As we dont have the gaps in my country my guess is it a US interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as applied to the shitter.
I expect in the USA people, particularly the out groups, are believed to be inherently criminal/immoral and need to be observed to make sure they aren’t doing anything undesirable.
As the US public toilet is primarily a place for moral judgement and not elimation of waste you then get the crazies questioning if people’s gender and equipment meets moral standards for use of the facilities based on casual assessment of their appearance.
As an American, experiencing European toilet stalls was one of the first tangible experiences where I was like “woah we are definitely doing it wrong”. Thanks, uh…Europe.
Going to Tokyo and every toilet being a sing-along butt rinser made me realized western toilets are barbaric.
Except for the ones where you have to pay, I can do without that.
If it means I’m getting a clean toilet, I’d rather pay a Euro for that
It’s never an either/or situation. Like, what, that Euro pays for someone to rush in after every use? Or is it a meaningless transaction meant to cause difficulty.
I remember some pretty nasty pay toilets in Germany, but it of course varies.
Hold up… you mean to tell me that there were stalls available for pooping even though as an American I’ve been taught my whole life that those gaps exist so people don’t do sex in them???
- Cheaper
- So they can be sure you’re not secksing or drugging
maybe you can’t make the doors fit the stalls properly because you don’t use the metric system.
maybe you can’t make the doors fit the stalls properly because you don’t use the metric system.
It would be delightful if this phrase started appearing on affected bathroom walls.
No man, you don’t get it, I was told that a foot is much better, because that’s 12 inches and then 12 can be easily divided by 2,3,4,6
As if you couldn’t just work with wood sizes of 12 or 24cms…
i would accept that if the rest followed.
it’s 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile.
meanwhile everywhere else in the world we just add and remove zeroes as needed. (or move the decimal point)
To be fair, using the decimal system for everything was the No1 mistake of the french revolution. A duodecimal system would have been so much nicer.
A duodecimal system would have been so much nicer.
Everyone loves a library!
I think that’s the Dewey decimal system, which inspired the Chewy decimal system, which is the next innovation in grocery store layouts.
It’s so hard to even conceptualize if it would be better. A few common divisions would be, but is it easier than a decimal system? Would switching to one ever not feel weird if you previously learnt the decimal system?
As with all systematic changes like that, the point is more about the impact on the future generations.
Thought to be honest, hexadecimal doesn’t feel weird to me as someone who frequently analyzes hexdumps. I’d wager it’s totally something you can learn.
yeah we apparently found our digits easier than knuckles when counting. it probably helped that it’s easier to communicate numbers with full digits than pointing parts of them.
Even worse are the urinals without dividers.
Ever used a trough?
It’s almost like that
Ugh, the county fair piss trough
They should replace dividers with mirrors so we can look at other men’s dicks while pissing
spotlights
Or magnifying glass then nobody would mind the possibility.
I feel like you don’t need that much intimacy when pissing but maybe that’s just me.
I feel like you don’t need that much intimacy when pissing but maybe that’s just me.
Who can say?
Me and Slim and Frank were just discussing that over a group trough piss, at the stadium, yesterday.
We agreed that it is pretty intimate.
Carl seemed uncomfortable that we were talking so loudly about it, but those hand dryers are pretty loud, so we had to speak up to be heard.
Admission and further gross exaggeration
(And no, this didn’t happen, of course.
Because, at the stadium, most folks stand just inside the bathroom entrance and just piss generally inward from the edge of the floor stickiness zone.
Most people find it difficult to even hit the side of the troughs from outside the sticky floor zone.)
For all the puritanical shame Americans have of their sexual organs, we sure are lax when it comes to giving a little privacy when taking a shit and sometimes even just pissing in a trough.
It also feels somewhat ironic that US hosts/makes the largest amount of porn
It’s because of the puritanical shame- without those gaps, people might (gasp) have sex in bathroom stalls instead of doing their business as god intended.
I mean, walking by and seeing
How could you not?
ripping basic privacy trumps puritanical values.
