Auto-SummaryThe forum post delves into the debate over gender-segregated public restrooms, questioning whether this is a matter of cultural norms or human nature. The author explores historical examples, starting with Japan's transition from mixed-gender hot springs baths to segregated ones around 1868 due to Western influence. In the United States, gender-segregated bathrooms became common after 1887, driven by industrialization, women's increasing presence in the workforce, and societal anxieties about working women. The author notes that while the reasoning behind these laws may seem outdated, the practice persists due to deep-rooted cultural norms. They also mention that historical evidence for gender segregation in public toilets is limited, suggesting that this practice might be more a product of social conditioning than innate human nature. The post concludes that while it's challenging to pinpoint the exact origins of gender-segregated bathrooms, it's clear that cultural influences play a significant role in shaping our perceptions and practices.
qman said:
SunnyD said: Most people are weird about taboos
And stand up to cultural norms
i dont mind too much bathrooms are gender segregated but i find it silly
Is it "cultural norms"? Or is it human nature?
Can you show us where in the world humans choose to have both men and women use the same restroom, I'm not talking about a individual toilet, I'm talking about a room with 10 toilets totally open to both men and women. It can't be a economic reason, it has to be out of choice.
This might be a difficult task less due to human nature and more due to cultural influence.
Though not toilets directly, the query brought up an interesting bit of information on Japan:
Quote: The baths are generally separated by sex, although in some more remote hot springs they still have mixed-gender baths. Actually, the tradition of men and women bathing together in hot springs was standard up until the beginning of the Meiji Period in 1868, when Japan began to open to the west. Mixed-gender onsen largely disappeared because of their “taboo” status in western society. ...
http://untappedcities.com/2012/01/04/a-taste-of-onsen-japanese-communal-bathing-at-sfs-kabuki-springs/
This is not entirely surprising, as when Japan was opened by the West there was a fair bit of rapid cultural adaptation that took place.
What is interesting is that effort to keep genders separate in bathrooms apparently started right around the same time in the United States as well:
Quote: Such laws date back to 1887, according to Terry S. Kogan, a University of Utah law professor and a contributor to the book Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. One hundred and twenty-seven years ago, Massachusetts passed the first law mandating gender-segregated toilets, and many states quickly followed suit. Many of those laws have never been substantially modified, with obvious exceptions in progressive enclaves like D.C. and San Francisco, meaning that much of the United States' toilet-related building codes reflect a literally Victorian prudishness that we might mock in other contexts.
These laws arose due to a confluence of several disparate contemporary movements, Kogan explains in Toilet. The centralization of labor in factories led to the centralization of human waste at work sites, which was carried away by recently developed plumbing technology that had itself been invented in response the newly realized germ theory of disease and the consequent sudden push to improve sanitation. Women's growing presence in the factory workforce, and in public life more generally, triggered a paternalistic impulse to "protect" women from the full force of the world outside their homes, which manifested itself architecturally in a bizarro parallel world of spaces for women adjacent to but separate from men's—ladies' reading rooms at libraries, parlors at department stores, separate entrances at post offices and banks, and their own car on trains, intentionally placed at the very end so that male passengers could chivalrously bear the brunt in the event of a collision. The leap from parlors and reading rooms to ladies-only restrooms was not hard to make, although Kogan admits that "it is not at all obvious what led regulators to conclude that separating factory toilet facilities by sex would protect working women." His research suggests that sex segregation was seen by regulators at the time as "a kind of cure-all" for the era's social anxiety about working women.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/11/sex_segregated_public_restrooms_an_outdated_relic_of_victorian_paternalism.html
The problem that starts when tracing things like this back is that it gets more difficult to find out what was informing decisions at the time. Trying to trace things back to an earlier period in time was not entirely rewarding, as the best result I found stated roughly:
Quote: Unfortunately the architectural design of toilets do not offer any firm clues as to whether Roman latrines operated on a gender-seperation basis, nor is there any written evidence to support this. The presence of men only in a wall painting in Ostia, Italy may point to gender segregation, but the evidence currently available is too limited to make any definitive conclusions.
Click Me (hope this link works)
The chapter goes on to at least indicate that Roman latrines could get very large in size, starting around twelve to fifteen users, scaling up to space for ninety people on communal benches.
There seems like there could be a case to say that gender segregation for bathrooms developed more recently in time; however, it could also be valid to potentially state that since humans felt it to be human nature that bathrooms were separate it was simply never construed as important to document. It also all relies upon toilet facilities being fancy enough to survive or be documented -- how long through human history were we pissing and shitting in a dugout outside a village due to lack of plumbing. Not really going to throw in on either side as being conclusively true without more information, and not really ambitious enough to keep studying the history of public toilets.
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