h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After chatting with various people who don't fit neatly into genders I'm confused. I would really not be concerned with women going into the mens toilet, but women seem to be concerned with men going into the ladies. Why do we have different toilets for men and women anyway?

Why not just have one set of toilets with proper cubicles that give enough privacy for everyone. So no gaps under doors or flimsy partions, just enough privacy for everyone.

If men & women shared toilets, you'd work out pretty quickly that our farts don't actually smell like flowers*. And we can't have that.

Deb

* but you didn't hear it from me!

Having lived with a woman for 14 years now (not counting my sister and Mum when i was a kid)...

I think I had already worked that out...



The obvious answer is that whilst most people probably don't care, it is those that do that make the difference.

We would have to expunge the communal slash urinal from the toilets and also, no cheap partitions and gaps to the floor? You mean someone's prepared to spend more money on public lavs?

It is strange that men are supposed to be completely happy about weeing with their backs to the door, so anyone could creep up on them during this particularly vulnerable activity; and of course they have to perform this right next to other complete strangers.
However, urinals surely take up far less space than cubicles, and probably use less water than WCs.

Maybe partly because many men's toilets are a bit rank? Some people have aiming problems, I gather.

Not that all ladies toilets are lovely, either.

Not sure about the idea that urinals use less water; All the ones near me, in the pubs round here, have ancient giant err whatever the bits are called, taht fill up with water, on the wall... and there must be gallons going down each time it fills, then empties; I am also pretty sure they don't turn these off over night, so it just flushes all night through even after the pub is closed

I thought all toilets were unitsex? oh... that explains a few things

An amusing game is watching the doors to the ladies and gents loos, in a gay bar/pub, quite why they bother having a 'ladies' and a 'gents', is a mystory, as it seems roughly equal amounts of each sex/geneder, going into each of the two toilets err... not that I spend an inordinate amoutn of time sitting looking at who's going into the loos in gay bars, honne.... OK I'll stop digging that hole now

You are 2 funny, 2 legs!

I think the only unisex bathrooms I have seen are the kind that are single occupancy. In other words, only one person goes into the room at a time and the picture on the outside of the door is of a woman and a man. But while you are in there there is no one else of either sex in there with you, unless you invite them in. Which COULD be entirely innocent so wipe those grins off your faces.

deb, more men than women have engaged in sex crimes so I guess that is why I would not feel safe in a room where I pulled down my pants if there was a strange man in there. Also, I am pretty sure I would be very nervous about allowing my little girl to go into a unisex bathroom.

That's interesting. Because if I go into a toilet cubicle I feel that I am in a room on my own. Although there might be a small gap under the door it feels like I'm in a room alone.

So for you it feels like you are in a room with others, even though there are cubicles? That makes sense.

Surely the easiest answer, is to teach women to use urinals
The greatest adoption of the use of a unisex toilet facility was that which I saw, and I believe is still in position, at a rail station.
Origional set-up was two 'toilets', one for the men, one for the women, each one imagines, having either multiple cubicles for the girls, in the case of the female loos, and the other having cubacles and urines, for the boys toilet.
They did away with these, both.
and put in a single, single cubicle unisex toilet.
The the queues on a Friday night when its either the last train leaving, or the late train arriving in, are fabulus

What really annoys me is, and is quite common in America, is when someplace has two single occupant restrooms that are arbitrarily labeled male and female. While I have some problems with it I can understand the rational behind large restrooms being sex-segregated, but single occupant toilets should really be unisex.

Interestingly, many establishments which had two
single occupancy toilets, each labelled for one
of the two more popular genders, have recently
replaced the signage with the dual-usage labels.

No doubt the arbitrary assignment of one for men
and the other for women was often a cause for a
lot of unnecessary suffering - and not a little bit of
temptation to risk being chastised for taking full
advantage of the empty but 'incorrect' room.

Unisex rooms are often cleaner than one expects and
I suspect there is some lingering self-consciousness
that someone of the other sex may be the next user,
which encourages a certain discretion and care
not seen in larger gender specific washrooms where
it is all too easy to assume that others of one's
own gender will 'understand', or at least tolerate
the bad habits of their own kind.

That said, the urinal is the only way for a man to pee
unless he is willing to sit or kneel with the bowl.


~jwf~

The smell, the fear of rape and the fact that having a specific one for men means we men need to queue less.

Well my mother-in-law remembers visiting her old aunts in Normandy who belonged in an age when/where women wore ground length dresses and no knickers. From time to time these country dwellers would just stay rooted to the spot with their legs slightly apart and relieve themselves. But urinating for "more modern" women is must more complicated than that, and, as we are presumably talking about public toilets, probably most of the 'loo breaks' are a question of having a pee..

Surely most people probably prefer handling 'real business' in a familiar spot, probably a vestige from evolutionary times for being "caught in the act' either defecating or having sex is a time of vulnerability in case of attack. "Being caught with your pants down".

