In Continuum.

Essay #2: Bathroom Habits

The following is the essay I wrote for school. The topic was a boring topic of "Men Vs. Women", and it wasn't the most interesting topic in the world, though however open-ended it may be. So as everybody else wrote about women being oppressed in certain cultures, how men and women deal with relationship problems - the usual - I wrote about the bathroom habits. Yeah, I went out and wrote about what men and women do in the bathroom for my compare and contrast essay. I figured that this is the only way you are going to stand out in a world of repetitive essays in school, the only way you are going to get an A without boring the wits out of the marker. After all, I am sure she has read the same topic over a million times, who wants to read more essays about how the sexes deal with marriage, or how they manage their stress? So here we go, bathroom habits. Have fun.


The battle between the sexes has been ongoing since the very moment homo-sapiens came into existence, and has become one of the greatest debates in human history. The infamous "Chicken and Egg" analogy pales in comparison to this, even. An eight hundred word essay does not even do such a vast topic justice, for it cannot begin to describe the unending differences between men and women. There does exist, however, a familiar piece of terrain from which we can try to understand the similarities that tie us together, and the differences that set us apart – the bathroom. While vanity is a sin that is indulged in by men and women alike as they stand before the unflinching honesty of the mirror, their bathroom habits are as different as ice-creams and peas.

The bathroom is probably the center of all vanity at home, be it for men or women. Before the merciless scrutiny of the mirror, both the men and the women display their love for themselves. The first thing anybody does before taking off their clothes in the bathroom is to check themselves out in front of the mirror. They usually check for flaws on their faces, which include anything from a new-found pimple, blackheads, or anything that may be judged by others to be a 'flaw'. Next, the clothes will come off and it is time for their body inspection. Both men and women will inspect themselves in a million different angles before making a mental note about the number of sit-ups they have to increase on that night, or they might even consider the possibility of a Botox shot. However, most men and women would skip the above mentioned steps and go straight to giving themselves a high-five in the mirror if they are satisfied with what they see. Of course, this is as far as the men and women similarity goes in the bathroom. As soon as they step under the shower, you can hardly tell if they belong to the same species of animal at all.

The difference begins in the amount of detail a woman puts into cleaning her body in contrary to men. A woman's showering routine begins with the application of face soap. For the next ten minutes, a woman is going to scrub her face with apricot facial foam until her face turns red. After rinsing off, women will proceed to cleaning everything below the neck area with such intricate details that it will put a team of scientists trying to put together a space rocket at NASA to shame. The equipments involved in this process includes the following: A face cloth, an arm cloth, a leg cloth, a long loofah, a wide loofah and a pumice stone. Each cleaning apparatus is used for different parts of the body, and every square inch will be properly cleaned and cleaned over before moving on to the next part.

A man however, has a radically different bathing ritual when it comes to the area below the neck. A man arms himself with a single bar of soap and nothing else when he is under the shower. Every part of the body can be considered 'thoroughly cleaned' with minimal application of the same bar of soap, and most men seldom feel guilty about such laziness. They call it 'efficiency', rather than any word remotely related to the word 'laziness'. This is especially so when men spend the majority of their time cleaning their private parts, and that alone takes up about eighty percent of the time spent under the running water. The other twenty percent is spent on washing other parts of the body and urinating in the shower - as far as most men hate to admit it.

When it comes to the hair, the women have yet another set of routines to follow strictly. Starting with the cucumber and sage shampoo with forty-three added vitamins, a woman would apply it on her hair and massage the head gently with the tips of her fingers and not the nails. This process will be repeated once more to ensure a thoroughly cleaned mane, which is followed by the conditioning of the hair with grapefruit mint conditioner enchanced with passion fruit. Similar to the first step, a woman would massage the head with the tips of her finger again and rinse everything off carefully until she the hair feels silky under the running water and not soapy. That is usually the end of a woman's shampooing ritual, which usually ends with drying themselves with a towel the size of a small country. However, a man's ritual ends a whole lot earlier than a woman's.

A man gives little care to his hair most of the time, or even the kind of shampoo he decides to use. A man would get into the shower and grab any shampoo available and use. Instead of massaging the head, most men would make shampoo Mohawks with their hair, which is as far as the cleaning process goes. Unlike women who dry their bodies with a towel the size of a small country, men would dry themselves with towels big enough only for a Chi-Hua-Hua.

Despite all the differences identified, the battle of men and women is going to continue as long as men and women exist. Such a battle wages on a subconscious level, and no force in the world is going to make either of them any less different, or more equal - even within the confines of a bathroom.