Regarding diapers: supermarket brands are cheapies and can leak (e.g. Tena, Depends, etc.)
Instead you'll want to take yourself to a pharmacy or care store to seek out a proper continence pad, yes they cost slightly more, but they work. These will not leak as you move about in the dive as the moisture is converted into a dry gel via super absorbent polymers.
They feel dry to the touch and as a bonus will balance the pH as to not interfere with the skin's acid mantle. There is no threat of breaching the capacity as absorbencies can be in the litres.
I have a spinal injury and have experienced both catheters (both Foley, which have a balloon in the bladder, and isc ones, which don't) and modern absorbent underwear.
Catheters are evil pain sticks. Modern pants are wonderful and have dramatically improved my quality of life.
You might argue against it for babies but at a certain stage feeling the moisture is a motivator for kids to learn to use the toilet.
That's why one potty training technique is to switch kids to regular underwear and mange the fact that they'll be wet pretty frequently. It's the uncomfortable wetness that both makes them want to potty train and lets them understand what it means to hold their bladder.
I was in disposable diapers as a kid but they used cloth reusable for my brother 2 years younger than me. One night they ran out of disposable so they outfitted me with a cloth one, next morning I was dry and I refused to wear diapers after that.
> Wouldn’t they just start pissing literally anywhere, though?
Yes. As an adult male, I piss any and everywhere I can get away with it. Parenting, common decency, and law enforcement have narrowed that down to mostly bathrooms and backcountry.
Yes, they will pee anywhere because their whole lives they’ve been covered in a soft diaper. But it doesn’t take long for them to learn that is an uncomfortable feeling in normal underwear and there’s an incentive to use the toilet.
As father to a toddler, the diapers we have (pampers brand) definitely contain these extremely absorbent polymers. They never leak and can contain insane amounts of liquid. Sometimes you forget about the diapers for half a day and there's no leaks and almost no irritation if the skin.
The latest Pampers diaper tech for kiddos is a veritable marvel of human technology. It will expand to like 5+ times the size while feeling dry (more or less) to the touch on the inside. It's still gross to deal with, but not remotely as much as I would have expected.
Thank you for talking about it. I am a guy and dive occasionally with a dry suit, but this is something that most people are not comfortable talking about.
I had this thought too. My best guess is that it's down to the length of the urethra. Have you ever lifted liquid out of a glass using a straw, by capping the upper end of the straw with a finger? That liquid wants to fall, but that causes the gas volume above the liquid to expand, so vacuum pressure pulls the water upward, counteracting gravity, and also pulls your finger into the straw slightly. I imagine that, for a longer column of fluid, that vacuum pressure is at least a contributing factor to the unpleasant feeling. (Not to mention that, when urinating, that column of liquid is already moving rapidly!)
Male here: it's a lot more manageable if you control it with your pubococcygeal(sp?) muscles, the ones you can also use to control ejaculation. I've had to do this while peeing into a bottle that wasn't necessarily big enough. It still sucks, but not so much due to physical discomfort.
> The perineal muscles are involved in ejaculation when they are involuntarily contracted. The ischiocavernosus muscle is responsible for male erection, and the bulbocavernosus muscle is responsible for ejaculation. By actively contracting the perineal muscles with Kegel exercises regularly, strength and control of these muscles increase, possibly aiding in the avoidance of premature ejaculation.
Uh, yeah. It's surprisingly difficult to find really reputable sources online that directly address it, but you can kinda just try it. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22211-kegel... "Pelvic floor exercises" is probably the right search phrase.
As a guy I found this article oddly riveting — the author seems super cool for being so candid. But the “pee slowly” thing had me coming to the comments to learn more: is this something ladies can typically do?
I learned—embarassingly recently—that ladies can apparently just stop pissing at will, or slice the loaf for number 1, it's incredible. Once I start going I'm pretty much committed.
I'm a guy but for me it just... takes more time to finish pissing?
Then again I found out in my teenage years that not everyone is able to stop urinating on command, too. Something to do with excessive drinking, pissing in public places, and some friends not being able to haul their little firehoses in before the cops took notice.
