Flies to Wanton Boys

Have you ever noticed that men's bathrooms smell so much worse than women's? Ever wondered why? OK, so maybe men are smellier, but it's really more specific than that: Urinals are to blame. Or rather, "spillage" outside of urinals are to blame.

Well, recently, according to NPR, there's been an effort to reduce spillage and the stink that comes with it — and the method employed for so doing just might surprise you: Flies. Either baked into the porcelain bowl or applied as decals, right above the drain.

The decals have been spotted in men's rooms both near and far: in Terminal Four at JFK Airport, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, several stadiums around the world, and elementary school bathrooms throughout America. They've even been spotted as far away as Moscow and Singapore.

And apparently, the reason is simple: The presence of the fly encourages men to aim.

In males, "there is a deep-seated instinct to aim at targets," May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois tells NPR.

According to author Richard Thaler, who documents the spread of urinal targets in his book Nudge, a manager at the airport in Schiphol claims the flies have reduced spillage by 80 percent, drastically reducing maintenance costs.

Doug Kempel has built a business around the concept, Urinalfly, which sells peel-off flies for home and school bowls. The company, reports NPR, is set to launch glow-in-the-dark fly decals for adult men, who get up in the dark of night to relieve themselves.

Now if we could only get them to put the toilet seat down after they've nailed the fly ...

Photo courtesy of jpctalbot via flickr.