Women, in extremis, go into men’s bathrooms and use the urinals. Urinals save space. Ladies’ rooms are famously overcrowded. Inefficient use of real estate. Toilet stalls would still be available, for peeing/pooping, female management, cocaine snorting, etc.
Factors:
Urine pressure (rear squat approach), necessary to avoid leg dribbling? True? I’m guessing that front approach demands even higher, uncomfortable pressure. (ignoring high leg lift to get better vertical drop, which brings up);
squat difficult for older people;
squat embarrassing. I thought about this–men get over it, but critical, I think, their faces (to see and be seen) are to the wall;
to get over 1) just redesign the damn urinals a little, add dividers.
How many? Pee-to-poop-and other-stuff ratio. Somebody must have done this. No public facility (lobby, elevator bank) is designed without a usage assumption.
Wearing a dress, you could hike up the hem and move the crotch of your panties out of the way. In pants it’s more complicated. You can’t get enough spread without dropping trou onto a nasty public restroom floor.
There was the She-inal, about 20 years ago, a female urinal with a hose and funnel sort of thing. Invented by Kathie Jones, a Pensacola, Fla., businesswoman who started a company called Urinette Inc. to manufacture and distribute it. She was motivated by long lines in public bathrooms, and one of her first customers was supposed to be the new Orioles stadium at Camden Yards. I don’t know if they ever closed the deal, but the product was short-lived. Urinette eventually sold the rights and I don’t know how long it continued be manufactured.
I’m equally confused. If it happens at all, it’s very rare. I’ve used women’s urinals at festivals and they were women-only and on clean ground - you have to completely drop your trousers and show your arse to the world. Not something I’m going to do in a room full of men and piss.
But the reason stated, to protect women’s delicate underthings from contacting yuck porcelain, can’t be the entire thing, and it must include the real estate issues. (Is Cecil UNCARING?! No.)
But, ladies, why doesn’t scrunching down underpants and pants down the thighs but still on “squat lap” and above the knee anchor them sufficiently from falling to the ground? It has worked for me (in an emergency bushes poop).
If your thighs are too close together, pee sprays in every direction . Remember, the urethral opening (is there a better word?) is behind the labia. If the labia are touching you have no control over the stream except to physically spread them with your hand.
Crouching awkwardly while grabbing your privates in the hope you don’t drench your clothes with urine isn’t a real attractive proposition to most women.
You’d piss all over your clothes. That posture works fine for women when shitting too, but shitting doesn’t require any aiming. It’d basically be the same as you squatting to pee in that pose, but letting your dinkle tinkle wherever it will.
Also, you’re still showing your arse to the world. Plus, if you’re in heels, you’ll probably fall over.
I’ve used a (modern, tiled, flush) women’s squat toilet in Italy, and they were fully enclosed in stalls like regular toilets. Due to real estate/exposure issues, I doubt you could fit them in a smaller space like you could with men’s urinals.
Well, that’s the point: I’d think the greater good for women would be access, period, even if a little more care must be taken.
Design change thus becomes a political choice.
I seem to remember a posti did with something else having to do with the unfairness/problem of ladies having to wait on line longer than men. Something must have caused my empathy/sympathy once, fairly dramatically.
Ever seem “turkish toilets?” Looks like a bathroom sink sunk into the floor with footsteps on each side. The calssier ones I saw in rural Italy included a length of garden hose atatched to a tap so you could “flush” it all down. Good for numbers 1 through 2.
