Public toilets! Wait for the ladies

[Burntt]

Taken my dd to a London show. Timing is terrible as I’m on my heavy period day and bleeding through super plus tampons every hour or so. I am amazed at how long the lines are at all the toilets! Is this normal now for big cities? 15-20 mins wait at the station twice and something like 10 mins in a McDonald’s. Theatre I was expecting to be bad but everywhere? I don’t get out much these last few years as I’m carer for my disabled child and when we go anywhere we can use disability toilets. Stood here with my radar key looking at the unused disabled toilet trying to distract myself. Of course if the men are waiting is a couple minutes only those lines don’t extend out the door and down the corridors. How are women putting up with this?!

@blueberrymuffin88 @idontknowhowtodreamyourdreams

Some people have conditions like IBS and Crohns Disease which mean they need a lot longer in the toilet. If you don't have/ know someone with one of these conditions then you can't really understand. They are also more common than a lot of people realise.

I know it's insane

I have seen some "interesting" ones in China. Especially in motor way services. An open trough along the floor that one squats over with all the other poop and pee flowing along under you. The smell is enough to prevent dawdling. Not the place to read the paper as you evacuate.

However worthy your reasons, are you happy that you're sending a very clear message that you absolutely don't care about sex-segregated toilets?

If enough women do this, it's a bit difficult to complain if it starts happening the other way around - if it's an event that attracts a vast majority male crowd, or even if certain men just like the idea of having an alternative to the men's freely available to them for whatever reason.

I remember being at a very big pub in Dublin watching an international rugby match. The queue for the ladies was horrendous however the lovely young men closed off the gents and guarded the entrance. There were more cubicles in the gents than the ladies. Obviously the architects were men! 😡

That reminds me of some places in Israel. I spent 3 months working on a Kibbutz when I was 18. I travelled around after and found that Israel then didn’t go in for public toilets much!

Although it's madness to start from a position of allocating the same amount of space for the men's and women's toilets, I'm not convinced that it would actually change much by arguing purely about the basic number of individual facilities available to men and women respectively.

Urinals use space much more efficiently in terms of number of users at one time - especially those grotty multi-user trough-type ones - so if no space has been set aside for extra cubicles in a proportionally larger women's room (or if both sets of toilets are already very small owing to lack of space for toilets in an historic building in general), potentially demanding the same number of 'units' could just lead to some of the urinals being removed and replaced by small empty sections of wall, with no change to the number of cubicles available to women.

It's not a great analogy, but if a workplace had, say, 10 car parking spaces and a bike shed with spaces for 20 bikes, if people were unhappy about cyclists getting more provision - even with very good reasons for using a car e.g. mobility issues, living much too far away to cycle in, having to drop kids off at school on the way or whatever - it's not like them removing 10 of the bike chaining posts would free up enough space for even one additional car parking space.

But men will have equal numbers re this.

I’ve heard women having phone conversations and coming out of cubicles with make up bag in hand.

There is no need to take so long. Changing sanitary products takes seconds ditto doing a wee.

That does sound crazy (and good on the men); but I suppose if, when the place was built, virtually all of the attendees were men, it probably made sense purely on relative numbers of users.

If it were, say, a large garage with staff toilets, whilst you would very much hope that any female mechanics who wanted to work there would be welcomed on to the team with open arms, it still wouldn't make a lot of practical sense to have equal-sized men's and women's toilets in the servicing area.

The garage we use only has a ladies' toilet in the reception are and only a men's in the back - which works perfectly for their practical needs (all of their mechanics are men and the receptionists are all women). If anything, the main people who 'suffer' are male customers who have to ask slightly awkwardly to be allowed into the private section at the back, whilst female customers waiting in the reception area can see the ladies' toilet right there and available for all women to freely use.

Yes, surely that's the one consideration where the numbers of both sexes with these issues will likely be equal.

And wouldn't many folk with Crohn's, IBS and similar already be using the disabled toilets anyway?

Enduring issues as a result of difficulties in childbirth are a completely different matter, of course.

Wait, how do you wipe then? Yikes. I'm obviously very ignorant about what goes on in cubicles.

So only women have these?

Go out into the lobby and use the automatic roller towel

🤣

I'm honestly stumpped. If someone can't reach back to remove/insert a tampon, how do they reach to wipe themselves adequately? 🤯 am I being thick what's going on? Sponge on a stick?

I use toilet paper to flush and open doors. Just the thought of other peoples wee etc left on them gives me the ikk.

Don't think we’d have room to stand back and manoeuvre our feet into position without rubbing our legs on the toilet seet or falling over
Maybe that’s why women take so long 🤣🤣

Insert from the front myself. I didn’t know people did it from behind

This thread is getting wild eh @PrizedPickledPopcorn

Well, I can do it both ways, but mostly from behind. If you look at the quote history pp must be doing some other third technique, since she can't do either of the above apparently. But then.. how the heck does she wipe?

That’s a very good point and I absolutely believe in separate toilets. I just get bloody annoyed spending the whole interval in the queue.

Found the same in Italy this October.

It's always been this way. The problem is that whoever designs loos (men) often allocates the same space for the male and female, but men's loos contain urinals which are smaller so there's more available and also much quicker to use. Women often have children with them which means there's more demand for the ladies and it takes much longer. We also have more to do in there like changing tampons. Nobody who designs loos thinks of any of this.

No, I said it will take larger people a bit longer to achieve everything in a confined space. I don’t use a mysterious third way, just what I always thought was the usual way 🤣. So thunder thighs, bags, coat negotiated.

DS- who I potty trained- also does things differently. Where did he learn that?! 🤯🤐
Who knew there were that many options! Maybe that’s why some people are slow- making their mind up!

I’m a women and an architect
It’s not the designers it’s the standards that need upgrading
and yes, they would have been done by men

Its also the standard width cubicle design that's an issue.
The same for men and women but we have to cram in a sanitary bin aswell. I struggle to get toilets offset from centre to allow for this…even when it’s on the drawings because plumbers and fitters are usually men.

Some of us really do try and have been for years and years.

IBS is about twice as prevalent in women as men. Then there are birth injuries, unique to women, and UTIs, much more common in women.

😆 thanks for clearing that up (pun intended)!

Curiosity satisfied, thanks for being candid. I'm probably the adult version of the kid who doesn't stop saying "why?"

I have IBS but surely not every woman in the loo has one of these conditions with a flare up at exactly the moment I decide to join that queue?