cmsellers wrote:I was out in Hill Country recently, where the majority of public toilets seem to have the setup of a pair of sex-segregated, single-occupancy restrooms. As I mentioned earlier today, this is a pet peeve of mine. I
get the arguments for sex-segregated multiple-occupancy facilities, even if I think they're specious. However they cannot possibly apply to single-occupancy restrooms i and I cannot even take a guess at what the logic behind them is.
This increases lines, and that brings me to another issue with long lines in restrooms: women's rooms. I grew up in a jurisdiction which tried to address this with "potty parity" laws requiring 3:1 ratios of toilets for women and men. This sometimes led to absurd results, as I
described previously.
As a practical matter, this often seems to result in women's rooms with multiple stalls and single-occupancy men's rooms. (I know of at least one case where a 2:2 toilet facility was converted to 1:3 during renovations.) This means that if there's long lines, the waits for the men's and women's toilets are about the same. But when there's not a wait, the men's room is a bottleneck which depends on the occupant, which means that I can be waiting for over 20 minutes for the men's room while half a dozen women are in and out of the ladies'. (And of course being a single-stall bathroom, the occupant of the men's room is very often a woman. This scenario is the only time I get annoyed at women using the men's room.)
I likewise recall absurd scenario where an event had about three times as many female attendees as male attendees. So the organizers alternated the men's room between a men's room and a women's room, meaning that while the average wait times were the same, as a woman you'd be waiting about 15-25 minutes, while as a guy you could be waiting anywhere between 5 and 40. If you really need to go and they just converted the men's room to a women's room, it doesn't matter that your average wait time is the same.
As
the Wikipedia article on the subject notes, when you have unequal numbers of women and men, this can lead to absurd results, as at a stadium in Tennessee. But attempts to balance by the number of men and women can also be ineffective,
as another stadium found out when they based their toilet ratio on ticket-holders, since men made up a greater share of ticket-holders than they did of attendees.
Avi would say that the system of sex-segregated bathrooms is discriminatory, unworkable, and illegal. And I think I agree, but looking at the moral panic over
transwomen using women's bathrooms, I fear that enforcing a rule desegregating restrooms is even more unworkable. The best case scenario is that large parts of the country people would remember which room was which, and men will be kept from the women's room by social pressure and possibly even threats of violence.
Since the issue seems to be entirely with men using restrooms with women, and women using restrooms with men doesn't pose a corresponding problem, we could have multi-stall "women's" and "unisex" rooms and hope that enough women are willing use the former men's room to equalize wait times where applicable. This might even happen naturally in the mass civil disobedience scenario I envision if the courts were to desegregate restrooms. However setting aside the issue of blantant illegality, it raises another issue.
Stalls in the men's room are fewer than in the women's, and in smaller bathrooms there's often only one stall in the men's room which presents a serious bottleneck. And there are some people who use the men's room who also use stalls exclusively. Some of these people urinate sitting down, which requires it. You could argue that not using the urinal is a choice (though so are women who don't avoid long lines by using the men's room), but it's not for transmen and as an intersex person, if my hypospadia hadn't been "corrected" it wouldn't be for me either. Since I don't have good stream control standing up it arguably still isn't. Moreover many people who are merely uncomfortable using urinals are autistic, which suggests that this would also be discriminatory.
So what do we do? One thought I have is mandating both integrated facilities, and mandating that every facility have at least one single-stall restroom. However aside from adding an extra government regulation (something I don't like doing), this would place the burden of lines disproportionately on people with shy bladders: those people who absolutely cannot use multiple-occupancy restrooms at all. And most of the people who
choose to wait in the single-occupancy line would be women, leading to a sexist
outcome.
Ultimately, I don't have a
good solution, but I feel the compelled to start this thread nonetheless. Seeing 3:1 toilet ratios being touted by liberals without a whisper of dissent pisses me off, seeing conservative lawmakers try to ban transwomen from women's bathrooms pisses me off, and seeing sex-segregated single-stall bathrooms pisses me off.
