10 Household Items That Are Dirtier Than Toilet Seats
I thought it would be fun to write a list of the things in your house that are dirtier than your toilet, mostly because I wanted to make you feel bad about your housekeeping. I quickly discovered that I’m hardly the first internet hacker / leaf artist to come up with this idea .
“X is dirtier than a toilet seat!” is practically an internet subgenre for good reason. Headlines like ” Your Keyboard: Dirtier than a Toilet ” grab attention, and just about anything you can think of, from remote controls to dog bowls, is unfavorably compared to toilet seats. But why is a toilet seat a measure of cleanliness in the first place? And what does it mean that one object is “dirtier” than another?
Most of these articles equate “bacteria per square inch” with cleanliness and contamination, but this is not a very convenient way to measure contamination. Most of the bacteria covering everything around are not harmful. Bacteria don’t smell. It’s invisible. So how could something that’s covered in invisible, odorless, harmless microorganisms be dirtier than something that’s covered in, I don’t know, vomit?
And why is the toilet seat a universal measure of “dirtiness”? In most homes, toilet seats are frequently cleaned with effective chemicals, especially compared to how many times they are used. They are nonporous. They are dry. They are not the best breeding ground for bacteria.
What actually happens is that toilet seats are “dirty” in the sense that people sit on them to take a shit – dirt is in our minds. Toilet seats are subjectively “dirty” because we know that people do their dirty work on them, and not objectively dirty, i.e. they are probably covered in bacteria. Comparison articles grab your attention because they play on two different definitions of the word “dirty” by making the bold assumption that car keys are dirtier than your toilet bowl, prompting you to take a look and discover that as long as you ignore what If you think you know what’s dirty (like places where people play dice), your car keys are actually dirtier than a toilet seat.
That’s why I rate every dirty item in your home in terms of how much more bacteria it contains than a toilet seat, and how much dirtier it is in terms of just being unpleasant .