Get used to the idea of co-ed bathrooms
As sure as women’s suffrage and the end of slavery, mixed-sex
toilets and showers will eventually be the standard in society. Greg
Stevens explains why.
Science Correspondenthttp://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/7005/co-ed-bathrooms-get-used-to-it/
The 1997 movie Starship Troopers, a
science fiction film depicting a near-future society, has a famous scene
in which military cadets, both men and women, are bonding and horsing
around in the showers. No special point is made about the fact that the
showers are co-ed, and no explanation is offered. It is depicted as the
most natural thing in the world.
There is no sexual tension. The cadets – all portrayed as
men and women in their late teens or early 20s, the standard age for
military recruits – are discussing why they joined up and whom they
might be missing back home. It is young people bonding, like you might
see in a shower scene in any military movie – apart from the fact that
there were both men and women interacting together, naked, in the
shower.
As a whole, the movie isn’t likely to be an accurate
prediction of the future. The plot, after all, involves psychic military
programmes and giant intelligent alien bugs. However, the shower scene
is most definitely the direction our society is heading.
Does that bother you? Too bad. You can kick and scream all
you want, but as sure as women’s suffrage and the end of slavery, co-ed
showers will eventually be the simple, unexciting, and uncontroversial
standard in society.
The future is now
Actually, Oberlin College in Ohio had co-ed bathrooms and showers in most dorms already in the early 1990s. It was both an attempt to break down gender segregation and to make the bathrooms more of a social extension of the houses themselves. The bathrooms were big group bathrooms, although they did have individual stalls for both toilets and showers.
The stalls locked, of course, and the shower curtains
closed all the way. So it wasn’t quite the open free-for-all portrayed
in the Starship Troopers shower scene. But it wasn’t far off.
European countries are relaxed about mixed-sex saunas and bathrooms
At Brandeis University, students are given the opportunity
to vote at the beginning of each year on whether or not the bathrooms on
their floor will be gender-neutral. Brandeis also includes a “gender
neutral” housing option in which students are allowed to share
multiple-occupancy bedrooms, regardless of the students’ sex or gender.
And there is now a trend in the United States for cities and counties to require
gender-neutral bathrooms. In both Philadelphia and Portland, all newly
built or renovated public buildings now must include a gender-neutral
option among their bathroom facilities.
The government always moves in baby steps: gender-neutral
bathrooms in public buildings are inevitably of the single-occupant
variety, rather than large bathrooms containing multiple stalls. And
certainly there are no laws yet banning the gendered versions of
bathrooms, either: gender-neutral bathrooms are merely a new option, for
those who choose to use it.
In many ways, these laws are nothing more than a
re-labeling that acknowledges what has been a de facto truth about
bathrooms for decades. When it is a single-occupancy bathroom, does
anybody really care whether the sign on the door is for men or women?
Does it really matter whether it is labelled as a “Men’s Room”, a
“Women’s Room”, a “Family Bathroom” or a “Genderless Bathroom”?
Merritt Kopas, a graduate student at the University of
Washington, surveyed undergraduate students last year and found that
most of them had ducked into a single-occupancy bathroom marked for the
opposite sex at one point or another, usually in times of “special
urgency”. As long as the bathroom consisted of a single toilet with a
lock on the door, none of the students surveyed thought it was a big
deal. Many of them didn’t fully understand why single-occupancy
bathrooms even have gender assignments at all.
It is important to recognise how common the existence of ungendered bathrooms really is – whether they are explicitly labelled that way or simply used that way in practice.
In gay dance clubs, where the gender ratio is often
extremely unbalanced in favour of men to women, men usually use both the
men’s room and the women’s room without any distinction being made. The
few women who might be in attendance are also free to use either,
without anyone raising any question. After all, the doors on the stalls
lock just as effectively no matter which room you happen to be in.
There is also, to be fair, the added consideration that cubicles in gay clubs are rarely primarily used for matters lavatorial.
It is important to recognise how common the existence of
ungendered bathrooms really is – whether they are explicitly labelled
that way or simply used that way in practice. The simple fact that
gender-mixing in bathrooms is already common, and has been in some
places since the 1990s, stands as a damning refutation of the most
popular argument put forward against gender-neutral bathrooms: the idea
that they will lead to increased violence, rape or abuse.
