Not so much an annoyance as a burning social injustice
Rosa Silverman on why toilets are a feminist issue:
Discussing “the tyranny of the toilet queue” on Emma Barnett’s BBC Radio 5 Live show this week, the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez made a spirited and well-founded argument for why toilets are a feminist issue; not so much an annoyance as a burning social injustice.
“Everyone knows that women have to queue for the toilet and men tend to just walk in and out, and that’s because we have traditionally given equal floor space for men and women for their toilets,” she told listeners.
It might seem fair on the face of it but, she contended, it isn’t: “For a start, male toilets tend to have urinals in them, which take up less space and immediately mean men have more provision than women with equal floor space. On top of that there are all sorts of reasons why women both will need to go more often and also may take longer when they’re in there.”
As Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, went on to explain, women need to go more often when they’re pregnant; women are eight times more likely to suffer urinary tract infections, which means they will be going more often; they are more likely to be accompanied by young children (a time-consuming process indeed); and on any given day, a proportion of women will be menstruating. (Meanwhile, on any given day, some men can be found effortlessly relieving themselves behind trees or, in extremis, in the street.) So how can it be fair that the same amount of floor space be devoted to men and women’s facilities?
There’s also the anatomy aspect, which was perhaps awkward to cite on live radio, but it does add to the time women take.
Toilets are a feminist issue. As a blog post on the website of the charity WaterAid warned in 2017, “There are many times in a woman’s life when she particularly needs a safe, private toilet. When she doesn’t have one, the consequences are serious. Having a loo can mean the difference between living in dignity or shame, health or illness, between getting an education, or dropping out of school.”
Toilets are a feminist issue for the same reason period poverty is a feminist issue: because lack of provision holds girls and women back and affects both their health and their prospects.
Toilets are a feminist issue in this country too because we have had to fight for them. In Victorian Britain, the public sphere was for men, while the home was the woman’s domain. Since most public conveniences were for use by men only, women had to plan trips out of the house carefully. The Ladies Sanitary Association campaigned for women’s toilets from the 1850s onwards, and a few were duly installed.
When women entered the workforce in large numbers after the First World War, toilets were again a big issue, as workplaces had been designed for men, and therefore lacked women’s facilities. Some employers were reluctant to change this, fearful women were stealing men’s jobs.
I’ve posted some news stories about girls or women who were raped and/or murdered because of the lack of a safe, private toilet.
I used to work for an opera company that was in the process of building a new opera house. Part of my job was educating the operagoers about the new building and answering their questions and concerns. By far the most important concern after where will my subscription seats be in the new House was about the washrooms. And one of the biggest selling features of the new opera house was that we allotted twice the space for women’s facilities. Everybody — men and women — knew this was a necessary improvement and applauded it; nobody complained.
Flash-forward to now: this city’s dedicated LGBT theatre space just reopened after going dark for a few months to renovate their washrooms, spending a huge amount of cash and leaving a lot of people unemployed over the summer. The end result is ridiculous: they tore down the separate men’s and women’s washrooms — which had long become unisex anyways; this is a very “queer” space — but whose stalls were very private, with heavy walls and doors that met the floor. In their place is one giant unisex washroom with flimsy dividers typical of a giant train terminal loo. Oh, and a fabulous glittery floor. With all that money and space, why didn’t they switch to single-user washrooms like practically everybody else is doing? Why did they shut their whole business down for months just to reduce the amount of privacy between men and women while they do their business? I can easily imagine the hyperwoke board members deliberately shutting down other more comfortable options on the grounds that it would alienate trans identifying males. I bet you good money they deliberately made the washrooms as close to old-fashioned women-only washrooms — flimsy dividers and all — to appease the trans males.
The glittery floor is pretty fab though. Something to distract you as you’re trying to ease your nerves while you pee surrounded by men.
Since we’re talking toilets, anyone else find the sanitary supply dispensers at their local college have been removed? Or is that an isolated phenomenon?
That sounds ridiculous. I’ve not heard of that before.
I know it’s not the same thing, but sanitary napkin disposal boxes became an issue at the concert venue I used to manage. Our toilets went “all-gender” a few years ago due to demands from our young hyper-woke employees. (This consisted of replacing the “Men’s/Women’s” signs with ones that read “Washroom with Urinals/Washroom with Stalls”.) The employees wanted us to install a pad/tampon disposal box in the former men’s washroom (like we have in every stall in the former women’s), since it was expected that women would start using the men’s stall. Naturally, no one got around to installing it, because naturally, women never want to use the washroom that consists of a wall of urinals and one not-very-private stall next to them. In practice, the men’s room is still the men’s room, and the women’s room is a spillover extra men’s room when the venue gets busy. Many men use the former-women’s room even when it’s not busy — in some kind of gesture of progressiveness, or just to be jerks, I don’t know. In the end, what it means is women now have to wait twice as long to use the washroom, because of men. Great job, woke kids!
My board of directors asked me if I had been receiving any complaints from men since the bathrooms went all-gender. I told them there were none from men, but there had been tons from women right from the start: complaints about increased wait times, complaints about mess on the seats, complaints about discomfort, complaints from feminists. The board seemed completely uninterested in the complaints from women. (Which was extra surprising because the most active board members were women.)
(grammar error: I should have said “former women’s room,” not “former-women’s room.” It’s not a room for former-women, lol!)
Artymorty, one other thing I’ve been noticing in restrooms lately is the tendency of the seat to be left up. At first I thought it was just from the custodian having cleaned the toilets, but it began happening at times of day where the custodian had not been in there, and many students had.
cazz, I noticed that way back in the 90s, when I still needed tampon/pad dispensers. Most of the bathrooms I went to, both at my school and at convenience stores, now contained condom dispensers, but no female hygiene products. I first noticed it in the convenience stores and thought it was just because they sell that stuff in their store and wanted people to buy it that way; but they sell condoms, too, so that didn’t make sense. And then the school started removing them. Maybe that was to encourage women to stay home and not get more educated than the men (see OB’s recent column).
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iknklast-
It’s absurd that at a time when some African countries are trying to make sure school girls can have sanitary supplies so they can go to school, this country is removing those supplies from college restrooms. Personally, I remember being a teenager and occasionally forgetting how to count to 28.
The school I teach at now does not have them in the restrooms. They do have signs that tell women not to dispose of them in the toilet, but it is only possible for them to dispose of them if they bring them from home. And our building has more women than men both in faculty and in the student body.
In BC, the current push-cum-plan is to provide free menstrual products in all public schools, of all levels :-)
ibbica – points to BC!
I’ve always thought that if women ran the world, they’d be free everywhere, all of the time.