Does pinching it off mid-piss hurt for you, as well?
I would say that a primary reason to do it slowly is to not put too much pressure into it, which is true for both women and men. The p-valve involving gluing it on your body, and the tube is soft which can easily get kinks. It can balloon and there is always the risk that the pressure find an alternative way that is not the outside of the drysuit.
I do not find it too uncomfortable myself. The fear of rapture is fairly major one, especially the first time of a dive when your trust in the glue are a bit low. After that you can increase the speed a bit.
Never had that problem. Also male. I used to play games with it in middle school, hopping from urinal to urinal, now I modulate my flow to reduce splashing.
If there are anatomical differences, they're not entirely gender-based.
Related thought - How did knights in plate armour manage? Were there accomodation for taking a pee without having to take a significsant amount of armour off?
Almost all medieval armour is open from below at the crotch. So, you can just let go, but you'll wet or foul your underwear. Sometimes there are flaps or removable pieces. Sometimes not. It highly depends on the type or armour and the exact time period.
I have a full maille kit for reenactment. I can easily pee while wearing it. I only have to remove my gloves and helmet (so I can see what I'm doing). Defecating is harder but not impossible, but I just go before gearing up. I don't have armour on all day during reenactment events.
The armour needs to be quite flexible in this area anyway as your hips and legs need to bend. they just used flaps of chainmail rather than seal you in. Look at some images.
I'm a little confused by this - I've ridden motorcycles for a decade now and typically one simply stops, dismounts, and orients oneself looking downwind.
Does that still work in a one-piece racing suit? I assumed that's what they meant. I haven't worn one, but I can imagine some of them make things a little more complicated.
They unzip down the front. Yes, if you lack a penis you'd have to get your arms and butt out to urinate, but that's hardly the same level of challenge as having to end a dive, surface, undo all your seals, and then get your arms and butt out of a drysuit.
I'm aware... while the process for urination (without a penis) or defecation (with any equipment) does require getting about 5/8ths out of your 1-piece moto leathers, this really only adds about 10 seconds and the desire for a good sized roadside privacy bush.
Do you have details on this? The (non-new) system is (At least in the US), a piddle pack. It's a thick plastic bag that folds flat, filled with kitty litter. Turns into pee gel. That's for men. The women's ones are more complicated, and have electrical pumps.
Pretty sure astronauts do too. I remember the weird astronaut love triangle incident where some astronaut lady who was in love with some other astronaut drove nonstop cross-country with apparently a BB gun and wearing a diaper to do God knows what to the guy. It was explained that wearing a diaper during spacewalks was routine for astronauts, so it probably seemed like a reasonable and convenient thing to do for her, rather than crazy and outlandish as it seemed to most regular people.
I know nothing about diving. Why can't you pee in a dry suit (except that one might find it gross)? I assumed that you could just rinse the suit afterwards. Or is being underwater a factor, because it gets too cold or the pressure does something with it or...?
Except for the gross factor? The author seems pretty clear that, yes, you can:
> For those of you asking, what are my options for diving in a dry suit? Well… you can just hold it (again, if you have a bladder of steel), nappies/diapers, the p-valve, or just pee in the suit (which is gross and defeats the whole purpose of the dry suit, right?).
The "purpose of the dry suit" is to keep you dry. If you're literally wetting yourself, and with a fluid that is rather more chemically offensive than water, then you're probably going to have a bad time. (I don't know how temperature-controlled dry suits are, but you lose heat a lot more easily through contact with a liquid (that's what sweat is for!), so the urine puddle probably makes heat retention harder, too.)
I live where the water barely gets warm enough to swim in during the summer, so kayaking is often a dry suit activity. When I was taking a class I had quite a time staying cool. Some people flip on purpose, or you just shove as much of an arm into the water as you can and wait. A dry suit makes 50°F water feel like a crisp morning with still air, instead of torture.
Water inside reduces that insulation. I wore my synthetic base layers underneath just in case.
