08/08/13: Why do men have to pee in front of each other in public restrooms?

by planresignpart2

August 8, 2013

It doesn’t seem to me that there’s a good reason for it.

Here’s a theory:

The people in charge of everything have almost always been men.

That includes the people who decide what public restrooms are going to be like.

There are and always have been a lot more homosexual men in the world than has ever been admitted.

Homosexuality has been persecuted in a lot of places for a long time.

Making men pee in front of each other in public restrooms is a way for men to be around each other sexually in a society which doesn’t allow homosexuality.

A lot of heterosexual men have probably always hated it.

A lot of homosexual men have probably always felt ambivalent about it.

A lot of homosexual encounters have probably started in public restrooms.

A lot of sexual harassment has probably happened in public restrooms, and in restrooms which employees and bosses both use.

The fact that men have to pee in front of each other is probably also one of the things that makes a lot of men insensitive to women’s concerns about being sexually harassed. Some men really are malicious, and deliberately harass women, knowing that they are being harassing.

However, there are probably some men who are initially insensitive toward women’s concerns, or don’t realize immediately what women’s concerns are, and probably part of the thinking of men such as those is “I wasn’t trying to upset you; I really was trying to make a joke about (whatever it was).” They may not specifically be thinking “I have to pee in front of other men every day; you have to get over things like that,” but if they really thought about why they are insensitive, they might understand that it’s because they themselves have been abused by things such as having to pee in front of other males their entire lives.

If homosexuality had always been perceived for the normal sexual orientation that it is, then probably that abuse would have been addressed and stopped. First of all, secretly homosexual men in power wouldn’t have felt desperate enough to want to continue having public restrooms where men have to pee in front of each other. I would think, also, that problems of homosexual harassment would have been less frequent than they probably always have been, and more men would have felt that their concerns would be taken seriously if they reported being sexually harassed.

I think that there also tends to be an unfortunate and deleterious “toughness” problem about abuses that are entrenched in society. Probably, there are men who think “I got over it; it’s something you have to get over because it’s the way things have always been. I went through it, and everybody else has to go through it, too. It’s just part of being a man.”

There’s no reason that you can’t ask “Why?” about things, not only but especially if they have “always been the way they are.”

Copyright L. Kochman, August 8, 2013 @ 8:55 p.m.