The comfort of bigots
The reason that I can confidently predict that mixed-gender multi-user bathrooms will one day be the norm is that the arguments against them are all stupid.
The most common, appearing everywhere from courthouses to
Facebook comments when the topic of genderless bathrooms arises, is that
somehow the presence of women in the same room with men, albeit in
separate locked stalls from those men, will lead to a sudden surge of
men attacking, molesting, leering at or otherwise sexually infringing on
women.
First of all: why would it? If it is a crowded bathroom in
the middle of the day, then it’s just as likely that a man would come
to a woman’s aid if she were being harassed. On the other hand, if the
woman is all alone in the bathroom late at night, then her danger is no
more than it would be in a gender segregated bathroom: after all, a
creepy, criminal man can sneak in to a women’s room late at night just
as easily as he can creep into a gender-neutral bathroom.
The simple fact is that most normal human beings know how
to act appropriately toward one another and the fact that they happen to
be in a room that contains toilets doesn’t somehow switch that off.
Second of all: there is simply no evidence that people
behave this way. Despite all of the scary fantasy “what if” scenarios
that people conjure up to argue against mixed-gender bathrooms, the fact
is that these have already existed for decades without muss or fuss. In
colleges across the US there have been dorms with mixed-gender showers
and toilets, with no rampage of harassment or rape taking place in these
facilities.
Finally, it is creepy and suspicious that the loudest
arguments about the safety of women come from men, who declare that it
is unsafe for women to be in the same bathroom as a man because in that
situation a man may just not be able to help himself!
Honestly, this kind of argument sounds less like concern
and more like a veiled threat. You better stay in your place, Missy, or
else us men-folk can’t be held responsible for what might happen to you!
It’s the sort of argument a rapist makes.
When a man says, “Women shouldn’t share the same bathroom
as men because they might get raped,” he is using precisely the same
logic as a man who says: “Women shouldn’t wear short skirts because they
might get raped.”
By contrast, many of the testimonials of women who have
actually experienced mixed-gender bathrooms have been quite positive. At
Oberlin, Zoë McLaughlin blogs
about the fact that she felt apprehensive at first at the prospect of
mixed-gender bathrooms, but soon realized that it was both a relaxing
and a safe environment. “There’s really nothing too terrible about
walking into a bathroom and seeing a guy,” she writes.
Similarly, Anna North writes
on Jezebel.com about her experience living in a co-op with co-ed
bathrooms. As with Zoë, she says that she was apprehensive at first, but
soon learned that there was nothing really strange about it at all. “I
don’t totally understand what the fuss is about, since I got used to it
pretty quickly… Nobody ever came onto me or made me uncomfortable, and I
was generally relatively at peace with the whole thing.”
Moreover, when women did feel uncomfortable, the reasons were – there is really no delicate way to put this – stupid.
Consider Jennifer Weiler, for example, who sued her school for not having gender segregated bathrooms on the ground that she didn’t want to live in fear of accidentally seeing dick.
Essentially, this was the only argument that she had. She
made a great deal of fuss about not realising she might be exposed to a
situation where she might accidentally see dick, and how lazy and sloppy
men were not as careful as they should be about where they uncovered
their dicks, and although she always had the ability to look away it was
still possible that there may be an unintended Dick Sighting and
somehow this would cause her irreparable harm.
Whenever the arguments are well-articulated, it becomes
clear very quickly that the so-called “rape and violence” fears are
either unwarranted or even logically inconsistent. Then what is left is
moral superstition and embarrassment. There is literally no practical or
rational reason to be opposed to mixed-gender bathrooms.
Onward, ho! … but, carefully
Just so that there is no mistake, let me say up front: I am not saying that anyone should be forced to use a bathroom where they are uncomfortable. Society will evolve slowly. The first stages are under way: buildings are being required, in more and more places, to have at least one genderless single-stall bathroom available for those who want it.
The next stages will be mixed-gender multi-user bathrooms
available in buildings that also have single-gender (men’s and women’s)
bathrooms for those who prefer to use them. As society adapts, and more
and more realize that the mixed-gender bathrooms are not dangerous or
harmful, they will become more commonly used.
Eventually, the gender-segregated bathrooms will simply
fall into disuse and will disappear. It will not – and should not –
happen because people are forced to use facilities that they don’t feel
comfortable using.
It will happen because people will finally realise that there is nothing to feel uncomfortable about.
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