Going to the ladies

(…..)

“Public toilets are among the last openly sex-segregated spaces that remain in our society and, crucially, among the last spaces that people expect to be sex-segregated,” declare Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (….)

 they quote the African American legal scholar Taunya Lovell Banks: “We must realize that continuing inequality at the toilet reflects this male-dominated society’s hostility to our presence outside of the home.”

(….)

“To perform a private function in a public setting requires what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called ‘civil inattention’, or the art of making living among unknown people tolerable,” writes George. “You know they’re there, but you pretend not to acknowledge them, by whatever means are at your disposal. How many people have lingered in a cubicle so that the sound of their excretion – of whatever variety – can’t be associated with them when they come out? How many have cringed in a hotel bathroom too close for comfort to a bedroom containing a new lover?”

And that, for me, is the final and most compelling argument. Women, whatever their chosen version of feminism, do like to retain their mystery. They perfectly understand this in Japan, where you can install in your loo a device called a Sound Princess – an electronic gadget which makes the sound of constant flushing to obscure more earthy lavatorial noises.

Marilyn Monroe could have done with one of these when Arthur Miller took her to meet his mother just after they were engaged. All went well until Marilyn had to go to the toilet. Because it was right next to the living room, with a flimsy door and very thin walls, she turned on all the taps so that she couldn’t be heard. Next day, Arthur calls the mother and says, “How did you like her?” And the mother says, “She’s sweet, a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful girl, but she pisses like a horse!”