I saw a study that concluded toilet seats in public restrooms were actually one of the cleanest surfaces in the restroom. Don’t dispute that - it just means that the entire area lands somewhere in the spectrum between disgusting and eldritch nightmare. Due to the finding that the toilet seats were cleaner than most other surfaces in the restroom, it further concluded that it was perfectly safe to just plop down bare-assed onto that nastiness.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. The toilet paper bird-nest is a must. A few layers of splash protection toilet paper in the water before I even sit down is a must. ‘Ick’ factor aside, there are enough contact acquired pathogens to justify extreme caution in environments like that. I ain’t risking ass warts over some hypothesis, study, full-blown peer reviewed theory, or anything in between.