Alright, in the show, they seem to have this unisex restroom that everyone willingly shares without thinking twice about it. Now, this phenomenon about sharing public restrooms is a new one on me (I mean, I know they exist, but they are not used simultaneously, at least none that I’ve encountered).
So, I’m wondering, is this unisex restroom thing common in high rise corporate settings? Like, say, a prolific law firm in New York? Has anyone ever encountered such a thing? Or is this just something exclusive to the TV show?
I encountered unisex bathrooms at Hampshire College–my best friend went there. This was in 1989, so I don’t know if they still exist there. I was fine with them in theory, but when it came time to go pee while my best friend’s dad was in the next stall dropping a log…
But Hampshire college is about as far from a “high rise corporate setting” as you can get.
I think I read somewhere that at Stanford, in some dorms at least, the bathrooms are co-ed. Imagine if a guy goes in to take a leak, and there’s Chelsea Clinton pinching a loaf (let’s see how many euphemisms for bowel movement we can put into this thread). hee hee hee
there’s a bar, no a club, in NYC called the Tunnel that has unisex bathrooms. it’s huge, and actually more like 1 large divided room. one side is urinals, one toilets. but there’s a bar, yes, a BAR between. and couches. and another dance floor through it. and to get to this remote dance floor, you have to go through the bathroom. it’s wicked weird.
The bar in the Tunnel bathroom is pretty cool, and cramped. Most clubs in NYC have unisex bathrooms, not just the Tunnel. Limelight, Sound Factory, Twilo, just about all the larger ones and plenty of smaller bars as well.
My dorm at MIT had some coed bathrooms, some with an indicator (1 sex at a time) on the door, and some single user at a time. After a while, I got used to it, but my parents always went for the single sex/user. There were different arrangements in different floors or suites of the same dorm. One suite in another dorm apparently had coed communal showers. :o It’s since been remodeled.
As far as I know, few if any corporations have coed bathrooms. My employer sure doesn’t.
Once at the Capital Center (US Air arena, whatever it’s called now), I was at a concert. As usual at these venues, the lines for the ladies’ restrooms were extremely long, but the men’s lines were shorter and moving faster. About halfway through the concert, the lines into the men’s rooms were half female. The guys didn’t seem to mind, as most of our business was #1, which used fixtures the ladies couldn’t use.
I think after a couple more events where this happened, the management cracked down on it.
I once went to a national convention for Mary Kay consultants with my wife. There were maybe 200 husbands out of 20,000 female consultants. With such overwhelming odds, the Dallas Convention Center “converted” (i.e., put little female logos over the male logos) all of the men’s rooms to ladies’ rooms in the half of the center we were assigned.
When I did need to go, I had to walk 200 yards past about 10 ladies’ rooms.
AWB wrote: I once went to a national convention for Mary Kay consultants with my wife. There were maybe 200 husbands out of 20,000 female consultants. With such overwhelming odds, the Dallas Convention Center “converted” (i.e., put little female logos over the male logos) all of the men’s rooms to ladies’ rooms in the half of the center we were assigned.
The same thing was done at the Lilith Fair concerts. I did feel kind of sorry for the few guys in attendence, as they had a bit of a hike to find bathrooms.
I was once at a restaurant with a large party that went late into the evening. At one point, there was a line for the ladies’ room and no one using the men’s, so we staged a coup and temporarily took it over.
Same thing with predominantly gay (male-oriented) clubs with men’s and women’s rooms - A lot of the “less fearful” men (myself included) will openly walk into the ladies’ room. The lines are shorter to nonexistent, and if there is a woman in there, she probably wouldn’t care.
We had coed Bathrooms and shower rooms in the co-op I lived in when I was in college.(Not many people figure me for a communist hehe). I think it basically happened because there was one large bathroom on each floor, the first floor for ladies room and the top floor for the men. At one point, I think in the 60’s, a guy in a wheel chair wanted to move in, but there was no was to get to the top floor(historic, unalterable house). Everybody just decided to make both of them coed rather than bothering with partitions or time schedule. It had been that way for years when I got there and nobody minded, the occasional shower walk-ins were just laughed off, but they made it clear to everybody that anything too bad and you would be kicked out of the house. The only real problem was that since it started out as a chick bathroom, the shower head was only useful for washing nipple level on down for me.
*robinh: The same thing was done at the Lilith Fair concerts. I did feel kind of sorry for the few guys in attendence, as they had a bit of a hike to find bathrooms. *
One of the first concerts at the Nissan Pavilion in Virginia was a Melissa Etheridge concert. They hadn’t thought about the high female-to-male ratio, so the ladies’ rooms had very long lines, whereas there were no lines at all for the men’s.
i work in an architectural office, no client has asked for unisex bathrooms as of yet. i believe that unisex bathrooms (like mcbeal) would only work in a smallish office, about 30ish people, rather than at corporate headquaters.
Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa used to (10 years ago) have dial-a-johns; i.e. there was a spinning indicator on the door set to the user’s preference. The choices were, IIRC, males only, females only, don’t care, and couples (I assume on the “shower-with-a-friend-to-save-energy” concept).
In some of the dorms at UC Berkeley, some of the floors are coed and hence the bathroom on the floor is coed as well. They only have toilets, sinks, and showers; there are no urinals (at least, not in the bathroom on the floor I use to live).
At least one dorm at Brown had co-ed bathrooms. When I lived there, there was one guy who loved to have conversations from the next stall. (no, thanks.) Of course, this is also a school that has a naked party…
At least one of the frats (ZDX) has fully coed bathrooms, and there are a number of dorms here that sort of “unofficially” have them. Where I did my undergrad (Quincy University, IL), the coed dorm I lived in for two years (North) had once been a seminary and thus all the bathrooms had a mix of urinals and toilets, though all were in closable stalls. They were technically single-sex, but I assure you that that wasn’t followed very rigorously.
As for Ally McBeal, I read that the original reason for the coed bathroom was simply that they didn’t want to (didn’t have enough money to?) construct two different bathroom sets. It’s since become really popular with a lot of viewers, not to mention a semi-regular plot device.
And why not? It’s not like you even see other people’s genitalia in a bathroom (one with all stalls, that is); for that matter, you don’t even see more than maybe their shoes while they’re doing their business. It would be much much cheaper and more efficient in many cases to only have one (larger) bathroom instead of two, not to mention the occasions where one sex outnumbers the other for one reason or another. Talk about an easy way to achieve potty parity.
My wife works for a startup in Silicon Valley, and they have a co-ed bathroom (two stalls), simply because they’re not big/rich enough to be able to afford anything more. Since the ratio of men to women is 3:1, she’s usually pretty nervous about going in just because odds are a guy could walk in and that is simply not cool with her (heck, she even kicks me out of our bathroom at home)
This has little to do with the OP, other than the topic of bathrooms…
When I first started my job at a huge corporate office, I had never EVER sat on a public toilet… Prior to that, I never used public restrooms for anything other than “shaking hands with the man.”
However, when you’re in one place for 8 to 10 hours straight (drinking way too much coffee), you’re eventually going to have to go “see a man about a donkey.”
So, somewhat nervously, I entered the restroom once, and covered the seat with one of those clever little paper shields. Being the big weirdo I am, I was a bit shy about possible offending people in the restroom with my bodily noises, so I bridled myself quite a bit. However, it wasn’t long before someone else came in and starting making quite a bit of racket, and I was just anxious to get out of there because I don’t particularly enjoy being around that sort of activity.
Anyway, after a minute or so it was almost like Dueling Banjos in that restroom.
