During intermission at last night’s Moth StorySLAM at The Oberon in Cambridge, I went to the restroom.
The Oberon has converted its formerly gender-specific restrooms to gender-neutral restrooms. When I entered what was once a men’s room, I was greeted with the typical line that can be found during intermission, except that this line contained both women and men.
Nine people in all. Five women and four men were queued up in front of the four urinals and three stalls. Some were chatting while waiting. Others scrolled through their phones. As far as I could tell, no one thought this odd or inappropriate.
And why would they?
Women used the stalls. Men used the urinals or the stalls.
One of the women in line actually knew me from previous performances and asked me for some storytelling advice while we waited to pee.
For someone like the Vice President, who can’t have dinner alone with a woman who isn’t his wife or drink a beer when his wife is not present, I would imagine that this scenario might cause him to blow a gasket. His seemingly admitted inability to control his lustful desires might erupt into an uncontrollable fervor at the mere thought of a semi-naked woman behind a thin restroom partition.
But for the majority of Americans who operate as normal human beings and who aren’t so fearful of temptation that they must quarantine themselves from the opposite sex without a marital chaperone, this gender-neutral reconfiguration is working out just fine.
Perhaps in the future the restroom design could be differentiated this way:
Gender-neutral restrooms
Single use restroom for the perverse who can’t control themselves when genitals are exposed privately but in the vicinity of their own genitals