You know, this got me thinking about an article I read a while back where a woman was making out that women waiting in lines for the toilet was a form of sexism, as it disproportionatly affects women and even if an equal ammount of space was given toilet-wise to both the menz and the womenz (like the situation she was describing in a museaum) it was still discrimination as women need to use the toilet more as they tend to have more needs to use it i.e. menstration, breast feeding, bladder issues during pregnancy etc. So being given the same space as the lads still counted as discrimination as they should be given more spaces for it to be fair.
Which just has me reeling given the amount of times I've seen places where women are given riddiculously more than we get, like I was shooting in a college recently and we had to do a scene in a toilet, so we went to use the lads and it was just this tiny space with only a single bowl and sink and that was it, but given how small it was we were having trouble filming, so we went to look in the ladies room next door (THE COLLEGE WAS CLOSED BEFORE YOU ASK, no students around, what kind of perverts do you take us for?) and BLOODY HELL, the size of it! Multiple cubicles, line of sinks and a God Damn Sofa, THEY GOT A SOFA!!!! Or another time I was at a club and there was just one men's room. Again, just a single toilet, so there were loads of us standing in a corridor waiting for our turn as girls were walking past us to use their facilities, which again included multiple cubicles and mirrors and sinks and chairs potted bloody plants, and we're all like "what the fuck? Unfair!"
Not that I'm saying that's always the case or anything of course, there's obviously multitudes of variations, it's just the narrative that women are being singled out as being hard done by for having equal access when plenty of places give them way more access, plus her whole tone was just that whole waiting in lines was an indignity women had to suffer, as though queing up for toilets is unheard of for men.
But having said all that, hey if women by and large do have greater needs for space and time for toileting, then I suppose that's fair enough if a business wants to cater for that to avoid queing. I mean I don't agree with any system that tries to enforce rules or laws on what toilet facilities a private business has to use (non-private businesses like schools or hospitals or what have you being a different matter of course). I personally think that what toilet facilities you wanna install should be entirely the businesses decision themselves.
And that's my real take on all of this, namely it'd be the business itself's choice what to do. If you have a coffee shop or whatever, and you don't want to have toilets there, or you only want unisex toilets there or if you only want men's rooms or only want ladies rooms or twice as much for one gender as the other or you want your toilet to be just a hole in the floor everyone has to squat over simultaneously etc. then that IMO should be your choice not a governments, and if customers have a problem with this, like the issues being described here they can not give them their business and bad mouth said business to anyone who'll listen. And given that it's in the best interest of any business to accomodate as many people as possible they'd be wise to listen, but if they don't wanna, more fool them and hopefully they'll lose out to a competitor that will fill that need, but at the end of the day I think it should be their decision not a law that's forced upon them.
sunglasses wrote:As for the bathroom situation, I've said before I've gone to the men's when the women's line is too long. I'm not the only one.
Oh hardly. Pretty much every time I've gone to a nightclub there's been two or three girls who'll come into the men's room with a "sorry lads, ladie's room is full, don't mind do youse?" With nerry a complaint in my experience. And ... I hate to be that guy but .... actually no, I LOVE being that guy, if I was to have done the opposite, stroll into the ladies room with a "sorry ladies, the Jacks is full, don't mind if I use your's do you?" I'd be thrown out of the place, and I'd be lucky if I didn't get a kicking from the bouncers or have the gaurds called on me.
But then again, you can hardly blame the women for taking advantadge of this double-standard, if us lads don't kick up a stink about it, why wouldn't they do it? I would if I was in their shoes.
I like Marc's idea about the single occupancy toilets. But those take up a bit of space. I like the idea of a large unisex restroom area with urinals in single closed off spaces like toilets, but with a sign that indicates they're urinals only. Or perhaps an area that just states: Urinals only, and another area that states: Toilets only, and perhaps a 3rd area that indicates a "family bathroom" which would include a changing area.
From talking to people whove worked in facilities with customer toilets that they've had to clean up- swimming pools, fast food restauarants etc. I think this overestimates how much power signs have on people's actions ... or basic human dignity. I've been told by a few that having to clean up shit and piss and tampons and underwear from right in the middle of floor, not just in a cubicle mind you, but right there in the middle of the actual bathroom, as though someone was just like 'screw this having to use a toilet bowl malarkey, I NEED TO POO NOW, to hell with society's rules ... and toilet paper!' is apparantly not an uncommon occurance.
Takes all sorts I suppose.
Not just yet, I'm still tender from before.