I have not actually inspected the 'Ladies' in the Royal Albert Hall, but given the symmetry of the place I would imagine that there is an equal surface area given to the Ladies and the Gents. Nevertheless at the intervals in concerts, when there is peak demand for loos the queues for the Ladies' loos stretch right out into the corridors, while there is no queue for the Gents.

But in my wife's university campus in Dijon there were unisex loos, as there are in our French Camping Club 'blocs', with a row of cubicles and and enclosed area with urinals. On the other hand, where there are separate wash-rooms and showers, those in the Gents are often invaded by teenage girls who refuse to wait on other teenage girls in the 'loo'. I do not know what proportion of women carry a "tool kit" in their handbags these days in order to "powder their nose" before making another entrance.. But that university campus was the Sixties when France was still a poor and spartan country. And our Camping Club is not actually open to the general public, so perhaps they do not count as 'public loos'.

And the different standards of cleanliness and hygiene between the sexes has already come up on the thread. I recall when in 1970 our Boys Secondary Modern mixed with the local Girls equivalent, and the boys learned very quickly not to say anything at all about questions of ablution , laundry etc, for the Girls were appalled at such filthy savages. French surveys regularly feature the fact that public loos, handles and other surfaces, are often contaminated by human faeces that is only forensically detectable. But then they rarely have loo paper!

Fortunately France has a large surface area of land and the French know how to use it. It is probably safer than the public toilets.

Cass

Despite common belief to the contry, the womens toilets are the dirtiest, and suffer the most vandalism, I have been informed by several, independant whitnesses, involved, in two differnt countys in the UK, who's responsibility as part of their work, involved having to clean both male and female toilet facilities, in pubs/bars/hotels/nightclubs.
handdryers ripped off the walls, toilet ceramics broken, toilets stuffed with toilet rolls, paper towels, and then flushed to flood the room, broken glasses and bottles stuffed into the loo, then covered with paper towels, to try and 'catch out' the clenaer, smeared excriment, all reported only in the female lavatorys...
Which really does seem contry to what one would expect
Mind, the yuckiest thing in the world has to be walking into the toilets, only to realise that one is paddling in multiple varities of urine err, in a male toilet I might add
I've never had a comment whenever I've just used the female loos which I've done, admitidly only a few times

"Why not just have one set of toilets with proper cubicles that give enough privacy for everyone. So no gaps under doors or flimsy partions, just enough privacy for everyone."

In one of my workplaces there were exactly that, but after complaints the cubicles were arbitrarily assigned a gender in the ratio of 2:1 female and male.

The exceptions were the accessible cubicles, which are still unisex.

So hands up - are there any of you who *wouldn't* just use a vacant single-occupancy bathroom, regardless of what it said on the door?

Of course the biological difference between the sexes is not limited to the male possession of a tube designed for quick and effective action.

There is also to the fact that for a significant period of their lives women have to cope with the menstrual cycle.. As a male teacher in an all girls school I was struck by the dismissive reaction of my female colleagues to me saying that a school rule that forbad any permission being granted to teenage girls "to be excused" was difficult for me to enforce. I was well aware of our daughter's difficulties in coping with a rather unpredictable situation.

In fact, as I observed on an old-school site recently, when I first taught "girls only" c1974 I was often told that a pupil was absent "because a cousin had come to stay".. When this happened with regularity I commented that this did not seem a good excuse for so many people to miss out on their schooling. One of the girls quietly let me know what this was code for..

Since the mid-seventies women have moved into a more equal position in the workplace and public life, so the "way ahead" is probably for more exclusive provision for women rather than more Unisex toilets.

The Feminist movement did rather embrace Professor Higgins "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" theme and demand that "females" should be treated just like males, when they really should have argued for the "feminisation" of a Western-macho culture: not just a widening of the "Rat Race" male struggle for the survival of the fittest culture, that really only applies to the males of the species, in so far as it applies at all.

Cass

In Brazil, people are encouraged to avoid using loos, in order to help conserve water:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEulkK7SpRs

Brazil needs to save water?

It doesn't strike me as a particularly arid country. Terrible infrastructure I guess...?

Well "loo" does come from the French "l'eau".. But it was the dirty water.Hence the London tradition of shouting "Gardez loo" when throwing the contents of the chamber pot out into the street, where there was very sensibly an central gutter, well placed to channel all the water into a good flow to wash it all away..

But before Joseph Bramah's "Water Closet" some big houses had a "Soil Closet". The gardener would carry sacks of dry soil up into the roof space. The people who used the toilet would then pull a lever that allowed the soil to fall and carry away the ecrement down a shoot into the garden. The gardener would then take it away to make manure, when there was a pile.

And the problem with flushing is that it is normally done with drinking water, and there are costs involved in producing water fit for human consumption. (I have just washed the car, as usual, using our captured rain water, a great asset that people used to use extensively before industrialization. More or less free. And pretty abundant here in these "Global Warming" days.

Cass