Massachusetts Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez brags that he can go longer without peeing than Rand Paul.

This happened during a debate last night with his Democratic opponent Ed Markey, who had praised Senator Paul for filibustering.

Gomez responded that he could have gone longer than Paul, who spoke for nearly 13 hours without urinating.

“I’ve gone lots longer than that in my time on the SEAL team,” said Gomez.

Is politics a pissing contest?

A pissing contest, or pissing match, is a game in which participants compete to see who can urinate the highest, the farthest, or the most accurately.

That's a more exciting game than a how-long-can-you-go-without-pissing contest. "Pissing contest" is an old metaphor used "to characterise ego-driven battling in a pejorative or facetious manner that is often considered vulgar."

Dwight Eisenhower is reported to have said of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he wouldn't "get into a pissing contest with that skunk." Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, used the same phrase in 1958 when asked why he had not responded to a statement by the French foreign minister that the French government had not been consulted about a crisis in Lebanon....

Consider the potential metaphorical use of a how-long-can-you-go-without-pissing contest. I note that it may work better in 2013 than pissing contest, since the reference is to an activity that — something Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles probably didn't think about — gives women equal opportunity.

In case you have trouble picturing women in a non-metaphorical pissing contest, Wikipedia — at the second link, above — recounts some Irish folklore:

In the story Tochmarc Emire several women compete to see who can urinate deepest into a pile of snow. 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 Cúchulainn avenges the deaths by demolishing a house with the women inside, killing 150.