Bathrooms Shouldn’t Be ‘Decorated’

What is it about women and their bathrooms?

Women have a bathroom decorating mania that borders on the obsessive. For instance, the other day I was passing some time in our bathroom when I noticed that my wife had decorated the bathroom with an enormous palm-like plant, its fronds gently waving in the breeze.

The more I looked at that plant, the stranger it got. Not because of that frond-waving situation: The fan was on. No, what seemed strange to me was that I would never, in my wildest interior-decorating hallucinations, have thought of putting a palm plant in the bathroom. In fact, I would never have put a plant of any kind in the bathroom. In fact, I would never have put any decoration whatsoever in the bathroom.

That’s because I’m a guy.

That’s the primary explanation, but there are secondary explanations as well, some involving simple logistics. Most bathrooms don’t have a whole lot of extra space for stands of timber. To get to my sink, I had to hack my way through that palm jungle with a machete.

Maybe this reveals a basic difference between the way men and women think about bathrooms. It dawned on me, as I was prowling through the underbrush in search of a towel, that men think of bathrooms strictly from a utilitarian standpoint. It is a place to do business. Anything unrelated to that business is extraneous.

Hey, what are those flowers doing in here? What am I supposed to do with those? Scrub myself with them?

Women, or at least the general run of my female relatives, believe that a proper bathroom should actually be attractive enough to disguise the fact that actual business takes place in there. I have an aunt whose bathroom is filled with wicker baskets, dried flowers, ruffled curtains, fluffy rugs and little porcelain cherubs. The casual observer would mistake it for the parlor where the afternoon tea is served.

Thank goodness my wife is content with a potted plant.

I believe I speak for many men when I say that while I don’t understand bathroom decoration, I don’t altogether object to it either. Except - and this is an important “except” - except when it interferes with a bathroom’s function.

Here’s a good example: toilet paper rolls. I strongly believe that the entire bale of 24 rolls should be stored right next to, or right under, the actual toilet. At least within reaching distance.

No woman I know shares this opinion. They believe that all of the surplus rolls should be hidden away in a linen closet or in a sink cabinet. This means that if the current roll runs out, a person must perform a complicated maneuver, often involving waddling, in order to obtain another roll.

Then there are those plush toilet seat covers. I have written previously about the menace posed by these seat covers (I won a Pulitzer Prize for my expose on this subject two years ago). But it bears repeating again: The fluffy cover unbalances the toilet seat. When a man is standing there conducting his business, the seat can suddenly come crashing down like a guillotine, threatening a man’s very essence. Emergency rooms have noticed an alarming increase in essence injuries.

Lately I have discovered an item in the bathroom that is more a mystery than a menace. It’s a small white ruffly ball of fabric that looks somewhat like a wrist corsage. The last time I looked, two of them had materialized in our shower.

What are they? Accessories to a wedding dress? A silk hydrangea? A new kind of Nerf ball? A new kind of Muppet? After consultations with the women in my family, I have finally learned they are none of the above. They are Buff-Puffs, a sort of lacy Brillo pad that people use for scouring their bodies. They call it an “exfoliant,” which sounds alarmingly similar to what they used to call Agent Orange.

Anyway, I now have an answer to one of my previous questions: Yes, you are supposed to scrub yourself with them.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review