AIBU to want to boycott M&S?

[thatdamnwoman]

Marks & Spencer has made its changing rooms unisex because it is striving to be inclusive and it wants everyone to feel comfortable in whichever changing room they want. Which means that a woman like me, who wants to try on clothes in an area where I know I won't encounter men if I step outside the cubicle to see how a garment moves when I walk, is now excluded from M&S.

There's evidence that when facilities are made unisex the number of sexual incidents goes up:

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/sexual-assault-unisex-changing-rooms-sunday-times-women-risk-a8519086.html

I think most ordinary men are horrified at the thought of unisex facilities. They're worried that they might cause offence or be mistakenly accused of predatory behaviour. On the other hand the changing rooms will be a magnet for all those men who get a transgressive thrill from going where they shouldn't and being just a few inches away from where a woman's changing her clothing.

I've contacted M&S and they just say they want to be inclusive and if anything happens to anyone in the changing room they'll take appropriate action. But why should anything inappropriate have to happen?

This year we're having guests for four days over Christmas and I would normally be spending at least £200 at M&S. This year I'll shop elsewhere instead. And I won't be buying gifts or clothes or home stuff from them either.

Will anyone join me in a boycott?

www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/paedophile-raped-screaming-girl-7-20061401

This is South Africa

www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/man-who-hid-toilet-cubicle-16293674

Wales

Just because these incidents are toilet cubicles doesn't mean that they couldn't just have easily happened in changing rooms.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/unisex-changing-rooms-put-women-in-danger-8lwbp8kgk

Yanbu. My local branch closed anyway but I won't buy online from them again. I'm sick of this bullshit bandwagon they're all jumping on. I have daughters and it scares me for them.

intend to go into an M&S changing room with five garments. Before I enter, I'll ask if the changing rooms are open to all. If they are, I'll leave the clothes say ,'not for me, thanks' and toddle off.

If we all did this every time we passed an M&S the message would start to get through to the boneheads who thought the idea up!

I beg your pardon.

So anybody that disagrees is a male or pretending to be ignorant.

Can't personally boycott them as there's some foods I can only have from there, but I'll be getting in touch with them to show my disappointment, which will probably be just as effective as me stopping shopping there anyway.

Are you working on the assumption that all men are inherently sex criminals? YABU. This is why society is fucked.

@Ninkaninus It's all quite tiring, isn't it? But it most definitely it worth the effort of questioning this drift away from sensible safeguarding and risk assessments, let alone the preferences of most female customers.

Spy cameras. Would you notice these?

How about these? Would you notice these?

Are you working on the assumption that all men are inherently sex criminals?

No. No-one has said that on this thread, ever.

As your comprehension skills are so poor I see no purpose in engaging with you further.

Are you working on the assumption that all men are inherently sex criminals? YABU. This is why society is fucked.
That would be unreasonable.
However you could work on the assumption that all sex criminals are men, and you'd be 98% correct.

Cymatic, good god no, but surely you can see that if a man wanted to get into a womans changing room for perverted reasons then opening the changing rooms to all men makes it a bit easier for them.

I worked in BHS many moons ago on fitting rooms they weren’t mixed but one long corridor, men to the left women to the right. Individual cubicles with curtains. Twice I had to kick out men who had snuck up to the womens side and were masturbating in the cubicles. Funnily enough never found any women sneaking down to the men’s side

And as a 17 year old Saturday girl that wasn’t a pleasant experience for me

With the WiFi link he can be in the adjacent locked cubicle watching in real time.
Not sure why any of these spy cameras are legal but these are all British websites.

@FlyingOink exactly! Not to mention the ones that look exactly like the hooks or hanging racks you'd find in changing rooms and toilets.

www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-50020307

1.600+ images, again in a unisex changing area.

But of course, This Never Happens

Those cameras are terrifying.

Let’s not kid ourselves: women do not film random blokes getting changed and masturbate over it.

The reason why they are called Peeping Toms is because they are always men. And telling women to take the risk to be kind is the modern version of ‘he won’t have seen much. Don’t make a fuss.’

I have to say I've shopped in places that for years have had mixed sex changing rooms - going right back to Gap, who I think have always had them (I certainly remember going to the Covent Garden one so long ago that I was thin enough to fit in their jeans and they only had the one changing room). Cos quite frequently do - I think it depends on their store layout - so if they have both male and female clothes on one floor they have a mixed changing room - with lockable cubicles. And there are probably others I've been in and just haven't noticed. So, sorry, its not going to be the hill I die on. Much crosser about toilets, but that's mainly because they are usually re-designated rather than re-designed, which is very unfair to women for all sorts of reasons.

YANBU. But then M&S had an MTF trans bra fitter in one of its London shops in 2017.

zwaartekracht a hard-luck story and a suspended sentence. Disgusting.
A man knowingly and intentionally films women and children surreptitiously and doesn't even get a week in prison.

Funny enough, the ones I just posted were from five minutes googling. I'm sure you could get even more surreptitious ones if you wanted to look for them.

And with the WiFi you don't even need to have a cable or a way to download the stored footage, you can just watch from a safe distance.

M&S haven't thought this through at all. I wonder if I ended up on some voyeur porn site through being filmed in a M&S cubicle, whether I could then cite M&S for a breach of GDPR as they have failed to ensure my privacy? I think it's technically possible.

MaudesMum that's good for you.

Frankly if a new shop decided to have unisex changing rooms that's up to them, and up to their customers.
But this is one of the UK's oldest chains, a major employer which is struggling, and a customer demographic that doesn't include student gender-warriors. So it's a commercial decision that will impact the company, the customers and the staff, and as such women are invested in discussing it.
It might not be the hill you die on, but to stretch your battlefield analogy, it's more ground lost.

I think if that happened and you could cite all these people telling m and s that it would happen and them ignoring it you could sue them for eleventy million quid.