well not just bathrooms.  it’s more political than that.  it’s about women and batherooms and how bathrooms were not designed for women.  I’m sure it’s not just me, that a lot of people have written about this, but in NYC I find it more prominent.  First off, in NYC there are very few public bathrooms.  We all know this, but we have sometimes to be reminded that the reason was the danger of men using the bathrooms for illegal fornication.  How terrible.  One would think that prudishness was in the past, but then someone also says, “No – it’s an economic problen!”  Of course that could be solved by charging money for using bathrooms.  That would create another problem – only rich people could have access to the toilets.  So what if there is a public npo for maintaining public toilets?

The biggest problem for me, however, is not the availability of toilets – women have always have had limired access ro roilets vecause of the modesty issue and the danger of invasion.  So we learned to hold iit in.  The problem is that toilets are a big problem for women.  Women have to remove some of their apparel, sometimes soiling that apparel by contact with the floors.  And because women have to worry about their vulnerable bodies making physical contact with unclean surfaces, they have a tendency not to sit but to partially squat, damaging their accuracy in hitting the toilet and not the floor (where their jacket is trailing).  And cleanliness afterward is challenging when you can’t reach everywhere necessary.  

And when you finally emerge from the bathroom, sometimes exhausting at all your gymnastics, you are usually met with a companion who complains, or thinks about complaing, “What took you so long?”  “Did you see the line?”  With all those adjustments a woman has to make with her encounter with public toilets, everything takes so much time the lines have to be long, and the women more desperate to get through them.  

But it’s not just public toilets.  Bathrooms in general are hostile to women.  The shower, for example, that comes from above when she doesn’t want to get her hair all wet and catch a cold.  She in fact wants to get the water down below – but it doesn’t get there without alternative plumbing.  

I actually have much more to discuss on this subject, but you probably think I’m a pervert.  I just miss the public toilets in Dizengoff Center.