I’ve never been in one or known a person whose dorm has one. But nearly every TV show depicting college life seems to have them, so someone out there in the real world must, too.
Have any dopers out there been in a dorm with coed bathrooms or know someone who does (or did)?
I had a summer internship with a theater program at Vassar six or so years ago. Some of us were housed in a “cooperative” dorm (apparently meant to be a more communal way of living than regular dorms). It was evidently co-ed during the school year, as it was while we had it over the summer. One big restroom on the second floor with four showers and a like number of toilet stalls & sinks.
The dorm was only at about half-capacity during that summer, with one guy surrounded by half a dozen women. I remember having a friendly conversation about nothing in particular with the resident guy one night through the shower curtain, while I was showering.
My dad wasn’t particularly pleased with the set-up, but, as with many things, my mom talked him down 
Oh, yes, the dubious joys of coed bathrooms.
Everyone sees them in TV shows and softcore porn and thinks it’s going to be cool–“Hey man, those chicks are gonna be NAKED! We’re totally gonna be showering together!”
Yeah, right, like orgies break out in coed bathrooms all the time. (well, there was that ONE, but all the pictures were destroyed…)
Anyhoo, except for showering with a friend and (maybe) shaving/ applying makeup, think about how many activities you DON’T want to see the opposite sex doing. What if the hot girl from down the hall walks in whilst you’re taking a big ole fajitas and beer dump? What if you walk in on her doing the same thing? Co-ed bathrooms, IMHO, are one of the easiest ways to actively discourage cohabitation before marriage. Of course, most college bathrooms are fairly skanky by dint of serving so many…(well, in restaurants, they call 'em “covers”, so what’s the best term here?).
You will not believe the fucked up repugnant shit some people, ostensibly from good homes with decent upbringing get up to “because we don’t have to clean it”.
Oh, the tales I could spin of people puking in sinks and shitting on walls…and those were the girls. Add to that an average of one tampon a week in the showers, or the trail of blood spots leading from the stall to the shower, where they ended in a pair of soiled Dior undies…
The men, of which I was one, usually confined themselves to puking and leaving truly tremedjous grogans for their friends to marvel at.
Sure. Of course, this was back in the late '70s and early '80s, before everyone got so wussified.
Similar situation to Rosebud’s…four single rooms on each floor of an four-floor entryway, sharing one big communal john. One toilet stall, two sinks, one shower. (This was in my Senior Year. Singles were a perk of the upperclassmen. Earlier on we had different permutations)
If one of the hot girls was showering, I usually did the gentlemanly thing and nipped up to the next floor to do Number Two; they did the same thing if they heard me clacking around with my razor and shaving gear. And everyone wrapped up well in a towel before slithering out the door and back to their room.
Carleton College (Northfield, MN) '90 checking in. Many, if not most, of our dorms had co-ed bathrooms. It was a convenience thing - somehow it often worked that the majority of the women on the floor would have, say, an 8:30 class, so the women’s showers would be overrun while the men’s sat there empty. Provided that the showers were private - and in the dorms I lived, they were not only individual showers but each shower had its own small, private changing area, too - the floor would usually vote to permit co-ed use for at least part of the day. The general rule was that the vote had to be unanimous. Usually, the showers were co-ed during “rush periods,” like 7-11 a.m. and 4-7 p.m., and single sex during off-hours so people who were uncomfortable could shower then.
The system worked quite well; I never heard of anyone being harrassed. Of course, Carleton was a small place (<1800 students), known for geekiness and fostering brother-sister relations between the genders. (Not that sex didn’t happen, just a lot less than outsiders hearing the phrase “coed bathrooms” might assume.) The floors were small, too - I think the largest had 55 residents, so everyone knew each other - and closely knit (people identified pretty strongly with their floor).
Our dorm had coed bathrooms in the coed suites when I was an undergrad a depressingly long time ago (mid 1970s).My thoughts:
1.) NOT sexy. It was as if I suddenly had a lot of sisters.
2.) We made up a sign on the door to indicate which sex was using the bathroom, but after the first week or so we ignored this. You called to see if someone was just getting into or out of the shower. If not, you just when in. Guys would go in to use the toilet or brush their teeth while gals were showering, and vice-versa. AFAIK, no one ever was crass enough to yank open a shower curtain while someone else was showering. If it was just using the stalls or brushing your teeth, we had total sex-mixing.
3.) It freaked my father out completely when he was using the toilet and a GIRL came in to use the other one.
My dorm did, and so did most of the dorms at my school - I was surprised when visiting a friend and finding out that there were men’s and women’s bathrooms… it seemed so inconvenient.
It freaked my parents out (“They’re teenage boys. They’re just going to walk into the shower to spy on you, that’s how they think!”).
Yep, mine did, too. Mid- to late-1970s. Also, like Ike’s, a floor with several guy rooms and several gal rooms, and a big ol’ bathroom. They figured we were all sleeping together anyway, so . . .
Exactly.
