Unrest over restrooms

Without a doubt, the bathroom is everyone’s Escape Room. This is the place where one can truly be oneself — whether one is a he or a she or in a doubt about, writes Indu Balachandran

It was a Man’s world. Till Eve made an appearance. Suddenly Adam, who really didn’t give a fig, or even a fig leaf, about concepts like bathrooms, felt he must have his own private space for private stuff — and that’s how the world began to have separate toilets for Man and Woman. Neatly labelled His and Hers.

Aha! Today life isn’t that simple anymore with people demanding gender-neutral washrooms; or to complicate things even more: many different separate toilets in our multi-gender, preferred-identity trend all over the world.

It was Captain Kirk from the famous Star Trek series who articulated a line that was a perfect fit for boundaries for privacy: ‘Where no man has gone before’. Women's toilets were out of bounds for men, and vice versa. Men went to the door marked with a graphic of a gent. Women went to the door marked with a graphic of a lady. But in a world where women wear the pants, and men love experimenting with dresses, it’s all getting a bit confusing which way to go.

Best place to think

If you’ve been to the Musee Rodin in Paris, you’d have seen the most iconic sculpture in the world, The Thinker — a man leaning forward in a sitting position, hand on chin, deeply contemplating Something. This image became symbolic of private bathroom spaces where we sit and do our best thinking. Or dreaming. Or ideating. It’s also the place where one realises a fundamental truth of life: Love may be the greatest feeling in the world. But the relief of empty intestines is often a better feeling.

As this sometimes takes time, even in public bathrooms, some men began writing amusing things on walls — leading to the whole concept of ‘toilet humour’ — something that women began to abhor. All the more reason the feminine gender never entered the men’s room, ever.

This low form of wit, often with scatological content, has special appeal for men right from when they are little boys — who go hysterical laughing at any sentence that has the word poop, pee, gas, burps in it.

Little girls typically were raised never to utter such words in public (particularly the common word for flatulence).

That’s why I was so happy to see that women are coming out to compete with men in the field of toilet humour — though of a refined and witty variety. Recently an event I regularly follow called the Edinburg fringe festival’s annual World Toilet Day Jokes Contest was won by a woman, Bec Hill. Beating hundreds of jokes sent in by men. Bec won the trophy for her one-liner: “For Christmas, I was given Sudoku toilet paper as a gift. It’s useless. You can only fill it with number one and number two.”

It beat other entries like “Did you hear of the film ‘Constipated’? It never came out.” And also: “Brexit is a breakfast cereal you eat when you’re constipated.”

Well, it’s no joke when bathrooms become the cause of marital clashes in homes. As marriage counsellors often advise couples, the most important rule for marriages to succeed is to have separate bathrooms at home. When the kids come along, it’s another story altogether.

The ‘Escape Room’

Without a doubt, the bathroom is everyone’s Escape Room — even if it’s called a whole lot of euphemisms like washroom, restroom, powder room, comfort room, the can or just simply the loo. This is the place where one can truly be oneself — whether one is a he or a she or in a doubt about. That’s why on November 19 every year (World Toilet Day) there are new tributes to the most amazing invention of all time since the days of the chamber pot.

I also have noted this alarming statistic: in India, more people have a mobile phone than access to a toilet (and if they do find a toilet, they’d probably take selfies immediately while on the seat).

Apparently, the Swachch Bharat campaign resulted in building 110 million toilets in just five years…but we now need four times that number.

Breaking the unfair binary rules for restrooms, we’ll be truly happy only when we get to the day when we see several doors marked with a spectrum of gender identities such as He/Him, She/Her, They/Them, Ze/Zir.

(He Said/She Said is a monthly column on gender issues — funny side up. The author switched to a career in Advertising/Travel Writing as world markets may have collapsed if she ever became an economist. Reach her at [e-mail])