In her day, Margaret Thatcher was said to have developed a unique method for overcoming the ‘men’s room syndrome’. This is a syndrome which excludes women. It occurs when males use the relative seclusion of the men’s room to lobby, exchange views or collude with one another in the absence of female opposition.
Female executives in the United States complain that a board meeting can be well on its way to reaching agreement when someone suggests a break. In the break the men go off to the cloakroom. When they return, the meeting takes a new direction. This is the syndrome at work.
Thatcher’s solution, it is said, was to make her cabinet ministers ask if they could leave the room. She would then only grant permission for them to go one by one.
There is just no female equivalent of the men’s room. In women’s rooms, cubicles ensure modesty and privacy. At no point in their lives are women expected to stand shoulder to shoulder with one another and relieve themselves publicly. Yet men do it all the time. The urinal is a very open, trusting sort of place, and one that men have fought to preserve grave jeopardy. This prompted the Sydney City Council to consider redesigning future public lavatories to eliminate the common urinal. There was an outcry.
In its editorial, the Sun newspaper argued that urinals should stay because they were open. It warned that replacing them with cubicles was more likely to produce ‘incidents’ because of the privacy these provided. ‘In many parts of Europe the lavatories are so public that any act of indecency or suggestiveness is practically ruled out it said.
Urinals were under threat again in the 1980s. With the new climate of equal opportunity, there was concern that this exclusively male facility was not ideologically correct. At one point the Urban Transport Authority proposed installing ‘uniloos’ at its Port Botany depot.
This unwelcome proposal stirred the male editorial writers at the Sydney Morning Herald. They wanted to know exactly what would happen to the urinals. ‘Will this last bastion of male separatism have a place in the uniloo scheme of things?’ they asked.
When the Western Australian equal opportunity lobby took up the cause and insisted urinals be removed from all boys’ toilets in State schools, the response from the then WA Health Minister, Mr. Taylor, was brief. ‘Bloody ridiculous,’ he said.
The use of public urinals is governed by strict etiquette. A certain decorum is expected, except, of course, at places like football stadiums where there is high-volume use and an alcohol factor at work. The men’s room at a football match can be a rowdy, unhygienic place.
But, in general, men say urinals are as quiet as churches. Two primary rules are ‘don’t look’ and ‘don’t make chitchat with strangers’. Looking straight ahead or looking up (as people do in lifts) is acceptable. Some men head for the comer because it feels safer, some try not to touch anything (they open the door with their foot), and some just stand there unable to let go.
This difficulty with letting go in public has been called the ‘bashful bladder syndrome’. Researchers say one way to overcome it is to do exponential equations. The man becomes so involved in the equations that nature takes over and before he knows it, his mission is complete.
Perhaps such men would cope more easily at individual wall-hung urinals. Steve Cummings from Caroma Industries, the makers of these urinals, says they are more user-friendly, more aesthetically pleasing and cleaner than slab urinals.
The trend these days is for hotels and office blocks to use individual urinals. However, venues anticipating large crowds still opt for slabs.
But never think that individual urinals are an attempt to reduce the essential openness of this communal male activity. Cummings says they afford no extra privacy. In Japan, for example, individual urinals have wings or side shields which, he says, do nothing more than create an illusion of privacy.
When George Freedman designed the men’s room at Bilson’s restaurant at Circular Quay, Sydney, he positioned mirrors so that a man standing at one wall-hung urinal could quite easily view the man at the neighbouring one without being detected. ‘Many men I know have come out of there saying, “Now that is an amusing toilet”,’ Freedman said.
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Tags: Women’s Health