The nearby men’s room had a fireplace
A few years ago Soraya Chemaly pointed out that very mundane bit of everyday sexism, the long line to get into the women’s restroom.
Faced with a long restroom line that spiraled up and around a circular stairwell at a recent museum visit, I opted not to wait. Why do we put up with this? This isn’t a minor pet peeve, but a serious question. Despite years of “potty parity” laws, women are still forced to stand in lines at malls, schools, stadiums, concerts, fair grounds, theme parks, and other crowded public spaces. This is frustrating, uncomfortable, and, in some circumstances, humiliating. It’s also a form of discrimination, as it disproportionately affects women.
After counting the women, I tweeted, “Dear @britishmuseum there are FIFTY women and girls standing in line for the loo while the men’s room has zero line #everydaysexism.” Immediately, people responded with the suggestion that women use the men’s room. But even more responses were defensive, along the lines of “How on god’s green earth did you arrive at the conclusion that this was sexist?”
Let me count the ways.
Women need to use bathrooms more often and for longer periods of time because: we sit to urinate (urinals effectively double the space in men’s rooms), we menstruate, we are responsible for reproducing the species (which makes us pee more), we continue to have greater responsibility for children (who have to use bathrooms with us), and we breastfeed (frequently in grotty bathroom stalls). Additionally, women tend to wear more binding and cumbersome clothes, whereas men’s clothing provides significantly speedier access. But in a classic example of the difference between surface “equality” and genuine equity, many public restrooms continue to be facilities that are equal in physical space, while favoring men’s bodies, experiences, and needs.
Everyday is every day – needing to pee while away from home does tend to occur several times every day for people who work, go to school, do sport, socialize, shop, visit theaters and libraries…the list is endless. New building design is starting to catch up but there are still quite a few old buildings around.
In the United States, for example, women in the House of Representatives didn’t get a bathroom near the Speaker’s Lobby until 2011. Prior to that, the nearest women’s room was so far away that the time it took women to get to the bathroom and back exceeded session break times. The nearby men’s room, meanwhile, had a fireplace, a shoeshine stand, and televised floor proceedings.
Close by and a fireplace.
Additionally, old building codes required more space for men, as women’s roles were restricted almost entirely to the private sphere. That reality has often confused the “is” with the “ought.” As scholar Judith Plaskow noted in a paper on toilets and social justice, “Not only does the absence of women’s bathrooms signify the exclusion of women from certain professions and halls of power, but it also has functioned as an explicit argument against hiring women or admitting them into previously all-male organizations.” She cites examples, including Yale Medical School and Harvard Law School, both of which claimed that a lack of public facilities made it impossible for women to be admitted as students.
We’d love to but we just ain’t got the terlets.
And when things are fixed…men complain.
When spaces are changed so that everyone experiences equal waiting time, backlash has been quick. In 2004, for example, new rules resulted in men waiting in line to use the bathrooms at Soldier Field in Chicago. They complained until five women’s rooms were converted to men’s. The result was that, once again, women’s wait times doubled. No protests have yielded a commensurate response to reduce them. That women are socialized to quietly deal with physical discomfort, pain, and a casual disregard for their bodily needs is overlooked in the statements, “No one is making them wait,” or “Why don’t they demand changes?”
Yeah, why don’t women do more demanding? It’s not as if they ever get punished for doing that.
At my university, the Engineering Center was built in 1969 and only men’s restrooms were available. This included the office tower, which is eight stories high. It remained this way until the 1980’s, I believe, by which time there were women Engineering faculty with offices in that tower. They eventually turned every other floor into women’s restrooms, which is not exactly an ideal solution because there was one restroom per floor, including the sprawling three-floor main complex.
I should add that the office tower restrooms were small, with only one stall per. So if a woman found the stall occupied on the eighth floor, she’d have to go down to the sixth floor. If that were occupied, then down to the fourth floor, and so on and so forth.
This is really just another way of telling women they don’t belong there…after all, these women have toilets at home, right? Probably not too long a walk from their kitchen or the nursery where they should be rocking babies.
But I think it’s really just the fact that men have tended to design the buildings, and new buildings have for a long time been built on the model of already existing buildings, and the idea is, if we slap a “women” sign on this restroom or that, remove the urinals and (maybe) put in one or two more stalls, then that should suffice. Until women start designing women’s restrooms, and are given the go-ahead to make it a bit larger than the men’s room, this won’t change.
