5 for us, 1 for you
Welcome to the urinals, women.
The Lyric Hammersmith offers “all gender” toilets.
The Lyric Hammersmith has been criticised for leaving female theatregoers “uncomfortable” with their gender-inclusive lavatories which feature five urinals and one cubicle.
What’s “gender-inclusive” about having five urinals and one cubicle? Even leaving out, for the sake of argument, the fact that women don’t want to be in a room with a line of men pissing into urinals, why does Lyric Hammersmith think five men attend its plays to every one woman? Why five for men and one for women? How is that “gender-inclusive”?
The London theatre claims that it provides a range of facilities “to meet the needs of all the individuals who use our building”.
Why five for men and one for women?
A spokeswoman for the theatre said: “The Lyric Hammersmith Theatre is inclusive and welcoming to all. We provide a range of lavatory facilities to meet the needs of all the individuals who use our building.
How exactly is a room with five urinals and one cubicle “inclusive and welcoming to all”?
“These include gender specific, all gender, private accessible and changing places facilities. Our all-gender toilets were introduced in 2018 as part of our strategy for inclusivity and equality.”
How does five for men and one for women do that?
Yeah, that makes it pretty obvious it is about the men pretending to be women, not the women pretending to be men.
Not even dividers between urinals so that men can shield themselves if they want to be discreet. This is just ridiculous.
I can’t imagine how a woman would feel forced stand in line to wait for the stall.
Let’s say there are exactly the same number of men and women attending the theatre, even though I suspect the theatre-going public leans towards female. Men urinate in about half the time women do due to not having to partially disrobe and sit down, leading to a massive difference in queue times for toilets even when equal space is given to each sex, but here we have five times the facilities for men than for women. The net effect is about ten times the throughput for men. And imagine if a single one of them has a medical problem requiring them to sit to urinate, or is too fussy to stand at the urinal, or wants a shit…!
I guarantee the designer was male and didn’t think for a second about women. Describing this as inadequate is being generous.
But nearly always it isn’t. This is something that has puzzled me ever since I was a child. It has always been obvious to me that in a place like a cinema or a theatre open to both sexes there need to be more facilities for women, because they need there to be. Yet this seems to be something that architects around the world have never been able to understand. So how is it that something that is obvious to a ten-year boy is not obvious to a trained architect?
You don’t need to just suspect; studies show that the majority of theatre ticket buyers are female. Yet theatres run toward films directed at men, and toilets designed for men, etc.
When something becomes standard in architecture, it is just done without thinking. In many cases, it has been the norm to just reuse plans over and over, not bothering to design something from scratch. It saves money and time doing that. That is one reason it has been so difficult to get buildings designed to be more environmentally friendly, and to stop wasting so much material.
My guess is that buildings that needed to have toilets installed for women after women started working/visiting were treated the same way. They pulled out a floor plan for a male bathroom, removed the urinals, and left everything else the same, without noticing that taking the urinals out actually reduced the space for urination. Also, they were designed by men, who didn’t think about women’s needs, even though many of them probably complained about how long their wife took in the bathroom.
Easier, faster, less costly – it was the perfect match…for everyone but women.
I don’t see how that could apply here, though, since most women’s rooms (and I think men’s rooms, but I can’t be sure) have more than one cubicle. This appears like actual malice. Maybe the designer was trans.
Holms – absolutely right. I have been involved in a stadium project, and I was somewhat intrigued by the visually different sizes of the men’s and women’s facilities. The analysis was actually quite specific, they had examined what the characteristic crowds were like (M/F/total size). Crowds for the larger events were characteristically 75% male, so 3:1 raw ratio, but 2.5x the throughput for the men’s. Plus the overall footprint per ‘unit’ of the men’s was smaller. Then because part of the funding was related to a Women’s World Cup, they modelled what a largish crowd with 50/50 would look like. The result was a design with about double the total area allocated to women’s – but both targeted the same range for wait times.
It’s not even five useable urinals… More like three most of the time. Males do not like pissing that close together especially without a divider. It’s inefficient and bad design.
If I am reading his statement correctly, there are other bathrooms that are single sex, so no woman has to use this bathroom. If it helps keep TIMs out of the women’s bathrooms, I’m all for this.
Eava@#8: Yeah, that was my read, as well. And if that’s the case, the 5-urinals-to-one-stall makes sense–the number of men comfortable using THAT bathroom, specifically, is going to vastly outweigh the number of women.
#8 Eava
If that is the case, what odds can I get on my bet – that trans women will often/mostly insist on using the specifically-women’s toilets?
Maybe, but I’m not sure. I think many, maybe most, men like to take a surreptitious look at their neighbour’s penis, not so much because of any homosexual tendencies but to compare its size with their own. It’s not very nice, but many of the things men do are not very nice.
There may well be women-only toilets in the building but having the gender neutral ones basically provides six additional pissing stations for men, and that’s not taking into account the likelihood of the floor space in the men’s and women’s toilets being the same, and thus allowing for more men to relive themselves at the same time. And that’s before you even factor in that women have to use the toilets more often than men for all sorts of reasons. We wear our reproductive organs on the inside for a start, so we have less space for our bladders than men do. Then a number of women will be pregnant and have a small human sitting on their bladder, or have a ruined pelvic floor from previous pregnancies, or have urinary tract infections which women are more prone to than men, or have to deal with periods even if they don’t need to pee. Equal access to toilets can only really be achieved by having far more women’s toilets than men’s.
There is one set of restrooms on the Summerfest grounds where the women’s is twice as large as the men’s. It’s the set by the Water Street Brewery, builfing “K” on the grounds map:
https://www.summerfest.com/grounds-map/