I almost posted this in GQ but I think there may not be a factual answer.
Why are public bathrooms that are set up for use by more than one person at a time always set up to be used by just one gender? I can’t say I’ve traveled extensively, but every country I’ve visited (Canada, France, England, Australia) has had separate men’s and women’s bathrooms.
How did this get to be the norm? Why not just have bathrooms to be used by whoever? I think part of why this notion seems weird might be because we’ve always lived in a culture where the bathrooms are specific for gender.
A few points I’ve thought of:
I’ve often been in circumstances where there’s been a line to get into the women’s room, but not the men’s room. This is due to a number of reasons, but certainly would be alleviated if everyone could just use the bathroom that’s most convenient.
Some women might not want to see guys standing in front of urinals with their penises exposed. So – put up some kind of privacy screen. Big deal.
When I was younger I would have missed the opportunity to leave the menfolk at the table while we women went together to the bathroom. Now that I’m older, there doesn’t seem to be the pressure to accompany another woman to the bathroom. I think women could adjust.
Some (maybe most) women might not want to have to put up with the mess men sometimes make in the bathroom. But I’ve been in many a women’s room that was pretty trashed, and pee on the toilet seat is not always the result of a man having used that toilet.
My thinking about this obviously came in part from the brouhaha there’s been over the past months about transgendered people using the bathroom. I’ve never understood how legislating which bathroom you use would work. Or why some think it ought to be legislated. Because after all unless you’re really young or kind of agoraphobic, it’s almost a certainty that you’ve shared a public bathroom with someone who looked like your gender but wasn’t.
What I don’t get is when the bathrooms are just a room with a sink and a toilet and yet they are gendered. Gas stations do this all the time. I was at a brewery last weekend set up like this and I couldn’t decide if it was hilarious or sad that the ‘men’s’ bathroom would be empty and a line of 3 or 4 women would be waiting to use the ‘womens’. I started making a point of asking the woman at the end of the line if she wouldn’t prefer to use the other restroom since she’d been waiting longer and that seemed to sufficiently dispel the norm.
We’re used to having every toilet in a private stall, but perhaps this wasn’t always the case? And if you’re going to lower your trousers three feet from a stranger who is doing the same thing, it’s difficult not to be aware of what sort of genitalia they have.
Wait, what? Speaking as someone who has pooped in a stall next to someone else pooping, my awareness of their genitalia has always been an assumption. Unless they’re waving their crotch under the divider at you, how are you ‘aware’ of their genitalia?
What I’m suggesting is that, perhaps, toilets have not always been placed in individual stalls. (Now, I don’t know if that’s the case, but if it is, it could, in part, explain why public bathrooms are segregated by sex. Certainly there were no stalls in the latrines in the army barracks in some military-themed movies.)
I have encountered a few mixed multi-person bathrooms, in the UK, including two in different local student union buildings (one in the bar). They seem to work fine, they’ve been there a few years now. There are (presumably, the label said so, I didn’t go to check) urinals beyond a screen at the back, and then a row of stalls. It’s a little funny seeing the moment of confusion when a person comes in for the first time, but then people just get on with it.
This, while sounds correct, actually just means everyone waits more, though in a few specific circumstances it could speed some though. It may be more fair, but that fairness means there is overall more waiting for everyone at times where all receptacles are in high demand. Having a express line actually works to everyone’s favor, which, perhaps unfortunatally, naturally defaults to men and urinals.
Now if there are unused resources in one gender’s bathroom that could be used to fill the request of the opposite gender, now that does cause unneeded waiting. But those are not typically high demand times.
I’m having a hard time coming up with a reading of this post that isn’t “It’s more important for men to not be inconvenienced at all than for women to be treated more fairly.”
And there often is unused resources: the men’s room toilets.
Well, it’s been my experience on wildland fires in base camp, there are several places around camp that have porta-potties set up. Initially, a bank of them have one larger one to accommodate disabilities. Other than that, everyone can use any one.
In reality, women firefighters insist upon making two to three of them as women only in a bank of 10-15. (There is no difference in function among any of them.) Women fire fighters want their own porta-potties because their male counterparts just can’t aim properly and splash around too much.
It also reminded me of something I haven’t encountered much lately. In some older buildings, the women’s room would be two rooms – one smaller room typically in the front that held a chair or two and a sofa, and the larger bathroom part that had the sinks and toilets.
I remember once being in mixed company when a women commented on a friend who felt sick and had to go lie down on the couch in the women’s room. You could practically hear the men’s jaws drop.
I also recently remembered that when the Equal Rights Amendment was under great discussion, one of the main arguments against its passing was that there could no longer be separate women’s rooms and men’s room. It surprised me then, and just flummoxes me now, that this was considered a reasonable rationale among many women for not passing the bill.
This result squares with a study a gifted class I was in in elementary school did with petri dishes placed in the gifted class’s restrooms: The girls’ room had more bacterial growth than the boys’ room.
I know and while I agree that it is unfair, and also that things could go faster if we can reallocate unused resources, from a computer modeling class project it was more efficient in that everyone waited less with a express line when all resources were occupied.
Not doing so was equivalent to saying yes it’s now more fair but now everyone needs to wait longer, even those who would have waited the longest before, now have to wait longer, but it’s more fair.
As to your last point “And there often is unused resources: the men’s room toilets.”, that is false in high demand times as toilets are used as urinals.
Only once in my memory have I been in a situation where there was a line for the men’s room, but not for the women’s. That was at a Joe Satriani concert. My husband reported that not only were the men using toilets as urinals, they were using the sinks as urinals too.
But I want to point out that often there are two kinds of waiting involved, the direct one where one waits to get into the restroom to use the facilities, and the indirect one where one has to wait for another person to use the facilities. Say a heterosexual couple has just gotten off an airplane and, as is common, both need to use the restroom. It’s nice if you can avoid taking your carry-on baggage, coats, etc. into the restroom. So person A hangs out with their possessions while person B uses the restroom, then they switch. If there is a line for the women’s room (and at O’Hare, there practically always is), the man ends up waiting for a longer period.
As someone who cleaned public bathrooms for years as a regular duty at a couple of different jobs I can confirm that this is very much the case. Both in the sense that the women’s room took longer to clean each time and because the worst experiences in cleaning public toilets were in the women’s room.
My theory is that women who urinate don’t have an easy-to-aim nozzle for delivery, women have menstruation to deal with, and women often spend a little extra time fixing makeup/hair/etc. And they’re more likely to have babies to change. Combine having more to do and messier and/or more complicated tasks to perform, and it’s inevitable that you’d leave more of a mess.
That being said I prefer having unisex bathrooms with just private toilet stalls. It’s more efficient and less complicated.
That wouldn’t be a problem if they hired [German](Well, it’s been my experience on wildland fires in base camp, there are several places around camp that have porta-potties set up. Initially, a bank of them have one larger one to accommodate disabilities. Other than that, everyone can use any one.) men.
No, women have a perfectly easy to aim way to urinate, the problem comes when you get the princesses who are too scared to let their butts touch a toilet seat, they hover & piss all over the seat, and don’t clean it up because they are too high and mighty to deign to touch a toilet.
