into the wood of the students’ desks. So, even with the door closed during a low-urination time of day, it was suffocating. I felt so bad for her. I was luckier with my classroom placement.

Now, I got curious. Not that curious – not all-day research curious – just a little. Male stench can’t just be a plumbing or cleaning or entitlement problem, right? There has got to be a difference in male and female urine. I can’t deny what my nose, throat, eyes, and lungs constantly tell me. I read that there are differences in male cat urine (felinine protein for marking territory) and male mouse urine ((methylthio)methanethiol which attracts females), for example. Scientific inquiry (or lack thereof) indicates that there is nothing that really explains why male and female urine might smell differently. The implication is that it must be all in one’s head (and, goddammit, one’s throat and nose…), of course. Individually, urine smell can be affected by dehydration, types of food eaten, and disease conditions. After a cursory look, there is no conclusion that excreted hormones account for male stench. Who knows what is true?  Either there is no difference (hard to believe), or men are abusing science to prove they are not gross, or the science hasn’t been done because it is more important to fund studies trying to prove women are natural, abusable fuckholes. I found one poorly written pop-sciencey/interpretation article written by an unintelligent, male-identified woman trying to imply a link (where no link exists) between mice and humans. Sorry lady, women are not fucking ‘turned on’ by the smell of male wee. Quite the opposite… Quite the opposite indeed… The smell of men inspires violent urges in me, actually.

Regardless of whether there is a difference in urine – really, that is not the point here, and I don’t really care – there is still a conclusion to be made. Men stink, and they need to pee in designated places, sit down while they do it, and clean the fuck up after themselves – especially if they are using residential bathrooms or dual-sex/unisex bathrooms where women are forced to use the same facilities. And this is yet another reason to keep male trannies out of the women’s toilets, btw. And their man-pee stench will give them away as dudes even if the bad wig and smirking entitlement don’t. Aside from the fear/intimidation, safety and violence issues, and usurping women’s status and rights issues, trannie men stink, too, and they should put their stinky male urine where it belongs – THE MEN’S ROOM.

Requiring men to self-regulate is not a human rights abuse. It is a tempering of ages-old privilege and infringement upon the rights of women.

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