How Slow Do You Go?

It's difficult to live with the fact that discrimination exists in our modern society. And nowhere is it more pervasive than someplace we're all familiar with — the bathroom.

Now I'm not talking about your private little relief station at home. It's the public, industrial strength restrooms where the inequities of bodily waste disposal make their home. You've participated in it and not even known. Until now.

Here's a typical scenario: You're out for the evening with your significant other. It could be a sporting event or a movie. Someplace that you both need to use the facilities together, and a lot of other people do too. That's when you run smack into the ugly truth: Somebody's gonna have to wait.

Now I don't mean waiting in line in the actual bathroom, because everybody has to do that. I'm talking about one of you waiting on the other. And before you start raising your gender-bashing hackles, that's not what I'm getting at. It's not about who takes longer, it's why.

There's no need to get into a delicate discussion about the different procedures of males and females. Instead, let's just say that a urinal (or the perennial favorite alternative, the trough) allows a man to quickly accomplish the task at hand. The toilet stall provides the privacy a woman needs to deconstruct and recompose herself. Porcelain follows function.

The unfairness comes into play when we consider the "flow-through" potential of bathrooms. Because of the smaller size of urinals, the men's room provides for more simultaneous functionality than the women's. Combine that with the faster turnaround time of men, and you end up with lots of guys milling around the women's room door, waiting for their significant other to emerge.

But how does this bathroom discrimination happen in the first place? It all boils down to an ancient bias in architectural design. Somewhere there's an unwritten rule that says equal floor space must be provided for both men's and women's rooms. Calculate porcelain density per square foot and you've got an equation for potty prejudice.

In order to rectify this problem, we need to convince architects the world 'round to design women's rooms to be bigger than the corresponding men's. Provide for an equal flow ratio in both. It would even be possible to put the doors side by side. Then all the happy couples could enter and leave together, just like Noah's ark.