Ah, those days…post-Sexual Revolution; pre-Reagan, Meese, Weinburger, and AIDS.
Student A: You look good. Will you come have sex with me now?
Student B: All right.
…Yes, kids, it was really like that. Too bad ya missed out on it.
At the Glastonbury festival they have unisex communal showers without shower curtains or anything. Nearly everyone avoids them though and the queues for the individual showers can last over an hour while you can just walk straight into the communal ones.
I usually just avoid showers and get a lovely festival aroma which innocent passengers enjoy as I get the crowded train home. Most of the people on the train are smelly festival goers and so don’t even notice.
My dorm started life as an all-male building, but had been co-ed for years by the time I got there. So there was one big bathroom per floor, and the rooms were mixed, and we shared. My floor was mostly guys, and considering some of the bathrooms I’ve seen since, it was surprisingly civilized, although I was too naive to realize that at the time. The showers were built so that you’d have to bring in a stepladder to peek in. Problems included pee sprinkled on the seat (from one of the girls), and a guy who gave haircuts in there and left tiny hairs everywhere. And a couple from another floor who came in to have undercover sex in the shower.
Ah, those days…post-Sexual Revolution; pre-Reagan, Meese, Weinburger, and AIDS.
Student A: You look good. Will you come have sex with me now?
Student B: All right.
…Yes, kids, it was really like that. Too bad ya missed out on it.
—I have a theory about why we all had such constant, unbridled sex in the 1970s. The clothing was SO INCREDIBLY HIDEOUS that we couldn’t wait to get each other OUT of it. Even the geekiest, ugliest person looked better OUT of those clothes than IN 'em. Even if you were straight, it was preferable to have sex with another guy (or gal) than to have to look at their godawful cothing.
. . . OK, back to what y’all were saying . . .
Great stories guys. I was getting worried for a while there when no one seemed to be responding. I began to wonder if co-ed bathrooms were just something created by the powers that be in TV land.
Now if only I’d been going to school in the 70’s. Gives a whole new meaning to extracurricular activity…
Cowell at University California Santa Cruz had co-ed bathrooms. It was no big deal.
One year I had inadvertently chosen a room on an all-male hall, and was brushing my teeth in the bathroom when someone’s girlfriend walked in. She used the facilities and then left, and another guy said “I don’t think she even realized…” I wanted to say to him “realized what? That you’re incredibly uptight?”
When visiting other colleges I found it really strange that there were separate restrooms.
Colby College, Waterville Maine, graduated 1995.
The dorms themselves were mixed by floor(I lived next door to guys all 4 years). Officially, the bathrooms were single sex, alternating by floor and switching at the semester, so that you didn’t have to walk up or downstairs all year long.
Unofficially, when you’re drinking or hung over? You don’t make it up or downstairs.
And some dorms did have bathrooms that were officially co-ed, but they were rare on campus.
SUNY - Buffalo Sate College, 1988.
There were no formal co-ed bathrooms in the dorms, but in practice the rule was “men’s bathrooms are always co-ed, while women’s are now.” Thus, only women had the choice of whether they wanted the act of taking a good, healthy steamer to be heard by the opposite sex. If a man stepped into the women’s room, he’d get a good thrashing by the RD, if not judiciary action.
Nope, no coed bathrooms. I went to an all-girls’ school, so the only time any of our dorm bathrooms went coed was when somebody’s boyfriend was down for the weekend. Or maybe parties when the Middies and Hopkins boys would invade; and then it was cool because you were so starved to see some boyflesh that even the computer science majors were lookin’ pretty tasty!
Queen’s University, Ontario: the single-sex residences have single-sex washrooms (surprisingly :D), and the co-ed residences generally have one washroom for each gender, and then a co-ed washroom, on each foor. While I’ve heard of mass showers, the particpants are usually clothed … the only shower sex I know of happens in the single-sex residences.
(Living in an all-male residence (sigh), it’s always funny when girls walk into the washroom and then apologize when they see me in there. shrug)
Of course we had mixed sex bathrooms. There wre locks on the toilet cubicles, you know.
The college bathrooms in my first year had… let me think
… they had four toilet cubicles, two shower cubicles and two bath cubicles (just a small room with a bath in it) That was on the ground floor. On the upper floors, fewer rooms shared a bathroom. The first floor had some individual shower cubicles and WCs, the top floor had individual bath cubicles and WCs.
There was a separate ladies WC on the groud floor, but that was just one cubicle with a sanitary disposal unit.
Each bedroom had a sink and mirror, so shaving and brushing teeth could take place in one’s own room.
I had pretty much the same situation that elmwood had - no official co-ed bathrooms, but women used the men’s room in practice, while men did not use the women’s room. This was because the dorm, originally single-sex (actually, originally an Army barracks), was shaped like the letter H. There were two straight halls on either side, with a large common room in the middle. Each hall was co-ed, but had one bathroom. So, girls on the ‘men;s room side’ of the building sometimes used that bathroom instead of parading around the common room in their robes.