Pissing contest

Etymology

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a pissing contest as a competition to see who can urinate the farthest or highest, and in extended use as any futile or purposeless contest pursued in a conspicuously aggressive manner. The first cited use of the phrase comes from a 1943 hearing before the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate F.C.C., where radio station owner Gene Dyer said: 'You boys have to understand … that I have to deal with a combination like that of Hartley-David; it is like having a pissing contest with a skunk.'

The OED's first citation of 'pissing match' is from a December 1971 Washington Post story. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English separates 'pissing match' (a conflict involving unpleasantries) from 'pissing contest' (a conflict with negative attacks by both sides), and for the latter offers the image of two men urinating on each other. Urban Dictionary's crowdsourced definition describes the figurative use as referring to a meaningless but entertaining act of trying to outdo one another.

Female contests

In his work on the psychology of sex, Havelock Ellis recorded a female pissing contest from Belgium. Two women each stood over a bottle fitted with a funnel and urinated into it; the one who filled the bottle the most won. A 17th-century Belgian comic song describes a similar competition, where three women aimed into a shoe to impress a man. Early Irish stories also include such contests. In the tale "Aided Derbforgaill," several women competed to urinate the deepest into a snow pile. Derbforgaill, wife of Lugaid Riab nDerg, won, but the other women, jealous, attacked her. They gouged out her eyes, cut off her nose, ears, and hair, killing her. Her husband Lugaid died of grief. Cú Chulainn avenged them by demolishing a house with the women inside, killing 150.

Metaphorical phrase

Dwight Eisenhower is reported to have said of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he wouldn't 'get into a pissing contest with that skunk.' John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, used the same phrase in 1958 when asked why he had not responded to a statement by the French foreign minister about the 1958 Lebanon crisis. The dispute between Carl Icahn and Yahoo! was described as a pissing contest. A review of American novelist John Barth's work criticized it with the statement: 'Prolonged exposure to this particular "pissing contest" just left me wanting to tell Barth to parse off.'

Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought credits the 'wordsmiths who thought up the indispensable pissing contest' along with other crass phrases. The Hippie Dictionary described the arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as a pissing contest in which each superpower developed bigger weapons until each could obliterate the other multiple times over.