As ways to fix things go, making the men start waiting in lines that are as bad as the women had been waiting in deserves protest – not on fairness grounds, it’s doing fine there, but on the grounds of not making people suffer. If lines are bad, get more bathroom space. If lines are bad for one sex and not the other, get more bathroom space that’s accessible by at least the under-served sex.
This should not be hard. We don’t have to do social justice stupidly – it helps no good cause.
Waits for toilets at places like Soldier Field – a football stadium – are always going to happen because they hold so many people and they rush for the toilets all at the same time. Building enough so that there would be zero waiting would be grotesquely wasteful. What Soraya mentioned was changing spaces so that everyone experiences equal waiting time. Surely in a waiting-inevitable situation that’s the fairest way to go?
The “they” who rush for the toilets are the people, not the places like Soldier Field.
If Soldier Field wanted to use the men’s room, I’d absolutely let it cut in line ahead of me!
Equality of waiting time is certainly a reasonable goal, agreed. I’m just saying that, if the “fix” directly makes things worse than they were before for the previously better-off party, there will be blowback, and a better way to handle it is a reasonable thing to ask.
It certainly will be a lot harder in the case of a place with intense bathroom activity at particular times – just switching some bathrooms is going to make things clearly worse for men when they are also experiencing (noticeable) waits when they do go. I did have in mind places without that problem. But still, even there – putting in additional bathrooms instead of simply switching them will mean a cost that’s not going to tick off the men so badly.
It will come off as a bit much in the way of tender concern for the privileged class, granted. And when we have to charge the costs of fairness to someone, charging it to the people who’ve been benefiting from the unfairness is obvious and appropriate. But still – sometimes, with a bit of thought, we may not have to charge them, or charge them so much or so obnoxiously, and when we don’t, it’ll make for an easier swallow politically and is simply kinder.
My wife used to organize a large genealogy conference which drew more women than men, and a mostly middle-aged/older crowd. Almost every year, when some of the larger talks let out at about the same time, I’d be at a urinal when a woman’s voice announced something to the effect that the lines at the ladies’ were very long, the men’s was now unisex, “and don’t worry, we’ve all been married so we know what one looks like, and we’re coming in.” No man ever objected while I was in a liberated loo, and the general air at the washstands was quite cordial.
That doesn’t fit with my experience. For some reason, whenever you add something to benefit women, when men don’t need the same because they are already fine, the men get really, really annoyed. It doesn’t have to cost them anything. It doesn’t have to inconvenience them at all. It only has to be targeted toward the women, and they perceive it as unfair.
I don’t know if that’s how it is everywhere, but it certainly is that way where I live, and everywhere I’ve ever lived. And the liberals complain just as much as the conservatives, because they perceive it as “unfair”, and giving an advantage to one sex. Never mind that it isn’t, it is merely removing a disadvantage, the perception is still there.
Pieter B, I see the dichotomy a lot at plays. Women buy more play tickets than men, and often make up well more than half the audience, but they have no more bathroom space, even though women need a bit more space even for the same amount of women. During an intermission, there is a very limited (10 minute in most of the US; I think London often has 20) time to use the bathroom, and once they close the doors, people don’t get back in (at least not in the theatres I attend). So as a woman, unless I am literally the first out the door, I stay in my seat and try not to think about it if I need to go to the bathroom, because it is extremely difficult to get back in time for the second act. There has never been an announcement about the men’s room; if you did that here, everyone would start melting down, and the local paper would carry scary, screamy headlines about men and women in the same bathroom, what is the world coming to, dogs and cats living together, chaos. And yes, they would hear, because someone would be upset and angry and would go telling the paper how awful this is, these liberal theatre folks that are so decadent that they bathroom together.
I have enjoyed (albeit with some wry sadness) the ready availability of washroom facilities when attending STEM events and atheism/humanism/skepticism events (not to mention model railroad events).
That ‘reason’ is loss of unearned privilege. If everyone gets two scoops, how will they know they’re The Best? They can only feel special and superior if they have people to feel special and superior to, and the lowliest and poorest of white men can still feel himself part of the elite, and identify with billionaires, if he has non-white men and every single woman to look down on. Humiliating women by making them queue for facilities is just a part of the constant reminders of his superiority.
^ True. Sad and depressing and true.