• A woman from Arizona may be forced to fly more than 300 miles away from her hometown to give birth, because her local hospital insists she must have a c-section. Joy Szabo had a c-section for her last child, and the hospital claims that doing a vaginal birth after a c-section is too risky. •  According to a British study, less than 33% of men wash their hands with soap after going to the bathroom. In order to increase the number of hand-washers, researchers suggest placing messages above bathroom sinks, which either shame the person into washing, or gross them out ("Soap it off or eat it later"). •  A man from the UK - who the Daily Mail dubs "Cruel Graeme Conroy" - has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for forcing a 3-year-old girl to smoke cigarettes. Conroy had a 14-year-old girl film him while he forced the young child to chain smoke five cigarettes, "as a joke." •  A Missouri ninth-grader has been arrested for making a website that called a classmate a "slut" and said she "would be better off if she just died." Missouri is cracking down on cyber-bullying after Megan Meier's suicide. • A woman who was raped as a 13-year-old is speaking out against rape kit backlogs after her kit sat untested for twenty years, much longer than the statute of limitations for her case. • A Berlin brothel is offering an "eco discount" to johns who walk or bike there. • PUMA Amy Siskind says "President Obama seems largely tone-deaf to women and women's issues," and praises the Republican party for "promising stars" like Sarah Palin. • But Jimmy Carter is bullish on Obama, saying that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize "as much as anyone who's ever gotten it for his achievement already," and that "he's spelled out an agenda that can be adopted by others in Europe and around the world to lead toward increased peace and human rights and the alleviation of suffering. Those are all tangible contributions - even though the fulfillment of all of them has got to require time to realize." •

This seemingly weird behavior originally had a rational basis (a horrible incident involving hot pepper residue), but at this point it's just become a weird tic. Every time I'm about to pee I ask myself, have I touched my feet recently? Have I touched the floor? Have I touched the mail ? (For some reason the mail has always seemed exceptionally filthy to me. An ex of mine once said his hands were probably dirtier than the mail, and I had to immediately put it out of my mind. I could never date a mail carrier.) I wouldn't rub a Wal-Mart circular on my vagina, my thinking goes, so I'd better wash all trace of that circular off my hands before they touch toilet paper that then touches my vagina.

I'm aware that makes me sound kind of insane, and maybe I am, but I'm not an obsessive hand-washer at other times. True, I might be a little more prone to hygiene preoccupations than the average person (which maybe explains why I found Wetlands more liberating and interesting than others did). But I do occasionally eat things off the floor, I will sit on a public toilet without a seat cover, and I certainly never do that thing of opening the restroom door with a paper towel. My theory is that most of us, even if we don't suffer from full-blown OCD, have some weird little cleanliness behaviors we are not totally proud of.

One of my roommates in college wouldn't get into her own bed unless she had thoroughly showered first. Hortense always buys new toilet seats for the bathroom every time she moves, and Katy is "so incredibly paranoid about poison ivy that I wash my legs, feet and hands with dishsoap like every day in the summer." Megan generally doesn't obsess about hygiene, figuring that "daily exposure to a minimal amount of germs keeps my immune system happy," but she does have a system for particularly gross bathrooms: "I kick the seat up with my shoe, pee while squatting, and kick it back down with my shoe." Dodai says, "if a bar bathroom is sketch I try not to touch ANYTHING — don't even wash hands, feeling as though my own urine is sterile but the flush handles/faucet/doorknobs are decidedly not." Sadie is "actually fairly vile" and doesn't worry about any of this shit.

Most of these weird behaviors don't really have a huge impact on our lives. However, I do wonder if living in a culture that pretends perfect hygiene is possible — toilet seat covers, the near-ubiquity of antibacterial soap — leads us to expect a level of cleanliness that's kind of unhealthy. Megan's right — routine exposure to a certain amount of germs is good for (most people's) immune systems, and some people think we might get sick less if we ingested more fecal matter. So whereas it might take me a while to break myself of the double-hand-washing habit (the hot pepper thing really was horrible), it might be smart if we all took a page from Sadie's book and let ourselves get a little more "vile."

They told her to demand a raise, and that "soft-spoken woman who dislikes confrontation" got the raise she deserved. And then they talked about "where to get the best cocktail dress, haircut and beach house that won't break my budget"! But seriously, folks. I can't decide if this is why women don't get taken seriously in business, or if this is a way of circumventing the golf-playing patriarchy by finding a women-only space in which to discuss workplace secrets.

I guess I think the former? Because while a lot of corporate climates are incredibly sexist (I know a hedge funder who was taken to a strip club after an interview), isn't it counter-productive to create these all-female gab fests? Wouldn't it be more useful to rail against a workplace culture where only the men can share insider info? Whatever, at least these bitches aren't peeing all over the seats or leaving cocaine residue on the counters. We think.

Not Just A Ladies' Room [WSJ]
Earlier: Even Oprah Employees Aren't Immune To Serial Seat Pissers
The Office Annoyance No One Really Talks About