Читать книгу No Place To Go - Lezlie Lowe - Страница 6

I have spent my lifetime waiting in toilet lines. Leaning on the wall, staring at the floor, fiddling with my phone, or making idle chitchat with my neighbours in the queue. I grew up being socialized to expect a line for the bathroom. I spent decades so desensitized to the indignity that I never questioned it. Once, as a child, I peed my pants waiting in a bathroom line at a community hall dance. All the while, the boys’ bathroom door hung ajar, the light on, the room unoccupied. I could literally see the toilet. Not a single girl in that line made a move.

I filed that experience away, ashamed. I went home and told my mom. She washed my clothes that night – a dark purple velveteen pantsuit. All I knew was this: waiting was simply what women and girls did while men and boys in the mirror-image door opposite breezed in and breezed out. I internalized the supposed reasons – women were doing their makeup, gabbing, taking too long. For men, the bathroom is an eyes-ahead in-andout; for women, allegedly, it’s some kind of potty party. A pee parade. But here’s the thing: I’ve never seen a woman do more than pat down some stray hairs or slash a strip of lipstick across her mouth in a public bathroom. Without the benefit of knowing what’s going on in the opposite room, men have made judgments about women, while women have been left wondering what the heck is causing all the lines.

Except Clara Greed. She’s one of the women who sleuthed it out.

The story of how Clara Greed became the UK’s ‘Toilet Lady’ finds its genesis at Paddington Station with a pay-toilet turnstile and an ill-mannered station manager. When the central London transit station was refurbished in the early 1990s, pay gates were installed at the entrance to its basement-level public toilets. The facilities had been free since 1963’s Public Lavatories Act made it illegal to put pay turnstiles in front of any public convenience. The turnstile part of that statute was repealed in 1981, and then, one day, without warning, there were nasty mechanical gates staring at Clara Greed.

Something lit a fire under her that day. She passed through Paddington regularly and just as regularly used the toilets there. She was furious. But not just about the twenty-pence fee. She was furious that the toilets had been renovated but left down a steep set of steps into the basement. She was furious that the turnstiles were excluding people from freely going about their natural bodily business. She was furious that the toilets were suddenly no longer the province of anyone visiting Paddington. She was furious that public bathroom provision – which she knew intuitively was a human right, even if her work and her teaching hadn’t brought her to the point of saying it outright yet – was being hacked away when it ought to have been improving. She phoned up the station manager when she got home. They fought. He ended the call with a suggestion for Greed. ‘If you want to go to the toilet,’ he told her, ‘you can go round the hedge!’

Greed calls this her ‘conversion experience.’ The urban planner and rock-ribbed feminist launched an inadvertent career as a defender of free and abundant public bathroom access, focused particularly on the needs of women. ‘Through no fault of my own,’ she says, ‘I became the Toilet Lady.’ Today, Greed is an emerita professor in the Architecture and the Built Environment faculty at the University of the West of England in Bristol. ‘I don’t look like a dirty-minded toilet campaigner,’ she jokes. But that’s never stopped others from looking at her that way. Because almost invariably, Greed has found herself delivering a difficult truth to architects, planners, and municipal governments: when it comes to public bathrooms, you’re really screwing up.

One of the most visible problems is, ironically, one few in those professions seem able to see – the leagues of women waiting for the can in public buildings. What that’s about, Greed says, isn’t the women. It’s the washrooms. Try this counting trick next time you’re out: even when floor space is equal for men’s and women’s restrooms, men often get more provision. Where women get six cubicles, men might get four cubicles plus four urinals. Consider the Pavilion toilets I spent so many days trying to get into with my kids – three toilets and two urinals on the men’s side and four toilets on the women’s.

