Thinking about peeing

[beetiger]

I got Rhys a potty, since he's been really interesting in flushing the toilet whn I use it. I took off his diaper and put him on it; he promptly hopped off, stuck his head in it, and peed on the floor. Not sure what to make of that.

I've been thinking a lot about gender-neutral bathrooms these days. I was at a performance of the Vagina Monologues last weekend, and the bathroom situation was just silly -- lines down the hallway for the women's room, and no one in the men's room. I couldn't get any of the women to hop overto the other side, though I suggested it to several. Part of it is the cultural taboo, I think, but part of it is just...the urinals.

Urinals are weird. We don't have them in bathrooms at home. Women's rooms don't have them, and generally they don't have extra stalls to compensate. I would think that standing with your genitals exposed in a public area would be really odd. So, why?

I have to know.

[Poll #448516]

Comments

[bookwurm.livejournal.com]

When I was attending Oberlin College, the first dorm I was in voted by floor to decide whether the bathrooms would be co-ed each semester. The options were usually single-sex only, co-ed stalls but single-sex showers, or completely co-ed. Sometimes, people would recommend restricting co-ed availability to certain times. The vote went by most restrictive, rather than majority rule. It was a little weird the first few times I went into a bathroom and found someone of the opposite sex, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I was never on a floor with co-ed showers though -- I think that would have weirded me out a little more.

The dorm was an E-shaped building, with a bathroom in each leg of the E, so each floor had two bathrooms that were officially for one sex and one for the other. Most of the bathrooms had one stall with a toilet and one with a urinal, plus a separate area with shower stalls. (Or was it two with toilets and one with a urinal? I've been away too long!) The bathrooms "switched sex" every semester, as I recall. There were a lot of jokes about the signage reminding people of this, mostly regarding the physics of two bathrooms mating. ;>