When I started diving I still didn't understand the difference between dry and wet suits. Although a dry suit could look pretty similar to a regular wet suit to a non diver from far away, the way of wearing it is way different.
A wet suit is used in warm/hot weather were the insulation provided by the neoprene and the wather that gets trapped between the suit and your body is enough. If you pee on a wet suit, well, your wet anyway, and it's not much of a difference.
A dry suit is what is used for really cold weather, and it's really dry inside. It's watertight. For keeping yourself warm inside the suit, you just wear some layers of "regular" dry clothes. So if you pee in a dry suit, your peeing on your dry clothes.
Would be like peeing in your flight or space suit (without a catheter like system like the described in the post)
You're generally not wearing just a drysuit if the water is cold. Under the outer shell, you often wear multiple undergarments to keep warm. Think a base layer, underwear, socks, 1-piece.
I once did a cold water dive in a drysuit without fleece undergarments.
We were loading our gear onto a charter boat for a week's dive trip and the boat captain dropped his keys through the dock and into the water. I volunteered as tribute, threw my drysuit over my t-shirt and jeans and went down in search of the keys.
I quickly found the keys which was a blessing because it was the coldest I have ever been; I would never do a drysuit dive without the layers again.
When I was much younger, we would go surfing in a wetsuit. When the water was cold, taking a piss would be a nice little break from freezing while the layer of water inside the suit warmed up. Sounds gross but it gets replaced over time while you're in the water.
Oh yeah, 'charging up' your wetsuit is great. The replacement is fairly limited with a good suit especially if you have booties and a hood, but who cares, people pay a lot of money for skin care products with urea in them.
Good article. I think this issue is a major reason why there are relatively few women diving in cold water, especially when it comes to technical diving that involves long exposures.
The relief zipper installed on some men's drysuits isn't for use underwater. It's just for use on the surface, to save the hassle of partially removing the drysuit (can be difficult on small boats). But it's also a source of leaks so no one really uses them anymore.
She mentions the male version with a zip on the front. How does that work, do you just unzip, haul it out and have a go in the freezing cold sea? Don't you fill up the suit with sea?
As others have said, the zip is for use above water.
Underwater, men have similar choices – holding it in, wearing a diaper, or a condom catheter (similar principle but without the need for such precise and thorough glue application).
I came to the chat before reading the piece only to find myself confronted with my assumption that it was about going deeper into flow while coding — and this is how some innovations happen!
Reminded me of a few similar articles I have read that reveal how divers’ real-world needs drive equipment evolution, transforming a basic human function into a catalyst for safer, more inclusive cold-water diving.
[1] "Why Do I Need to Pee Every Time I Dive?" (DIVER Magazine), and
Regarding diapers: supermarket brands are cheapies and can leak (e.g. Tena, Depends, etc.)
Instead you'll want to take yourself to a pharmacy or care store to seek out a proper continence pad, yes they cost slightly more, but they work. These will not leak as you move about in the dive as the moisture is converted into a dry gel via super absorbent polymers. They feel dry to the touch and as a bonus will balance the pH as to not interfere with the skin's acid mantle. There is no threat of breaching the capacity as absorbencies can be in the litres.
I have a spinal injury and have experienced both catheters (both Foley, which have a balloon in the bladder, and isc ones, which don't) and modern absorbent underwear.
Catheters are evil pain sticks. Modern pants are wonderful and have dramatically improved my quality of life.
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It's not, actually. Your comment is less relevant than theirs.
This seems like a sad example of "we'll do something to children that we'd never accept for ourselves, but it's OK because what can they do about it?"
They can potty train.
You might argue against it for babies but at a certain stage feeling the moisture is a motivator for kids to learn to use the toilet.
That's why one potty training technique is to switch kids to regular underwear and mange the fact that they'll be wet pretty frequently. It's the uncomfortable wetness that both makes them want to potty train and lets them understand what it means to hold their bladder.
I was in disposable diapers as a kid but they used cloth reusable for my brother 2 years younger than me. One night they ran out of disposable so they outfitted me with a cloth one, next morning I was dry and I refused to wear diapers after that.
