Loo problem answer obvious

University of Otago Diversity Week organiser Hahna Briggs and  OUSA Clubs and Societies manager...
University of Otago Diversity Week organiser Hahna Briggs and OUSA Clubs and Societies manager Matt Tucker in a gender-neutral bathroom. Photo by Linda Robertson.
Gender-neutral loos? Let's not confuse sex with going to the toilet, Glenn Hardesty writes. 

I hope they do a survey of the week-long gender-neutral loo experiment in the OUSA building at the University of Otago (ODT, 17.5.16). I'm sure that the number of students whose "mental and physical health'' is improved by the experience will be vastly outnumbered by those who are weirded out by the prospect, and avoid the loos in those facilities altogether.

Or perhaps not, as student unions are the natural haunts of the impeccably politically correct.

I would be interested to learn about the history of public toileting facilities.

I imagine that when it became necessary to have a communal jakes in places of public resort, it was thought proper to segregate the men's and women's in order to desexualise the ablution zone - that is, to stop sexually predatory men taking advantage of women when they've got their knickers about their ankles.

A not-unreasonable precaution.

But now we have people wanting to re-sexualise the toilet.

If no-one should have to attend to the back end of their digestive processes in places where they are "not comfortable'', what - in the brave new world of gender-neutral dunnies - is to be done about people who want to keep their relations with the opposite sex romantic and chivalrous, and free of toiletty connotations?

Men have traditionally lined up with each other at the urinal with cheerful bonhomie, grunting minimal greetings, but otherwise resolutely keeping their eyes to themselves.

(This is also a precaution against piddling on your own - or the other chap's - shoes.)

Women, so I am told, chat with other from within the safety of their cubicles.

OUSA's Hahna Briggs says "a lot of people don't identify with binary-gender experience surveillance'' - well, how many is "a lot''?

A great many more people wouldn't have a clue what "binary-gender experience surveillance'' means.

I can't quite figure it out. If it means, "being watched by persons of your own gender'', I must admit I have noticed the phenomenon.

In public loos, where gentlemen, of course, try to notice as little as possible, I have observed that young men are more reluctant than in the past to line up at the urinal, and will retreat to a cubicle even if they're only taking a leak.

I presume this represents on the part of contemporary young men the only true instance I know of actual homophobia - that is, they want to pee privately for fear that homosexuals might be eyeing them off.

It wasn't something that my generation had to worry about.

There is a sort of intimacy and tacit understanding that comes of people being of the same sex.

Men and women, in the main, do not want to be in the same space where people of the opposite sex are dealing with personal bodily functions - it's a case of "too much information''.

A man does not want to be going to the toilet in the same space as potential sexual partners, or friends of his mother, or his daughter's playmates.

It's just a bit icky.

Confusing excretory functions and sexual functions is quintessentially infantile.

As children, little boys will go into the ladies' loos for a dare and think there's something exciting about it.

Unaccompanied children used to be warned by parents and teachers to be on guard at public loos for "dirty old men'' - now called paedophiles - similarly stuck at an infantile stage.

When (or if) we mature, we figure out that the people we go to the loo with and the people we want to have erotic relationships with are not the same.

The solution to the loo problem is obvious.

A couple of decades ago it was noticed that there were many people who were genuinely uncomfortable in traditional toilets: I mean people in wheelchairs, or otherwise disabled.

So, there are now everywhere toilets for the disabled, and every service station attendant will tell you they are underutilised.

So rather than the very expensive option of the entirely privatised experience (each loo in its own self-contained room), there should be one for men, one women and one for the uncomfortable.

Meantime, boys: if you do want to get your jollies from listening to girls piddling, you can apparently do so, at any time, in the ground-floor toilets in the University of Otago Clubs and Societies Building.

- Glenn Hardesty is a retired teacher.

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