STP Journey, Part 1

I have bad bathroom anxiety.  Essentially what happens is that I can easily walk in and out of a men's public restroom with no difficulty... I pass well enough and I do not feel nervous about that aspect.  I don't mind going in a stall, either.  But I do mind sitting to piss.  It's not that I think it's going to get me in trouble, I have been in restrooms several times where men have been sitting in the stalls and pissing, and nobody whispers "I think that might be a girl!" as they do it.  My therapist said maybe it would help if my driver license said "male," which may be true.  Something I decided though was that I needed to start pissing standing up again... I used to have an STP (Stand-To-Pee) device that I made out of a packy, a piece of tubing, and a medicine spoon but I currently don't know where that is.  I eventually will make one of those again, but for now I have a Freshette.

Why did I pick the Freshette?  Honestly, one of the main reasons was that I had an Amazon gift card and they sell it there.  It didn't have the same female branding that the Go Girl has and I wanted the luxury of tubing.  It came yesterday, so here's what I think about it.
Freshette is marketed to women on the go, which is evidenced by their not-feminine-but-definitely-female advertising.

For women only!  Of all ages!

Having trouble pissing from a boat? Freshette is for you!

Honestly I don't know how they can advertise this to all ages because the thing is huge and any girl child trying to use this thing... goodness, that would be child abuse.

Thing is, I'm not great at assessing how big something's going to be when I get it in the mail, so I expected it to be smaller.  This is bias I guess because most FTM-created urinary directors are built for secrecy, a medicine spoon can be palmed and a pack-and-piss just rests in your underwear.  This is meant to be carried and used without secrecy and so it's not appropriate for use in a urinal and it will be difficult to carry in a pants pocket unless you are wearing rather baggy pants.

But it is appropriate if you are in a stall or if you're in one of those situations that shows up on the Freshette package, such as camping.

It's also more expensive than a lot of the other options out there owing to its sturdiness and bulkiness.

The tubing is optional.  The whole kit will come disassembled and in that bag above, and you can choose whether or not to thread the tube through.  It took me a while to figure out how to do that for some reason, but I did succeed eventually:

Not assembled yet.

Assembled.

 As you can see, this is different from the picture in that the tube is not as long, but I think any longer and people will start asking questions, so it's not that bad.

But does it work?  Yes.  And I have a feeling that if you're the kind of guy who is kind of creeped out by trying to get the small opening of a medicine spoon to magically land on your urethra, something like this may be a good compromise until you're more adept at your aim.  Some have said it requires a lot of pressure or it'll leak, that has not been my experience.  Just know that it is in your best interests to actually practice using this thing before you whip it out in public.

A problem is that when you're nearly finished the stream may "fork" or split to one side. This is incredibly annoying, but once I got used to it it wasn't a problem anymore.