Every restroom/bathroom/toilet/jacks here in a pub or restaurant, the door to the men’s room is usually open while the door to the women’s is usually closed. Any reason for this? Considering men have their penuses out publicly while women get stalls it seems strange to me.
Its usually a security thing. You will also see the stall doors off their hinges in bars a lot too. It is a combination of preventing sex in the bathroom and fights.
So they don’t accidently cross the streams. Crossing the streams would be Bad.
In all fairness, they should leave the door to the women’s room open too.
I don’t know why this is, but I wish they would stop. The best burgers in this town are at a little shitheel bar, but you have to get past the smell of urine and stale beer to enjoy it.
Considering the number of people I notice not washing their damn hands before leaving, I’m glad when the door is open so I don’t have to grab the germ-infested handle to open it on the way out. I’m not a germophobe but the handles on restroom doors completely squick me out for that reason.
All you people must live in or near hell. I never see that. Mens rooms have equally closed doorways.
Perhaps Wisconsin is heaven.
So the rent-a-cop can sneak in silently in time to stop any tea-room action.
Even with the door open, most men’s rooms are arranged such that you still can’t see any of the urinals from outside the door. So that shouldn’t be an issue. In fact, many don’t even have a door at all, just a dogleg wall.
For the OP’s question, my guess would be that it’s just a room that people go in and out of often, so it’s a matter of convenience to just leave the door open. The question, then, is just why the women’s door is usually closed.
I’ve been in men’s restrooms that have only one toilet (sit-down variety) each, no urinal. In some restaurants that economize in this way, the practice is that the door is left open when unoccupied. When a guy enters, he closes and locks the door (if it isn’t self-locking) behind him. Thus, a patron can tell at a glance if the room is occupied or not.
I’ve never seen anything like what the OP describes, except that in large public bathrooms, in places like airports and stadiums, there might be no actual door; instead, a small L- or U-shaped vestibule provides a visual barrier between the urinals and general passersby outside.
The part about the individual stalls not having doors is surprising since I assume that reference is being made to bathrooms intended to be used by adults. We see this often in America in the boys’ bathrooms in public schools, but once we reach college and the adult world, it’s practically unheard of in any public men’s room big enough to need stalls. I can only think of one exception, on the lower level of a library at UCLA. When I was a student, from 1982 to 1984 there were about ten stalls without doors. I still live in the neighborhood and use the library; a few years later I saw that they had installed doors but they were very high on the bottom and very low on the top. I suppose they had been having some sort of issue with guys having a surreptitious rendezvous, and they still wanted to be able to see easily if there was more than one person in a stall.
I don’t know what the OP is talking about either.
I know what the OP is talking about, but I’ve also seen the ladies’ room open in the same way in some places. (Most of the time both are closed though.)
I’ve wondered about this for a long time. Back when I was in nursery school, the girl’s bathroom door was always closed when someone was in it. The boys could leave their door open. It made no sense then and it makes no sense now.
A few reasons come to my mind:
Janitor props open door to clean - no one ever closes it;
Ventilation - some bathrooms have no windows or working fans;
As above, to prevent…er, excessive privacy (sex, drugs, fighting, whatever);
Owner got tired of repairing and repainting the door;
Contrariwise, maybe the hinges or latch got broken, and never got repaired;
As above, the door only gets closed when someone goes in.
This would presumably apply equally to the women’s bathrooms too.
I have seen this very thing many times before.
I think it a combo of three things;
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In a pub or a bar, if trouble breaks out in the bathroom (where the drunken hammerheads are packed into a small space together) you want to hear it as soon as possible, before your expensive fixtures, (which break easier than you might think), get trashed.
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Ventilation, even if there is a window getting more air into the stinkier men’s room is always a good idea. Plus it keeps people from smoking any substances and less likely to conduct illegal activities if the door is open.
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Big drunken college student types can misjudge the brute force required to open the door or find simple amusement in kicking it open etc. Again, this can take it’s toll on the fixtures. Largely you want your bouncers watching the crowds not the bathrooms. But it is it’s own little closed off room, and, if you want them to keep an eye on goings on there, you have to give them a fighting chance.
I think the myth that men’s rooms are smellier/dirtier than the women’s has been disproven here (and elsewhere) numerous times.
I thought it was to prevent Larry Craig type stuff. I don’t think ventilation would be a reason.
I wish more women’s rooms had open/no doors–when there’s a line (most always), keeping the door open is pain. And nothing beats the I have to go so bad, only to get the door open and find 10 women crammed into the bathroom behind the door.
Gah.
For single-occupancy bathrooms, it’s almost certainly the ‘let you know it’s unoccupied’ factor.
And for multi-user bathrooms, I’d imagine that a large part of it has to do with a significant lack of male modesty. I mean, hell, it’s not like there are creepy chicks who are sneaking in to check out guys taking a leak, right? But the converse is a known phenomenon.