Gentlemen, can you spot what’s wrong with this picture?

Some of those voyeuristic bathroom scenes are dirty in a way many guys don’t even realize.

As part of our continuing examination of the ways the 2-D and 3-D worlds differ, today we’re following women into the bathroom. In illustrated form, of course, thanks to the insight of Japanese Twitter user @tyapaou_.

Depending on what genre of anime you’ve been exposed to, you might have seen the camera follow one of the female characters into the bathroom, no doubt due to the deep, poignant symbolism such a setting lends to a scene. However, just as with scenes of women in the bathtub, male artists probably don’t have a vast wealth of real-world observation to base their illustrations off of when depicting a lady monarch perched on her porcelain throne, which @tyapaou_ contends often leads men to drawing them in the style shown on the left in the tweet.

However, @tyapaou_, along with many other female online commenters, pointed out that lowering the skirt like that isn’t going to be a woman’s first choice. Why? Because it leaves the hem lying on the bathroom floor, which generally isn’t someplace people want their garments spending a lot of time in real life.

While lowering may be the only option with a particularly snugly fitting skit, @tyapaou_ points out that, when possible, the more natural choice is to bunch the skirt up instead, as shown in the drawing on the right.

So why would male artists choose the skirt-down method for their characters? Well, the most obvious explanation is that, being guys, their first-hand experience with expelling bodily waste comes from a pants-wearing perspective. The fact that a skirt can be raised to expose the pee-propelling area of the body just as easily as it can be lowered never crosses their mind.

From an artistic standpoint (pervy, to be sure, but still art-based), there’s another reason for the less-than-realistic approach taken by some male animators. A lot of anime aims to titillate while not doing anything that would cross the line into outright pornographic content, and lowering the skirt allows for a low-angle shot that clearly shows the girl is naked around her hips without explicitly showing her naughty bits, something that wouldn’t be allowed on Japanese TV, even in the late-night time slots that anime commonly occupies these days. A zoomed-in shot of a skirt around a character’s ankles has a good chance of slipping past the censors.

Of course, even if the artists have never worn a skirt themselves, common sense concepts of spatial relationships should alert them, and viewers, to the fact that when that skirt gets dropped, it’s picking up traces of fecal manner. When your target audience is excited by the prospect of a woman going to the bathroom, though, odds are they’re not the sort to get turned off by a few drops of pee amongst the pleats.

Source: Togech, Twitter/@tyapaou_