Cite?
It just seems a natural consequence of the difference in the organs used for urination.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Are you saying that my penis somehow changes my urine to be smellier?
I work in an office building that is attached to a hotel. The office building bathrooms are disgusting messes, so I don’t use them. I walk down the hall to the nice, clean, large hotel lobby bathroom. On the way, I pass the women’s room, which is always closed. However, every time I arrive at the men’s room, the door is always open. Every time, propped open with a little wooden wedge.
Every single time I go in, whether for #1 or #2, I kick the wedge so the door will close. The bathroom has 5 stalls and 5-6 urinals, separated by little privacy walls, and 6 sinks. There’s hardly ever anyone in there. Of course, it’s all marble, so it’s echo-ey, and there’s often not a fan running or ambient music playing to mask the unmistakeable bathroom noises.
I’m not particularly modest, but I’m just not crazy about taking my daily crap in an echo-ey room where the sound will be directed through the open door into the hotel lobby. I don’t think the people in the lobby are interested in it either.
If I go back later in the day, sho’nuff, the door’s open again and of course the women’s room is closed. I don’t get it.
One word: hovering.
The door to the men’s room in my office area is almost always propped open. I have no idea why, but it seems like some people have door war, as it will open or closed multiple times a day.
It’s in a spot where smells or sounds shouldn’t bother anybody working, but I see no reason for it be open. But I just leave it the way I found it, it doesn’t bother me.
No kidding. One day I was in the local city transit bus depot, using the lower-level men’s room, where I had to take a crap that I already knew was going to be of the noisy and noisome variety. Of course, the door was wide open — maintained in that position by some built-in mechanical apparatus which lacked any readily-apparent means to disable it — and to make matters worse there were two women in business suits who had for some reason decided that the hallway immediately outside of the restrooms was the ideal place to stand and have a lengthy business discussion.
I feel like I can answer this with some authority. I’ve worked constantly in a handful or bars over the last 13 years or so and for the last 2 have had bars as my clients meaning I was in several hundred of them every week. I know what goes through the owner/managers heads and the process that leads to this. Here’s what happens.
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The late-night cleaning crew comes in in the wee hours and props open both the men’s and women’s restroom doors. They have to mop all the floors and generally use some pretty powerful stuff for the job. Propping the doors open makes the mopping easier and it vents out those bleach fumes. They leave the doors open when they leave to further vent the cleaning solution smell and to promote drying of the floors and any puddles in and around the fixtures.
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The manager/bartender/cook, whoever comes in first, goes through the process of getting everything set up. That usually entails getting the lighting adjusted to business levels and setting up all the chairs/stools. Since the bathrooms don’t generally don’t require any set up and are usually tucked away out of sight the set-up guy pretty much ignores them.
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The first customers arrive and stumble towards the bathroom. Almost all women arrive and see a door propped open and close it behind them out of modesty. Most men see an open door and don’t even take notice of it, they walk past and do their business.
That accounts for some of the occasions where you see a Men’s room open and a Women’s room closed, it’s just a combination of a lack of male modesty and laziness.
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Some bars will actively prop open the doors as the day goes on because bathrooms can be overly hot and smelly. However, due to fear of lawsuits and the general consensus that women are more modest and protective of their bathroom they’ll only do that to the men’s room. Compounding this bias is that the vast majority of bouncers and bus boys are men and therefore they are able to step in a prop open a men’s room door while they would avoid a women’s.
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Men’s rooms are often smaller than women’s room due to the fact that urinals have a small footprint and because there’s no pressure to have a large mirror and vanity area inside. In that case there’s a sense of claustrophobia in many men’s rooms and opening a door goes a long ways.
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Bars typically favor men by a factor of 2 to 1 over women and as such the men’s rooms get at least twice as much use. The demand combined with the smaller overall size noted above creates a need for a long queue that will often extend out of the door. In many arrangements it’s difficult to open and close a door where there’s a line on either side of it, so having the door propped open solved that congestion issue.
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In some rowdier places security is an issue in the men’s room, but I’d wager that this is the minority. If there’s fighting or drug use going on a open door won’t do much to change that, but I’ve little doubt that some places prop a door open to fight it. Also it makes it less likely that someone would drink to the point of vomiting without being seen and ejected.
It’s true that men’s rooms are generally no stinkier or dirtier than a women’s and there are plenty of crowded women’s rooms with long lines, but the modesty of women and the fear of a potential legal situation on the bar’s part means that an open door policy isn’t going to happen on both sides.
Personally I’m a big fan of a propped open men’s room door. It saves me the hassle of opening it, it helps keep the bathroom cool, dry and odor free and it’s keeps the drunken assholes in check.