But that’s not where the inequality ends. Women, biologically, need more provision. For one thing, they take longer to empty their bladders. I’ve been rhyming off the most-cited numbers since I first started researching toilet design problems in the early aughts: men take, on average, forty-five seconds to pee; women, ninety-six. A 2017 study out of Ghent University in Belgium cites times of sixty seconds for men and ninety for women. Pretty close and point taken. But women also spend more time because they have to squeeze into a stall, close the door, lock it (if you’re a man, ask a close-by woman how frequently bathroom slide locks are misaligned). Women must take down or remove clothing to urinate. Most men walk in, unzip, and let ’er rip. And third: women use the bathroom more frequently than men. Again, biology: women menstruate, women can be pregnant. But also, society: women are more likely to be caregivers for children, the elderly, and the disabled. ‘The men, as you know,’ Greed says, ‘waltz in and out.’

Or don’t. In the absence of a toilet, desperate men, by virtue of simple mechanics, can easily pee en plein air. This biological ace card also adds options to the provision men get inside buildings. Men can use toilets, regular urinals, and trough urinals – pretty much any hole with a sewer-heading drain will do for an able-bodied man. Women pee in toilets; ergo, they need toilets in their bathrooms − which helps contribute to the unequal ratios in men’s versus women’s rooms. Urinals simply take up less room. So where square footage for men’s and women’s bathrooms is equal, men usually get more opportunities to go.

Urinals are efficient and effective, no question. But urinals for women have largely been a non-starter. American Standard sold one in the 1950s, but uptake was slow, probably because of the increasing popularity of women wearing trousers. It was discontinued. Portable urine-diverting devices like the P-Mate – which we’ll meet again in a later chapter – are considered by most women articles of last resort. And cisgendered women aren’t the only ones left out. While some trans women might have the bodily equipment to use urinals, if they’re using the women’s rooms that match their gender, they won’t find any urinals in there. Some trans men will not have the equipment to use urinals, even when they find them in the men’s rooms they are rightly using. Short take on the universal usefulness of urinals? It’s a toilet, toilet, toilet, toilet world.

Compounding the problem: men dominate planning, design, and construction. When Greed studied architecture and planning at Cardiff University in the 1980s, she was one of only four women. And all the professors were men. The male-to-female ratios in these fields aren’t much better today, especially among the ranks of ‘starchitects’ whose splashy, celebrated art can fall shy of practicality, particularly when it comes to women’s needs. Off the top of her head, Greed cites Jonathan Adams’s Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and Paul Andreu’s Dubai International Airport Terminal 3. ‘Huge queues. It’s atrocious. A major thing like this and they can’t even provide toilets.’

Men, Greed has discovered, don’t appreciate her investigations into their bathroom business. ‘Talking about how many urinals should be provided or how long it takes men to urinate – some people probably think a girl shouldn’t know these kinds of things.’ And pee is mild on the spectrum of Greed’s favourite topics. Periods, Greed says, make men go red. ‘I used to be very professional and technical,’ she tells me, ‘and now I don’t care. I just say what I want to say.’

How much money, I wonder, would you have if you tallied up all the dimes collected in automated stall-lock pay toilets in the 1970s and 1980s across North America? Pay-to-pee, for a time, wasn’t unexceptional in the United States and Canada. The early twentieth century saw the burgeoning of this trend, which spiderwebbed its way across the continent by way of transit terminals and shopping malls. By the 1970s, it’s estimated there were fifty thousand pay toilets in the United States. Ten cents a tinkle.

Pay toilets were flushed out of America by the efforts of a small committee of free-weeing advocates known as CEPTIA – the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, about which the journalist Aaron Gordon wrote a colourful narrative history in 2014 in Pacific Standard magazine. Cooked up at a Howard Johnson pay toilet off the Pennsylvania Turnpike by two brothers and proselytized by their friends and family, CEPTIA argued that elimination is inevitable – dime or no dime – and demanding money for a basic bodily function is a violation of human rights. Moreover, CEPTIA argued, stall locks represented discrimination against women, since urinals usually remained free. The feminist argument was the one that hit hardest in Equal Rights Amendment−engrossed mid-seventies America. First city – and soon state – governments banned the locks.

