Ok, ok. Hear me out. I am female identifying, and for a long time I have been joking about how men and boy’s bathrooms are just plain weird. Urinals… why don’t they have doors?!
As bathrooms are slowly becoming gender neutral, a lot of men’s bathrooms are opening up to women and non-binary folks. HOPEFULLY they’ve been open to non-binary and trans for longer than this, but that is not the conversation today. Because I have been privy to male bathrooms, I can see that they have not at all changed since the time I was in elementary school and thought it would be hilarious to run into the boy’s bathrooms to see what they were like. Again, disclaimer, there may be some bathrooms that have updated their urinals to have doors. But for the most part, no doors.
This is weird. I couldn’t imagine using the toilet in free visual scope of another human. Is there something about women sitting down that need doors? Is it the fact that women are the “gentler sex” and require doors and privacy?
You might be a male-identifying reading this like, “Whats the big deal? This is part of our man culture.” So it might be. Men get the (what is presumably) joy of free-standing and urinating wherever they so please. Camping out in the forest? Easy peasy for men. In fact, I’ve seen many over my lifetime course of road trips just facing away from the highway doing their thing. At a house party and the line is too long? No problem, them boys go off together in the bushes and jovially have a conversation whilst doing their business. It’s somehow discreet, its a joint affair, and its perfectly acceptable (within reason) for men to go about taking a wee anywhere they so please.
Now is THIS why y’all don’t have bathroom doors? Something about your hands covering that bit of genitalia that make it suddenly not count as exposing yourself?
Here’s some educational reasoning behind my qualm. I have been reading this book called ‘Consent Laid Bare: Sex, Entitlement, and the Distortion of Desire” by Chanel Contos. It revolves around Australia creating a petition to have their sex education nationally add consent education into their curriculum. We all know the Me Too movement changed the game in how we talk about sex and consent. This book largely talks about female history, recent and in perpetuity, with how lack of consent education has affected them. For example the Hollywood-ized “Just kiss the girl” – a form of not asking for consent to kiss and just laying one on them. This style of kiss used to be universally seen as sexy and confident, and the idea of someone asking for permission to kiss was cringe and took the excitement away. THIS IS NOW ARCHAIC. Asking for consent is sexy.
So while this book talks about the female experience, it also talks about the male experience. How young boys are groomed to have this “macho exterior” in order to attract a mate to avoid being what is now deemed an INCEL. This book exposed a truth to me that I have never been able to get out of my head since. From as young an age as possible, the small penis jokes has loomed over boyhood. If you don’t know, now you know, male genitalia grows with age. So OF COURSE young boys have what they have. However this book also lays claim that the origins of these terrible jokes, this ability for boys to see other boys and make trauma-forming claims that affect a budding manhood…. Are the locker rooms. From these jokes, comes inaccurate ideals, and an unsafe “power” men hold in their sizes. What other place do men come in constant contact with the ability to see other sizes? You guessed it. The bathroom.
Now you like might be like my classmate, who when I recently brought up this topic to them they say, “Well Volante, there is etiquette in the bathroom… you don’t stand right next to someone who is already there.” Yes I get this… but WHY is it still a thing to not have doors?? Are men not worth the extra money it takes to put doors in? Tell me, why hasn’t this evolved out of our norm?
Written by: Volante Matheson
Contact: vmatheson1@my.bcit.ca