Occasionally I hear people argue it’s so you can catch IV drug users without bursting in. Personally I think it’s that capitalism cares not for your happiness and it’s fractionally cheaper to have shitty doors, and so that’s what people do
I think it’s because bathrooms are cost, and so they got enshitified early to discourage costumers from using them.
But where are the costumers supposed to change costume if not in a stall?
That’s a great point.
No its not a profit saving thing. It makes no difference cost wise to save a few cms of wood. Its intentionally designed that way. Go to any other capitalist country than America and you won’t see gaps.
It makes no difference cost wise to save a few cms of wood.
The cost savings is not only in materials. For manufacturing, lower quality materials and larger tolerances. Time to install and repair is lower because of how open the design is. Time to clean is lower because you can just soak the floor and mop without worrying about each stalls’ corners.
Brutal efficiency at the cost of comfort and privacy is what capitalism is all about. The US is just used to it and somehow also incredibly puritanical.
That said, efficiency isn’t a bad thing. There are some countries with some bathrooms that don’t have stalls - legit indoor public bathrooms where you just squat over a hole or urinals that are just one long wide trough. It’s about what you are used to.
Nah I refuse to accept its for efficiency or cost savings. Thats so negligible no one would bring it up. Especially at the scale these are being constructed.
Ive seen a ton of arguments like “oh its to save costs installing if the floor is uneven” or “it gives leeway for different cuts” or “its for cleaning” but these are things can can easily be designed around without having a gap that leaves the user exposed. Either Americans are to stupid to design around this constraint (they aren’t) or theyre intentionally leaving it in for some reasons and there is plenty of speculation on the reasons.
You’re correct, those things are avoidable and can be designed around. However hiring the people who know how to do that also costs money and it’s cheaper to hire shitty engineers who do things safely instead of well. We’re not stupid, we’re exploitative
If you’re gonna build hundreds of thousands of bathrooms you can afford a decent engineer to make a door. Look at any other country, even the poor ones.
Uh, I know it’s because we’re unfortunately too close to the States but in Canada we have the same problem. It’s getting a little better, and we aren’t such babies about gender neutral bathrooms either, but we have our fair share of stall gaps.
I don’t know about you but the vast majority of bathroom stalls I see do not use wood. They are almost all metal, and keeping metal from rubbing on metal in a high humidity environment seems like a cost saving measure to me
Toilets shouldn’t be high humidity environments (that’s what ventilation is there for) and gap-less doors don’t need to rub at all.
That’s what this European high tech that seems to be virtually unknown in the US is for: door rebates.
Its usually wood with metal edges. They dont rub because the hinge has a few mm of clearance. Even if they were to scape the metal should last plenty long and be treated for the environment its in.
Most places I see use a door frame and floor to ceiling walls but in stuff like schools.you still have the shitty stalls but the gaps are 1/10th the size they are im the us. Not enough to look through.
I have doubts about the IV drug users. It would imply that bathroom stalls used to give privacy before IV drugs were a thing, and after indoor plumbing.
I suspect the posted “cheapness” posted elsewhere, or so managers can check who is “slacking off”. (Also so pervs can spy.)
The only reasonable reason I’ve heard is it makes it easier to clean/prevent mold growth. Like y’all don’t need to worry about drug users at the office.
You’d be surprised.
The stalls at my work have zero gaps whatsoever and the door/walls (which are made of wood) go almost to the floor. There’s fairly high quality locking handles that indicate whether or not it’s occupied. It’s amazing and I don’t know of any other public restroom in my area like it.
I’ve worked a couple places where the stalls were like that. There are fixtures they can add to the gaps to cut them off.
Also, places that have all-gender group restrooms typically install gapless stalls because of obvious reasons.
Really? That’s what I’d expect even in a run-down public toilet in a train station over here in Austria.
Y’all have standards. Rights, even.
-over here in insert anywhere but the US.
