Waiting In Line
We recently went to a movie theater to watch a film—the first since being vaccinated and the first in well over a year. There was no line for the attendant who checked the tickets we bought on-line but there was a pretty long line for buying snacks. We decided against popcorn and instead found our seats in the theater and waited for the commercials to end and the previews to begin.
Looking around the room, it might have been half-empty. There were still plenty of seats available, even disregarding the buffer seats between groups of masked people. I don’t miss crowded theaters at all.
It was great to watch previews on a big screen and we really enjoyed the film: a fine way to spend a couple of hours after waiting to venture back out for so long. Which, of course, led to using the restrooms after the film. I waited for my wife just outside the restrooms after I was finished.
Pause for a moment and consider that: even after a screening at a half-full theater, the women’s bathroom had a line.
Caroline Criado Perez explains in great detail a fundamental failure of building codes and the architecture of public places in her book Invisible Women: women’s bathrooms are the same square footage as men’s bathrooms. I will state this plainly and briefly: what might seem like logical and geometrical equivalence of gendered restrooms is nonsense on stilts, enshrined in ignorant building codes.
OK, I’ll expand on this somewhat. There are slightly more females in the overall population, who tend to need a little more time to use the restroom in accordance with their biology. Women also require stalls to address these needs, which clearly require more space than urinals. Women tend to live longer than men, so there tend to be more, older women who might have a disability using the restrooms than men—again requiring a bit more time. Women still tend to do most of the childcare, so women are changing diapers or helping our children use the restrooms as well: again, more time needed. (I don’t have children, but I have overheard some of these proceedings and am aware that even just going pee-pee can be an epic saga.)
It is manifestly obvious that women’s restrooms are grossly under-provisioned for the population they are intended to serve. No one in their right mind would want their wife, their sister, their mother, their daughter, their grandmother or their granddaughter to have to wait in line for far longer than comfortable just because of a stupid and myopic convention.
The scientific community has developed an insanely effective vaccine in an astonishingly short period of time. This breakthrough is nothing short of breathtaking and awe-inspiring, and the benefit to humanity is enormous—even allowing us to go back to the movies with minimal risk. So now let’s fix the goddamned building codes so that women’s restrooms are adequately sized.