Toilet humour is no laughing matter
When Isabelle O’Carroll spies a toilet queue she sees red...
Have you ever been in the grip of wee insanity? You’re dying to go to the toilet, but when you get there you find six people before you all queueing to wee. You’re fit to burst but there’s no way you can possibly wait for that long so you start shuffling, deep breathing and clenching your jaw. Then it happens, you start thinking “I’m going to piss my pants in about 30 seconds; I can’t do that I’m a grown woman!” Your mind starts working overtime thinking about how you could wee in the sink, after all you probably won’t see any of those people ever again. Maybe you could go into the blokes’. Maybe you could pee into your hands?
It’s pretty much a fact of life that women need to go to the toilet more than men; we often joke in our family that my mum should make a guide to all the toilets in the UK but it’s no laughing matter when you see the amount of women queueing at festivals, cinemas, train stations, clubs and department stores. Even in our own (thankfully temporary) offices at Shiny Towers we’re faced with one toilet per floor while the men’s have two. Two! Now I am the fastest pisser in the world but even I can't cope with one toilet for a whole office floor.
Faced with all these queues you’d think that more women’s toilets would start springing up, but no, everyone has to have the same, whether or not they need the same things. Men and women are different, and it is unfair to use a male benchmark to measure female habits. Maybe it’s just the wee insanity making my blood boil but the lack of women’s toilets is symptomatic of a larger inequality in society; to me the queues represent all the women waiting for a more female-friendly society. We may have the vote (1918), access to birth control (1961), and medical abortions (1962), and the right to prosecute for marital rape (1991!) but there’s still so much that needs to change. We’re still waiting for rape and domestic violence conviction rates to improve, for satisfactory childcare and genuine flexible working conditions, and for representation in Parliament.
Next time you see a queue of women patiently waiting their turn try to imagine what else they’re waiting for. Fully accomodating the needs of different groups in society makes life better for everyone, after all no-one wants to see anyone pissing in sinks do they?!
Last week I would have laughed, Isabelle, but now I realise just what a big, BIG (HUGE) problem this is. My daughter and I went to the Sheffield Arena on Saturday to see Dolly Parton (yay!) but there was one block of toilets each for men and women sitting in a section that held about 500 people. We needed to go before the show. The queue for the Women's was two miles long. Outside the Gents, nothing! Encouraged by two women who were coming out of the Men's, we averted our eyes, took a deep breath and scuttled off into the men's loo where there were four vacant cubicles. Relief! But how insane. On our exit we recommended it to some women waiting outside the disabled toilet but they weren't impressed. At the interval we abandoned all thought of public loos as the Women's queue was five miles long and ten deep. To our horror there was also an Arena employee 'guarding' the Men's toilets! I don't even think it's true that women need to go more often than men, I know a few men who have to go more than me. It's just that women need proper cubicles since we need to remove more clothing. We are going to see Elton John at the same place in May - and we are going to enquire about self catheterisation beforehand.
Posted by: Maz | March 26, 2007 3:30 PM