Locks were part of the scenery at the local mall when I was growing up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a suburb of Halifax. I remember always stopping in to get a dime from my grandmother, who worked at the House of Bridal Fashions. Other times, I slithered under the stall door to avoid the charge (a dime clearly meant more to me then). Apparently, I wasn’t alone: Gordon’s history notes the four techniques of foiling stall locks, rolled out by CEPTIA (who, besides being a grassroots social-justice powerhouse, was also delightfully jocular) at a press conference in 1973. There was my own ‘American Crawl’; the ‘Doorman,’ where one user holds the door for the next; the ‘Stick It,’ in which a piece of Scotch tape invisibly covers the lock, preventing it from engaging; and the ‘Stuff’ – same idea, but with toilet paper rammed into the hole.

I recall witnessing that technique at the mall. Wait. Or do I? Bob Pasquet was a manager at the shopping centre of my childhood and preteen indolence, and he remembers those diabolical dime-purloiners controlling access to the outside of the main bathroom door, not the individual stalls. (Then why the heck was I sliding my body along the grotty old bathroom floor – ew! – instead of just opening the door?) I canvassed the memories of childhood friends. Some sided with Pasquet, others with me. There’s this, too: I remember locks in the 1980s. Pasquet says they were removed about 1977, too early for me to remember them. Here’s what’s certain, anyway: women shoppers lugging bedraggled children would routinely march into Pasquet’s office to complain. ‘I always tried to convince them that they were better off paying a dime,’ Pasquet says, ‘and pretty well anybody can afford a dime, and if you didn’t have a dime, you could get one from pretty well any store. In my opinion, they stopped some vandalism.’ But not all. Men would knock the stall doors off their hinges and smash the toilet paper holders. Women, Pasquet says, weren’t as inclined to lavatory savagery, but were messier. ‘Toilet paper and all sorts of awful.’ He wonders if the vandalism was an ironic product of people’s anger over having to pay. Still, he says, ‘I don’t remember a lot of controversy.’

After my chat with Pasquet, I wondered about the alleged bad manners of women. My husband worked in a bar in his twenties and had to clean the bathrooms after his shift. He once echoed Pasquet’s comments, saying: ‘All those tiny pieces of toilet paper all over the floor. I never understood it.’ Then it struck me – all those minuscule pieces represent something much bigger. Women don’t just wait in lines to use public bathrooms, we actually use bathrooms differently than men. We have more parts of the bathroom to navigate. We can’t really stand up to pee, so when we’re faced with a particularly dirty seat, many women choose to hover. It’s an excellent quadriceps-hamstring workout, I’ll grant, but it usually ends up leaving more splashed pee on the seat for the next person. Having a properly operating and adequately stocked bathroom is worth more to women, because we rely on the function and inventory more.

First: men don’t use toilet paper at urinals. (Look, just admit it.) Even the ones who opt for stalls don’t bother wiping when they urinate, or, at least, they don’t wipe as commonly as women. There’s more toilet paper mess in women’s bathrooms because women actually use the stuff. And there’s so much on the floor because of the half-assed design of commercial toilet paper dispensers, the kind of paper they hold, and the way they’re installed. To start, the paper is single-ply, wraithlike; you need great gobs of the stuff to get anything done with it. It’s manufactured on hulking rolls the size of extra-large pizzas, the weight of the things so heavy compared to the lightness of the toilet tissue that one semi-aggressive pull instantly rips it. The plastic dispensers are likewise no match for the beef of those giant rolls, so the paper clunks out in frustrating stop-starts. And here’s the kicker: the dispensers are, so often, installed too low – women are grabbing up and under at the paper from a trapped seated position. The paper flies off in Lilliputian bits as we awkwardly tug.

