My TIME.com column today on the tortuous experience – especially for women – of living without proper sanitation. I can’t forget trudging — mercifully only as a short-term voyeur — through villages in Africa and South Asia, with no idea where to change tampons, no idea how people cope without toilet paper and pads and even buckets of water and soap. And yet everywhere I went, people were bathing in rivers like this photo, trying to stay clean and maintain their dignity, which in some ways only worsens the problem. I know these stories don’t get nearly as many hits as my pieces on movies and sex, but I really like to dust off that public health degree once in a while and am grateful to my wonderful editor, Ruth Konigsberg, for letting me publish it.
Children bathing next to toilet in South Asia. (Photo: TIME)
From TIME.com:
Urination isn’t one of the first words that leaps to mind when people think of civil rights, but activists in Mumbai have launched a new campaign called the “Right to Pee” to redress gross inequities in the allocation of public restrooms. In New Delhi, for example, according to the New York Times, there are more than 1,500 public restrooms for men and only 132 for women.
The burden of bad sanitation affects almost all poor people but it falls disproportionately on females: in urban areas, there is a fee for most public washrooms, but men can use urinals for free and they frequently relieve themselves in public when facilities are lacking. In rural areas, where most people have to defecate openly, women are often subject to harassment or assault when they relieve themselves. To avoid the need to urinate, they often withhold hydration, a practice resulting in high rates of urinary-tract infections, heatstroke and other health problems. And coping with menstruation in the absence of privacy, water or sanitary products can be a nightmare…
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/06/19/are-toilets-a-feminist-issue/#ixzz1yFEEurCG
Yes, toilets are a feminist issue. In New York, especially in Broadway theaters, one sees at intermission a legion of men troop to and from the men’s room. Meanwhile a lengthening line of women wait patiently in line in the halls until the lights flicker and the next act begins: few of them actually managed to use the women’s room. While men glide in and out of their assigned restroom, women are forced to wait in public areas – and what is less private that standing in public clearly awaiting a chance to relieve oneself? This is a building code issue, and codes are largely written by men. The building code requires “X” number of fixtures for men and women. But a study of bathroom use shows women need “2X” fixtures. I’m an architect and our firm regularly doubles the number of toilets in women’s rooms. We also always design an anteroom, so that any waiting can be done in an all-women environment, and out of the public eye (It’s more a dignity than a privacy issue). Surprisingly, on the state of Virginia requires one and half times the number of fixtures for public restrooms for women compared to the number of fixtures provided to men. In the meantime, women should feel free to avail themselves of ample accommodations in the restrooms provided for men. Mayor Bloomberg would do well to decree that Broadway theaters (among the worst offenders) provide at least three times the number of toilets for women than they currently offer.
The only time I ever saw a line of men waiting outside a restroom was at a Thursday morning New York Philharmonic rehearsal – the rehearsals are quite inexpensive and attract a large audience of retired men and women. At intermission the men – all of whom were beyond middle age – seemed to suffer prostate-inspired urgency and raced to the men’s room, and for the first time in their lives were confronted with the insult of a long, public wait. I’d never seen such a nervous and distraught formation of men. Maybe they could lobby Mayor Bloomberg, too.
Thanks so much for this interesting architect’s perspective. Love the Philharmonic example! People are so uncomfortable talking about bodily functions, but it’s a problem even in ‘first world’ economies, as you say. One thing often forgotten is that women are almost always the ones carting little kids to the bathroom, so in addition to the more complicated ‘mechanics’ of peeing for women, and the issue of periods, they just have more people — uncooperative, truculent, messy people – to deal with in restrooms, too! (And don’t get me started on the many times I had to breastfeed in a toilet stall…)
I saw your post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. While I agree with you that sanitation is a feminist issue or an issue of diversity, I do so for different reasons. This is a struggle that I have spent some of my career puzzling over. To figure out how to move feces without using water pipes, i.e. is to find a solution for a century or more of stagnant ideas about public utilities. Send a rocket to the moon — easy. Flow, or conveyance of a basically toxic substance, or, for that matter any substance, water, energy, electricity, through our villages to or from a public collecting point – has exhausted ideas, buzz, excitement, sexiness, whatever you want to call it. The reality at its least virtual is that toilets do not save lives. We suffer from our 18th century preoccupation with water as a conveyor belt. Easy flow of goods and money through a pipe. This is especially true for villages here in Alaska where a toilet is the flushing point to a network of pipes which must be buried to below frost depth, impossible in permanently frozen ground, or be elevated and be a major obstruction – try bringing a fire truck into a village with a ring of utility pipes in place of a main street. Literally millions of dollars have been flushed away on solutions such as whole-village vacuum tube systems, four-wheelers fitted with pumper vacuums, and buckets with special slosh-proof covers. Other forms of reducing quantities, such as incinerator toilets and composting toilets have met similar barriers — which is the insufficient flow of money from residents to the common good and back, a lamentation of water as the good model for this, which in turn reflects the basic failure of flow in places where things do not flow easily. After all of the congressional appropriations are spent, and engineers have specified the latest pump, it’s back to cumbersome transactions, transporting human waste in buckets to a central lagoon, open to the air, which becomes the vector for disease from which women and children suffer disproportionately. Floods of money do not solve this, at least not in the long term. When the public utility grid reaches into rural areas, the concept of the public-utility grid breaks down the same way that capitalism does.
What a fascinating comment. Many thanks for your thoughts. I have been to a lot of ancient sites (married to a Greek!) and am always struck by the “ancientness” of our plumbing strategies. As you say, the flow/water motif is exhausted in many, or most, parts of the world, and we need a new approach.