Yes they even have diapers/nappies for toddlers that absorb less on purpose.
I would definitely shit my pants frequently if it wasn’t for the discomfort. Practical concerns aside. Smart, yet stinky parenting technique.
Wouldn’t they just start pissing literally anywhere, though?
> Wouldn’t they just start pissing literally anywhere, though?
Yes. As an adult male, I piss any and everywhere I can get away with it. Parenting, common decency, and law enforcement have narrowed that down to mostly bathrooms and backcountry.
Yes, they will pee anywhere because their whole lives they’ve been covered in a soft diaper. But it doesn’t take long for them to learn that is an uncomfortable feeling in normal underwear and there’s an incentive to use the toilet.
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> What is the incentive?
You reward them with praise when they pee in the toilet. People are pretty receptive to praise and kids even more so.
Parenting provides the rest of the correction needed to finish the process.
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As father to a toddler, the diapers we have (pampers brand) definitely contain these extremely absorbent polymers. They never leak and can contain insane amounts of liquid. Sometimes you forget about the diapers for half a day and there's no leaks and almost no irritation if the skin.
Those diapers say 10-18lbs on the package, but they actually hold waaaaay less urine than that
—First dad joke my brother in law bestowed upon me after my daughter was born
The discount supermarket ones we use seem just as good. Also based on the absorbent gel, no leaks, no irritation.
The latest Pampers diaper tech for kiddos is a veritable marvel of human technology. It will expand to like 5+ times the size while feeling dry (more or less) to the touch on the inside. It's still gross to deal with, but not remotely as much as I would have expected.
Source: Am new dad of 3.5 year old boy
kids pee a lower volume than adults
Thank you for talking about it. I am a guy and dive occasionally with a dry suit, but this is something that most people are not comfortable talking about.
> PEE SLOWLY
Ok, this has got me curious - is this an anatomical difference? I'm male and I find it very, very uncomfortable to pee slowly. Almost painful.
I had this thought too. My best guess is that it's down to the length of the urethra. Have you ever lifted liquid out of a glass using a straw, by capping the upper end of the straw with a finger? That liquid wants to fall, but that causes the gas volume above the liquid to expand, so vacuum pressure pulls the water upward, counteracting gravity, and also pulls your finger into the straw slightly. I imagine that, for a longer column of fluid, that vacuum pressure is at least a contributing factor to the unpleasant feeling. (Not to mention that, when urinating, that column of liquid is already moving rapidly!)
Male here: it's a lot more manageable if you control it with your pubococcygeal(sp?) muscles, the ones you can also use to control ejaculation. I've had to do this while peeing into a bottle that wasn't necessarily big enough. It still sucks, but not so much due to physical discomfort.
> use to control ejaculation
Wait. What?
> The perineal muscles are involved in ejaculation when they are involuntarily contracted. The ischiocavernosus muscle is responsible for male erection, and the bulbocavernosus muscle is responsible for ejaculation. By actively contracting the perineal muscles with Kegel exercises regularly, strength and control of these muscles increase, possibly aiding in the avoidance of premature ejaculation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kegel_exercise
Uh, yeah. It's surprisingly difficult to find really reputable sources online that directly address it, but you can kinda just try it. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22211-kegel... "Pelvic floor exercises" is probably the right search phrase.
As a guy I found this article oddly riveting — the author seems super cool for being so candid. But the “pee slowly” thing had me coming to the comments to learn more: is this something ladies can typically do?
I learned—embarassingly recently—that ladies can apparently just stop pissing at will, or slice the loaf for number 1, it's incredible. Once I start going I'm pretty much committed.
I'm a guy but for me it just... takes more time to finish pissing?
Then again I found out in my teenage years that not everyone is able to stop urinating on command, too. Something to do with excessive drinking, pissing in public places, and some friends not being able to haul their little firehoses in before the cops took notice.
Does pinching it off mid-piss hurt for you, as well?
I would say that a primary reason to do it slowly is to not put too much pressure into it, which is true for both women and men. The p-valve involving gluing it on your body, and the tube is soft which can easily get kinks. It can balloon and there is always the risk that the pressure find an alternative way that is not the outside of the drysuit.