And yet…how can this be?! Anyone accustomed to sitting on a public toilet and using toilet paper could ferret out the appropriate height for a dispenser. Here’s my stab at the reason that simple user-friendliness is so elusive inside the toilet cubicle: men install the dispensers. It hearkens back to the point Clara Greed made to me when she was laying out the reasons women so often wait in bathroom lines: men dominate planning, design, and construction. Men aren’t the ones usually sitting on public toilets to pee, scrounging for paper to wipe. Women are. But women either aren’t doing the installing, or they aren’t being asked what works and why.

So, as women sit on the toilet clawing at the paper; as we work with more complex clothing, and live the biological fact of taking longer to empty our bladders than men; as we change tampons and children’s diapers and assist elderly relatives – what happens? Lines form for women’s bathrooms. Longer and longer and longer. I mean, just ask Hillary Clinton. In December 2015, the then presidential hopeful was late getting back to the stage after a commercial break during a live televised Democratic debate. As the moderator posed a question to Bernie Sanders about median household income, Clinton strode to her podium, in front of the cameras, her opponents, and 6.7 million viewers and pronounced a deadpan ‘Sorry.’ Turns out, she was in a lineup for the ladies’ room. The solution here, and for every woman kept waiting in line, isn’t to fix the women. Women aren’t what’s broken. What’s broken is bathrooms. And the fix is potty parity.

Potty parity is a movement that seeks to reduce bathroom waiting time for women by treating men and women, boys and girls, equally. Which is to say, unequally – because, as we’ve seen, an equal number of toilets does not make for equal waiting time. So the ‘parity’ ratios mean an increase for women: sometimes there are two facilities for females to every one facility for males; sometimes it’s 3:1; sometimes it’s 3:2. Potty parity begs the question: Why should women have to wait and men not have to? Ask yourself, and you’ll find there’s no good reason – it’s garden-variety gender discrimination. That’s why the American Restroom Association has been fighting the parity battle since the 1990s and has seen legislation passed at the municipal and state levels. New York City, Philadelphia, California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and other jurisdictions have all enacted parity laws recognizing the greater needs of women.

Canada has potty parity laws, too. The National Building Code of Canada enshrines 2:1 provision in favour of women, and most Canadian provinces and territories have adopted the rules wholesale. Yet, if you’re keeping track, the Halifax Common Pavilion bathrooms I’ve been telling you about rank 5:4 in favour of men. What’s up with that? you ask. What’s up is the intractability of many public bathroom problems – laws apply only to new construction, and older bathrooms aren’t subject to parity code until they’re extensively renovated. We may be starting to think about equity, at least from a statutory level, but we’re still using the same damn bathrooms.

The fight for potty parity goes beyond the battle for more stalls. It’s about getting more bathroom access generally in cities, because women need bathrooms more often than men. Mandating governments to provide public bathrooms at all, let alone to build up standards for the numbers of public bathrooms that should exist based on population, has mostly eluded public toilet advocates. Bathrooms are a political football; their existence is often by the grace of business improvement organizations or parks associations, rather than by law.

While potty parity is squarely about women and people who identify as female – we’ve all got the same problem if we’re in the lineup under the stick figure wearing the skirt – more and better bathrooms don’t benefit women alone. People with invisible disabilities like incontinence, shy bladder syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease all get a lift from more loos. So do parents of small children and caregivers of adults. There are scores of bathroom users out there who could really use the leg up.

Clara Greed knows that her favoured bathroom fixes – including double provision for women and wider stalls – are hard to swallow for governments and businesses. They stretch budgets as they reach for parity. She often hears how challenging retrofits that make more space for women can be. ‘There won’t be any room left for a stage,’ one theatre-owner whined to her. ‘It’s going to all be women’s toilets.’ Governments, at least those up the food chain with the job of legislating changes rather than paying for them, have been more receptive. Greed herself helped write the UK government’s standard on public toilet provision.

