Since the 1940s, the term has been used as a slang idiomatic phrase describing contests that are "futile or purposeless", especially if waged in a "conspicuously aggressive manner".
[citation needed] Urban Dictionary's crowdsourced definition describes the term as being used figuratively "to refer to a meaningless though nonetheless entertaining act in which people try to outdo one another in any way."
Comments found there also describe pissing contests as literal competition "in which two or more people, usually (but not exclusively) male, urinate with the intention of producing the stream with the greatest distance.
The winner is Derbforgaill, wife of Lugaid Riab nDerg, but the other women attack her out of jealousy and mutilate her by gouging out her eyes and cutting off her nose, ears, and hair, resulting in her death.
Her husband Lugaid also dies, from grief, and Cú Chulainn avenges the deaths by demolishing a house with the women inside, killing 150.
Two bladders inside the head hold copious amounts of urine, which the lobster squirts through a pair of muscular nozzles beneath its antennae.
By contrast, the loser shuts off his urine valves immediately.Dwight Eisenhower is reported to have said of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he wouldn't "get into a pissing contest with that skunk.
[18] Alexander Pope included a pissing contest as part of the duncely games in Book 2 of The Dunciad (1728), with the winner awarded the female poet Eliza Haywood and a china chamber pot to the runner-up.
A literal pissing contest and territorial marking is also depicted in Carroll Ballard's 1983 adaptation of Farley Mowat's autobiographical novel Never Cry Wolf.
[21] During a figurative pissing contest with a sleazy rival, Jack Nicholson's character confronts him in a bathroom,[22] shows him he has just taken his job, fires him, and then pees on his shoes saying, "I'm just marking my territory, and you got in the way".