I do not find it too uncomfortable myself. The fear of rapture is fairly major one, especially the first time of a dive when your trust in the glue are a bit low. After that you can increase the speed a bit.
Never had that problem. Also male. I used to play games with it in middle school, hopping from urinal to urinal, now I modulate my flow to reduce splashing.
If there are anatomical differences, they're not entirely gender-based.
Related thought - How did knights in plate armour manage? Were there accomodation for taking a pee without having to take a significsant amount of armour off?
Almost all medieval armour is open from below at the crotch. So, you can just let go, but you'll wet or foul your underwear. Sometimes there are flaps or removable pieces. Sometimes not. It highly depends on the type or armour and the exact time period.
I have a full maille kit for reenactment. I can easily pee while wearing it. I only have to remove my gloves and helmet (so I can see what I'm doing). Defecating is harder but not impossible, but I just go before gearing up. I don't have armour on all day during reenactment events.
Interesting, thanks. I guess the downside of that an opponent is likely to attack your groin, in a most unsportsmanly fashion. =:0+
I've seen some armour with a metallic 'cod piece'. Some of the more extreme examples here.
https://www.tumblr.com/petermorwood/133331041560/15th-and-16...
I assume that must have been detachable?
The armour needs to be quite flexible in this area anyway as your hips and legs need to bend. they just used flaps of chainmail rather than seal you in. Look at some images.
I've seen similar for when you are wearing a motorcycle suit.
You can search for pee/urination funnel. Apparently, commonly used for camping as well.
I'm a little confused by this - I've ridden motorcycles for a decade now and typically one simply stops, dismounts, and orients oneself looking downwind.
Does that still work in a one-piece racing suit? I assumed that's what they meant. I haven't worn one, but I can imagine some of them make things a little more complicated.
They unzip down the front. Yes, if you lack a penis you'd have to get your arms and butt out to urinate, but that's hardly the same level of challenge as having to end a dive, surface, undo all your seals, and then get your arms and butt out of a drysuit.
The person who wrote the blogpost is a woman.
I'm aware... while the process for urination (without a penis) or defecation (with any equipment) does require getting about 5/8ths out of your 1-piece moto leathers, this really only adds about 10 seconds and the desire for a good sized roadside privacy bush.
Hazard Lee on YouTube has a great video going into the new system they have for fighter pilots to pee in their planes.
Do you have details on this? The (non-new) system is (At least in the US), a piddle pack. It's a thick plastic bag that folds flat, filled with kitty litter. Turns into pee gel. That's for men. The women's ones are more complicated, and have electrical pumps.
I wonder what kind of other jobs/occupations require having some kind of pee management system. Maybe astronauts?
Pretty sure astronauts do too. I remember the weird astronaut love triangle incident where some astronaut lady who was in love with some other astronaut drove nonstop cross-country with apparently a BB gun and wearing a diaper to do God knows what to the guy. It was explained that wearing a diaper during spacewalks was routine for astronauts, so it probably seemed like a reasonable and convenient thing to do for her, rather than crazy and outlandish as it seemed to most regular people.
Amazon warehouse workers?
I know nothing about diving. Why can't you pee in a dry suit (except that one might find it gross)? I assumed that you could just rinse the suit afterwards. Or is being underwater a factor, because it gets too cold or the pressure does something with it or...?
Except for the gross factor? The author seems pretty clear that, yes, you can:
> For those of you asking, what are my options for diving in a dry suit? Well… you can just hold it (again, if you have a bladder of steel), nappies/diapers, the p-valve, or just pee in the suit (which is gross and defeats the whole purpose of the dry suit, right?).
The "purpose of the dry suit" is to keep you dry. If you're literally wetting yourself, and with a fluid that is rather more chemically offensive than water, then you're probably going to have a bad time. (I don't know how temperature-controlled dry suits are, but you lose heat a lot more easily through contact with a liquid (that's what sweat is for!), so the urine puddle probably makes heat retention harder, too.)