The planner is at home with the stodginess of committees and code by way of her training. But she’s unrepentantly grounded in the practical. No wonder. Greed is a woman. She waits in bathroom lines just like the rest of us. Or, perhaps, unlike the rest of us, who fail to notice the injustice or who pass it off as the way things are. ‘I do toilet evangelism standing there in the queue,’ she says. ‘You need to raise consciousness.’ Greed wants to lead a revolution, and not the velvet sort.

If there’s any revolution happening in public bathrooms now, though, it’s being driven by the transgender community. Trans individuals often report feeling out of place in public bathrooms, which are typically strictly sex-segregated and tightly policed by users. To wit: most people, I’d wager, would walk silently past someone they suspected was shooting drugs in a stall. Yet watch a man step foot into the women’s bathroom and he’ll be urgently ushered out for his social transgression. My dad once accidentally strolled into the women’s room at a ski hill as my young daughter tried frantically to alert him. We still talk and laugh about it years later.

This is not the experience of trans people using public bathrooms that fit their gender. Being transgender in a gendered bathroom is rarely funny. Trans people report facing verbal and physical threats and abuse in the bathrooms that are right for their gender, but can be perceived by others as not matching their sex. A solution is unisex or gender-neutral or gender-free (my preferred term) bathrooms, which are being embraced in public schools and universities across North America, in chain restaurants like Tim Hortons, and in government buildings. In 2013, then Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter signed legislation requiring such bathrooms in city-owned buildings; it’s the same in Oregon’s Multnomah County, which includes Portland. But on several fronts, gender-liberated bathrooms fail.

The legislation mostly works like potty parity – only for new construction, so it can take a long time for change to happen. When it does, not everyone’s on board. The conversion from traditional side-by-side, sex-separated bathrooms with multiple stalls to single-user bathrooms may level the peeing field, but it is wickedly expensive and usually decreases provision and adds to lineups. Where once there may have been two stalls in the women’s and a stall and three urinals for men – allowing six people to go at once (unfairly benefiting men, I grant) – there may now be two toilets in two single-occupant rooms that are designated gender-free or ‘family.’ In the less commonly seen conversion to gender neutrality – where signs are simply replaced to declare multi-stall spaces gender-free – there’s been backlash ranging from outright transphobic to merely wary. Even declaring existing single stalls gender-free has its detractors.

Clara Greed, for her part, likes the idea of gender-free washrooms, but won’t stand for them if it means the removal of women-only spaces. She points out the prohibition against sharing such space with biological males among some Muslim women, fundamentalist Christian women, Hindu women, and Orthodox Jewish women. She says there’s a social function of public bathrooms that’s being lost with sex desegregation: ‘The public toilet is one of the few places left where women can be actually separated from men.’

Uprisings of any stripe are becoming more complicated, at least in England and its surrounds. Whereas North Americans, and certainly Canadians, haven’t enjoyed much on-street public provision, the UK has a long tradition of recognizing the need for stand-alone public bathrooms in city centres (even if they have been designed, in the main, for men – more on that in chapter six). But today, public toilets are disappearing. A 2016 BBC report found, through Freedom of Information requests, that at least 1,782 facilities had closed across the UK in the preceding decade. In London alone, it’s estimated that about half of council-managed public bathrooms have closed: city governments don’t see their value justifying the cost of their maintenance. Some of London’s ornate underground Victorianera facilities are being sold off and transformed into kicky little cafés and hip restaurants. I love charcuterie, sure, but there is a limit. Today’s toilet campaigns, increasingly, aren’t for better provision, but to keep what’s there now.

Greed turns to the business case. When visitors come to Britain, she says, ‘they are disgusted by our public toilets and the lack of facilities.’ But she’s also convinced that better provision helps breathe life into dusty downtowns. Public bathrooms, she argues, are far from money down the drain. ‘I keep asking god for a toilet miracle, but I haven’t seen one yet. It’s like the miracle of the five thousand loaves and fishes. I want five thousand more toilets.’