So there’s a big deal these days about using the “correct gender rest room.” And maybe this is a provocative notion, but maybe we should just get over it. Here’s why.
Years ago, I was at the Rites of Spring progressive rock festival (ROSfest) in Gettysburg, PA. One of the things you have to know about prog is that the audience is primarily men—and often older men. So prog concerts are one place where the men’s rest room line is longer than the women’s. I had a conversation with one man there (violating one of the cardinal rules of the men’s room—don’t talk to anyone in the public bathroom) about our advanced ages, prostates, and diuretics. Fortunately, there was a long gap between bands so we did not need to rush the women’s room.
More recently, attending a theatre production at the local art gallery I, like many of the audience, needed to use the rest room at intermission. To get there, we had to descend the back stairs, and walk toward the front of the building to the room that had three stalls in the single rest room. Panic! Audience members felt that they could only go in if there were other members of the same gender as them at the same time. Personally, I could pee regardless of who was in the next stall, but I guess for some, it creates a problem.
Side note: in grad school, a colleague asked me if it was weird to be using a urinal next to my dissertation adviser. Not at the time! It would be now after I fired him….
And side note #2: when people ask me what celebrities I have met, I tell them that I once used a urinal next to Orson Bean.
Finally, the one memory that prompted this blog post. In one of my positions, I had to enter a ladies’s room to counsel a female student who was panicking with stage fright. How weird to be standing at the door of a toilet stall speaking to someone sitting on the floor next to a commode.
I feel the need to explain that, yes, of course I sent another female student in to the room first to make sure that it was clear for me, a male professor, to enter, and check to see if she was okay. And fortunately I metaphorically talked her down and got her back to the stage. But it does count as one of the stranger moments of my teaching and directing career.
MUSOFYR 