• A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I mean…you are more right than you think.

      Bathroom fixture manufacturers created a massive marketing/propaganda campaign around the idea of Hygiene, and the idea that its better for your health and safety, simply because they wanted to sell more fixtures…and the way to do that was to get more houses built with indoor plumbing facilities, because in the era before this… a solid chunk of the population still used outhouses, and bathed in portable tubs they filled with water heated up one pot at a time on a stove once every few weeks… if that. and because filling the tub was so much work, the whole family washed in it, without changing the water… usually the husband first, then the mother, then the kids in order of age got to bath in the bouillabaisse of mom and dads filth.

      You’d be gobsmacked how many things like that are the result of marketing.

      Milk being essential for bone health? Another marketing gimmick, from the dairy industry.

      Diamonds are essential for proposals/weddings? Another marketing gimmick, from the diamond cartels.

      and more.

  • andros_rex@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 hours ago

    When I was in college, it was funny how the engineering building only had one restroom per floor - they were all mens until like the 70’s, cuz wommin can’t be engineers of course.

  • Carrot@lemmy.today
    82·
    7 hours ago

    I’m all for all-gender bathrooms, but there MUST be at least two public bathrooms at any given spot. I can’t tell you how uncomfortable it is to take a first date to a museum, both need to use the bathroom, and walk into the single, silent, all-gender bathroom, and try to pretend you can’t hear each other doing your business. I assume gay folks have been struggling with this since the beginning, but y’all should have said something

    • Zkuld@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 hours ago

      But they have to be careful because otherwise people might realize it’s cheaper and easier to just label bathrooms with “sitting” and “sitting+standing”.

  • solrize@lemmy.ml
    10·
    13 hours ago

    It’s sort of the other way. Buildings in the southern US before the 1960s, besides having gendered bathrooms, also had separate bathrooms for white and black people. So 4 kinds of bathrooms. The Pentagon today is apparently a bathroom user’s paradise, because it was built in the 1940s with enough bathroom capacity for all its users even having the 4 kinds of bathrooms. Then after desegregation, its bathrooms got consolidated into just 2 kinds (by gender). So it now has 2x more bathroom capacity per person than newer office buildings have.

    • klay@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      are you sure its 2 times the capacity per person now? Because that makes no sense. Without additional info, there should be the same amount of people using the same capacity of bathrooms now.

      Just the number of bathrooms usable per person has changed, so you are more likely to have a bathroom nearby. But you don’t have more room or more toilets per sé.