I hope this topic will not be TMI or cause anyone any discomfort.
I grew up and attended high school in the US southwest in the mid-1980’s. The boys’ restrooms at the school I attended, as well as the other schools in the same district, did not have stalls surrounding the toilets. If one were unfortunate enough to have to defecate during school hours, any one else in the restroom would be able to watch you, and hear you, and smell you. (Especially those sitting on the adjoining toilets, which were only spaced a yard or so apart.)
Apparently this no longer occurs today, even in the military. So I’m wondering, how many of you had to poop with your classmates? Did you feel awkward and/or embarrased?
Do you have any idea if the girls’ restrooms were the same?
Did the teachers have to use the same lavatories as the boys?? I can’t imagine standing by in the presence of your math teacher squeezing out a grogan.
I am female, graduated high school in 92, and have never been in a place without stalls with doors. I have seen men’s restrooms with no door on the (often single) stall, and that creeps me out too. Good grief. Isn’t community showering bad enough?
I am 64, grew up in Texas, and don’t recall any facilities in school not having either stalls or at least panels to separate the commodes, except in campgrounds or Grandma’s old “2-holer” on the farm.
At our high school, there are different bathrooms for staff and for students. The stalls are there, but they don’t have doors. Most students hold it until they can get home.
The boys room had dividers between the toilets, but that was it. No doors though. What was worse, and it was this way in every school I attended (9 total), was when you turned the corner after entering, there they were, open to anyone who walked in.
The urinals didn’t even have the dividers, and they were close together, so you were always in danger of splashing from anyone on either side of you.
I have no memory either way, so I’ll assume I did since I’m more likely to remember uncomfortable reticence than a normal bodily function.
Plus, I grew up with three brothers in a one-bathroom house, so costive timidity wasn’t an option. I recall an early memory when one of my brothers has passed one of those monsters stools that kids form when they’re too busy playing outside to come in and shit, so they squinch it back for a day or so. They must have seen “Moby Dick” on the evening TV movie the night before, because my brothers were in there with all the sharpened pencils from my mom’s desk.
Not quite school, but in the US Army basic training in the 60’s, the entire barracks used one bathroom. No stalls, just rows of toilets. No separate urinals, just a long trough. And one communal shower room. All indoors.
And we liked it. Not really.
At least the showers had hot water. What did you expect, bidets and personal attendants?
I hope they paused to tattoo each other’s arms with Sharpies before embarking on this most unusual of Nantuckett Sleighrides.
Going to a boy’s camp for four years, our shitters not only had no doors on them but the stalls on each end were pretty much open to god and country given their proximity to the large open entranceways. In fact, surrounded by camper cabins, they pretty much guaranteed a modicum of privacy. It’s how most of us discovered even in the absence of curiosity that the variety of ways possible to wipe one’s bottom were as numerous as sands through the hourglass… not that that was one of them.
When in was in the military, we’d go “camping” sometimes – an exercise in the woods. Everything we brought was quickly mobilized and seemingly very old. Anyway, we had some funky stalls. There were three toilets in two rows, and the rows were facing each other. There were canvas walls to the right and left of each toilet, but nothing in front. So you guessed it, when it came time to break one off, you were looking directly at the dude who was doing the same.
I don’t think anyone liked it so we developed a system: You stagger the stalls, so only three of the six would be in use and there is no one directly in front of you. If you really had to go and you couldn’t wait, you’d go in the woods. But there were always FNGs and other outsiders who’d go with us not understanding the system. Picture it, you’re in mid-push and some jackass comes in and sits directly in front of you, looking at you, and oftentimes wanting to exchange pleasantries. Are you kidding dude? Look at my face – NO TALKING.
These descriptions of open-plan toilets reminds me of the story from WWII when FDR was personally involved in the design of the rooming accomodations for the WACS, drawing inpiration from his own days in boarding school.
His reasons, and I assume those of the designers of the bathrooms described in this thread, were not to embarass shitters but to thwart didlers.
When I started college (Mizzou) in the late 80s, we had fairly typical stalls in the men’s restrooms in most of the class buildings, union hall, library, etc. Each year, they were less and less. Soph year, the partitions were cut down (so it was obvious if there were more than one pair of feet in there). Junior year, the doors went away (multiple pairs of feet hadn’t stopped). I stopped using 'em – because, ick – but I suspect that by the time I’d left there was nothing left but a hole in the floor for use.
When I went into the Army in December 1974, we were “warehoused” in the Receiving Center at Ft. Leonard Wood for a week before our training cycle started. We stayed in World War II barracks, and the latrine had a row of very public toilets along one wall and a urinal trough along another wall. There were probably 30 guys in one building. I will never forget walking into the latrine to see a dozen guys parked on toilets trying not to look at anyone else. I didn’t crap for a week. Fortunately, when we got to the training companies, the new barracks had more privacy.
I had stall-less toilets in high school (public school on Long Island).
It was highly controversial. Basically, the school dirtbags would often go into the bathrooms and vandalize them, usually by ripping out the stalls.
The administration complained about having to constantly put new stalls in. One morning, we got a schoolwide memo in homeroom - the next time the stalls were ripped out, they wouldn’t be replaced.
The same day, the dirtbags ripped out the stalls and the school kept its promise. God help ya if you had to go #2 in the C-wing bathroom. You’d be squatting for the world to see. I got stuck having to go there once and somebody walked in to the bathroom. I couldn’t think of what to say with him watching me go, so I just waved and said “Hey. How are ya?”
Not really.