The female toilet is under global threat.
Let me frighten you with one word, gals: Ladiesgents. Shanghai has just become the first city in China to introduce unisex public toilets. Men and women won't pay a visit to separate facilities marked Men and Women, but to communal ones.
Unisex toilets have been tried before in China, but only in parks or hospitals. They did not fare well. Poor signage meant the needy were confused. And in one case, the Ladiesgents was actually inside the Gentsgents, a discriminatory divvy-up of previous facilities.
Aside from the terrors that come to mind about men's ablutions in a shared space, what's most alarming is the prediction of Zhang Chaoyun, deputy director of the Shanghai Public Sanitation and Environment Quality Monitoring Center, that "unisex toilets are a future trend." When Shanghai's Number Two foretells what's in the wind, toilet-wise, the world, and chiefly its women, should worry.
Does this mean an end to the Ladies' toilet? It's not exactly what Virginia Woolf meant when she talked about a room of one's own, but it's a small skip from literary to lavatory relevance.
Hitherto, the rest of the world has viewed China's toilets with hilarity, tittering as the People's Republic sought to match its economic rise with a ceramic one, from hole in the ground to a Western-style pedestal.
It chortled at over-compensation for years of squat misery; like when one city, Linfen, spent 50 million yuan, or £5.2m, on five-star toilets. One resembled an Imperial Palace, another the Watercube acquatics centre in Beijing. Sculptures of beaming families were even positioned outside.
But the world missed the signs of politicisation in China's powder rooms. You see, Linfen's loos also featured a statue of a toilet with the seat being put down. I don't deny the city a chance to recoup its investment from female tourists marvelling at this sight. Yet the casting in stone of a considerate act towards women's toilet habits suggests such courtesy is rare indeed in China.
And did you know about the gender john gap? Thought not. China's ratio of female to male toilets is 1:2.3, an inequitable distribution that was highlighted a couple of years ago when a feminist campaign organized a sit-in of Men's in Guangzhou and Beijing. It wzasn't the same kind of Occupy movement as recent protests in Hong Kong, but passion for the cause was comparable (You can see a report I did here, including an invasion of Chinese male toilets: english.caixin.com/2012-04-06/100376890.html).
Shanghai offers a chance to prove all of this matters far beyond the Middle Kingdom's smallest rooms. Its Ladiesgents featured both a built-in pan and a urinal; if toilet manufacturers sniff money in the unisex market, they'll focus on this design. Bye-bye to bog standard separate cubicles and urinals for the rest of the world. Economically, where China goes, the world follows. The one hope is that gents might join a campaign to save the Ladies. Men famously don't like needy women. Come wait in our queue.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article