I live where the water barely gets warm enough to swim in during the summer, so kayaking is often a dry suit activity. When I was taking a class I had quite a time staying cool. Some people flip on purpose, or you just shove as much of an arm into the water as you can and wait. A dry suit makes 50°F water feel like a crisp morning with still air, instead of torture.
Water inside reduces that insulation. I wore my synthetic base layers underneath just in case.
When I started diving I still didn't understand the difference between dry and wet suits. Although a dry suit could look pretty similar to a regular wet suit to a non diver from far away, the way of wearing it is way different.
A wet suit is used in warm/hot weather were the insulation provided by the neoprene and the wather that gets trapped between the suit and your body is enough. If you pee on a wet suit, well, your wet anyway, and it's not much of a difference.
A dry suit is what is used for really cold weather, and it's really dry inside. It's watertight. For keeping yourself warm inside the suit, you just wear some layers of "regular" dry clothes. So if you pee in a dry suit, your peeing on your dry clothes.
Would be like peeing in your flight or space suit (without a catheter like system like the described in the post)
You're generally not wearing just a drysuit if the water is cold. Under the outer shell, you often wear multiple undergarments to keep warm. Think a base layer, underwear, socks, 1-piece.
I once did a cold water dive in a drysuit without fleece undergarments.
We were loading our gear onto a charter boat for a week's dive trip and the boat captain dropped his keys through the dock and into the water. I volunteered as tribute, threw my drysuit over my t-shirt and jeans and went down in search of the keys.
I quickly found the keys which was a blessing because it was the coldest I have ever been; I would never do a drysuit dive without the layers again.
Beyond it being uncomfortable, it’d essentially be a thermal bridge - defeating the purpose of keeping an air gap on the inside of the suit.
When I was much younger, we would go surfing in a wetsuit. When the water was cold, taking a piss would be a nice little break from freezing while the layer of water inside the suit warmed up. Sounds gross but it gets replaced over time while you're in the water.
Oh yeah, 'charging up' your wetsuit is great. The replacement is fairly limited with a good suit especially if you have booties and a hood, but who cares, people pay a lot of money for skin care products with urea in them.
You lose heat 25x faster when wet.
Good article. I think this issue is a major reason why there are relatively few women diving in cold water, especially when it comes to technical diving that involves long exposures.
I'm sorry but am I the only one wanting more info than "of course me can just use a zipper"
I'm kinda confused how one can maintain a dry suit and zip open their fly?
The relief zipper installed on some men's drysuits isn't for use underwater. It's just for use on the surface, to save the hassle of partially removing the drysuit (can be difficult on small boats). But it's also a source of leaks so no one really uses them anymore.
She mentions the male version with a zip on the front. How does that work, do you just unzip, haul it out and have a go in the freezing cold sea? Don't you fill up the suit with sea?
It's more that you can go between dives without having to de-suit completely, I think.
Correct. It is for when the diver is on land/boat.
It is however fairly uncommon today to see people with such zipper since zippers tend to be the first place a drysuit start to leak.
As others have said, the zip is for use above water.
Underwater, men have similar choices – holding it in, wearing a diaper, or a condom catheter (similar principle but without the need for such precise and thorough glue application).
I came to the chat before reading the piece only to find myself confronted with my assumption that it was about going deeper into flow while coding — and this is how some innovations happen!
Reminded me of a few similar articles I have read that reveal how divers’ real-world needs drive equipment evolution, transforming a basic human function into a catalyst for safer, more inclusive cold-water diving.
[1] "Why Do I Need to Pee Every Time I Dive?" (DIVER Magazine), and
[2] "Drysuit Diving Myths, Busted" (Scuba Diving)
why not just pee into the suit?
edit: ah it’s a dry suit not a wet suit
Peeing in a wetsuit is one of life's small pleasures.
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Ah, yes, normal bodily functions and ways to deal with them in technical settings is "disgusting". Very thoughtful insight, "thank you".
look, mac. this is not what i want to be seeing over my fish and chips.
Then stop looking at your fish and chips after you pee on them.