Public bathrooms are sexist.

I generally don't align myself too strongly with feminism - not because gender inequalities don't exist. They do. And they are devastating. However, I find that the scope of feminism tends to be too narrow, leaving out huge numbers of people faced with equally distressing circumstances. I'm not denying that women face a unique sort of discrimination, but I think that it's important to recognize all inequality - particularly the types that hit all demographics (especially minorities) such as economic inequality, which is hugely debilitating and rarely seriously confronted.

That being said, public bathrooms are sexist. This may seem like a petty issue (and it is), but I think that it's so fundamental of a concept it really upsets me. I have two main issues with women's bathrooms.

The first is that people always comment about how messy women's bathrooms are, deducing that women are inherently more messy or careless than men. I won't argue that women's bathrooms aren't messy - I've been in them. Of course, I don't spend a whole lot of time in the men's bathrooms for comparison, but I'm willing to believe ours really are the funkier of the two. The problem I have with this is that people seem to forget that women take children into the bathroom with them much more often than men do. For those of you who have never taken a small child in there with you, not only do children need to be closely attended to (making you less concerned about whether your paper towel landed in the trashcan) but also kids are very messy. The combination between poor coordination and natural (constant) exuberance can be explosive. So cut it out with the messy bathroom bit.

But that issue really pales in comparison to my concerns about the actual structures of women's bathrooms. Have you ever noticed that the lines to women's bathrooms are so long that women will actually jump ship and use the men's bathroom, which is often completely empty? I know I've done this on more than one occasion. Did you ever think that maybe they should make our bathrooms bigger? I have. I read a study once that found that women take three times longer just to go to the bathroom than men. This does not include the time we take to fix our hair or complain about our boyfriends. This is pure bathroom essentials. Doesn't it follow that our bathrooms should be about three times bigger? And let's not even get started with what throwing kids into the mix does to these figures.

I'm serious about these complaints. Logically, women's bathrooms should be larger. But getting back to my spiel about feminism being too exclusive, the issue of public bathrooms goes deeper when you're talking about discrepancies between other populations. Think about the difference between "rich" and "poor" bathrooms. How about the problems transgendered folks have just trying to find a safe place to pee? If I weren't being a hypocrite, I would be writing about these things, too.

I realize that this is a silly thing to blog about when so many other terrible things are going on, but sometimes it's the little things that strike you.