Last year, the musician Charli XCX mentioned in a video interview that she prefers to use male-designated public bathrooms because, well, there are usually no women there. She said: “I actually avoid the girls’ bathroom in clubs. I always just, like, sneak into the men’s because there’s no line and there’s no, like, drama… [There’s no] annoying, ‘Wah, he said that’, you know?” The comments have gone viral now for some reason, inviting a discussion about women and bathrooms.
Using a gents’ loo in a pinch is fine, and this is something many have done at some point (including, of course, accidentally), but Charli XCX’s comments are about women themselves — not the toilets designated for them. They’re about how women talk to each other, rather than just doing their business and getting back to the party. They’re about, well, women.
A public, female-designated bathroom is, first and foremost, a human right. In the Indian context, schools which don’t have proper sanitation facilities for girls have high dropout rates for this reason. Unsafe public restrooms increase the risk of sexual assault. Travel may be thwarted because of a lack of access. Ableism in design is a further, less gendered, inhibitor.
Beyond all this, as a space, a women’s bathroom is a place where so much more than “drama” happens. It is a place where strangers ask or offer each other sanitary products. It is a place where friends exchange quick confidences privately. It is a place where friendship itself can be made (drunk girls in bathrooms — years since having been one myself, I still send heart bubbles to that whole vibe!). It is a place where someone may go to compose herself, to cry, or to look herself in the eye in the mirror and make a decision before she gets back to a table where something is demanded of her. It can be a place where someone being stalked can hide and ask for help.
In a short, breathless poem called “To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably In The Next Stall”, which I encourage you to find and read in full, Kim Addonizio lists a range of things that sad woman — any sad woman — may have done, and ends it, “listen I love you joy is coming” — and that, in a line, says so much about what the space of the women’s bathroom has been for many. A generous one.
None of this is to suggest that unisex bathrooms are a problem, or to inadvertently wade into trans-exclusionary territory. This is only to say that, as it is and has been, the space of the women’s bathroom is an interesting one from a sociological perspective, and doesn’t deserve to be derided.
That doesn’t mean such spaces are perfect. In fact, they are designed inconsiderately: the same square footage is often given to both women’s and men’s bathrooms in any given public location, without accounting for the fact that the former require more time (menstruation, pregnancy, smaller bladders and so on), and the latter require less room (more urinals can fit into the same area than commodes). That’s why women’s queues are longer — not because of gossip.