It always baffles me that this is considered a luxury in the USA while in Germany (and I assume most of Europe) this is the absolute standard. Stalls where the door doesn’t lock properly or where the indicator on the outside is faded so that you can’t reliably determine if it’s occupied are already considered signs of bad maintenance. Gaps that you can look through without pressing your face right against them would be a “nope, I’ll never visit this place again” level scandal.
I am so jealous. My old work had stalls with gaps. The whole room was a bit tight, so you couldn’t just back up far enough to see the feet of the person in the stall. The locks were installed in such a way that if you pulled the door a little, it would open. (So a discreet soft pull on the door was not a good way of determining occupancy.)
The only way to know was to look in the gap.
I was about to go in a stall when I made eye contact with the current occupant of said stall. She just yelled out “YOU CREEPIN?”
I am of course not socially awkward at all and was completely normal when I replied back “no… Sorry.”
Actual privacy in a multi-stall bathroom would be so nice.
Why didn’t you try knocking? Knock twice 2 times, with a few seconds pause in between, if no response, then you can try the door. Going straight to looking into the gap is … creepy imo.
Edit: this was in reply to “The only way to know was to look in the gap.”. And no it wasn’t. Knock for fucks sake, have some manners.
The locks were installed in such a way that if you pulled the door a little, it would open. (So a discreet soft pull on the door was not a good way of determining occupancy.)
Maybe because of that?
Starting with pulling on the door is already impolite imo. If there is no visual cue as to the occupancy of the room, then the first thing one should do is knock. If the light is off or the occupancy signal says it’s free, then sure, try the handle. Otherwise knock first, give the person who is shitting there a chance to reply with “occupied” or to knock back. But looking through gaps or trying if the door opens with the handle and then going “oops sorry”, please no.
Same goes up for offices, meeting spaces, bedrooms etc, when the door is closed and it could be occupied, always knock before attempting to enter. Less bad when someone does it, but still, one could just knock.
Am I too non-USA to understand this?
All you need to know is that toilet stalls in the USA (and Canada) have huge gaps around the doors, unlike other countries. You have to carefully position your head so you’re not making accidental eye contact with people outside, and somehow relax knowing everyone can see you taking a shit.
This is a typical public restroom
Ah… so yes. And wow.
How much door fitting tolerance do you want?
All of it
I think they just suck at carpentry, amongst other things. Doors are haaaard.
Doors being hard doesn’t explain it, since they’re not a problem for the rest of the world (which is the vast majority of it).
Yeah, they don’t know how to make door rebates. They don’t even have that in their actual house doors leading to the road. And we over here even have them on toilet doors.
So you don’t suffocate in there.
they explains why everyone in Europe is dead by suffocating in public toilets.
I am, of course, not joking in any way.
I am, of course, an environmental storytelling toilet skeleton in a European bathroom.
Spoopy, literally?
As someone from Europe I can guarantee you that 5-10cm (2-4") at the bottom and 30cm (12") at the top with almost no gap between the door and wall are by far enough to not suffocate. Maybe put a vent in the ceiling for good measure.
So trans women can be discovered, I suppose.
(Edit: immediately after posting this, it’s prolly way too dark but I’m leaving it there. Also it me, a trans woman terrified of using the stall for this exact reason.)
It explains why there is the debate about which toilet to use for trans people. They can see the other sex naked. It would not be an issue if the doors didn’t have gaps.
I’ve always believed that the whole stall concept was developed by some kind of pervert.
I mean, even when they grant proper visual privacy, that’s just one of our five senses. You can still hear and smell what’s going on next door - and I swear in some cases just about taste it.
To me, “privacy” means all senses.
Not to mention having weirdos peek over the top of the stall, which has happened.
As a man, can I just say that I have never enjoyed peeing shoulder to shoulder with other men.
The reality is that every American has experienced this for their entire lives at this point. The actual popular opinion is “I don’t actually care because every public bathroom I have been in since the 40s is like this.”
More like:
”I don’t actually care because I never use a public bathroom, as long as my health allows, just as the building owners intended."
I assume it’s because it’s cheap infrastructure.
Yeah, being literally as cheap as possible is the main design driver for poop stalls with large gaps. Very forgiving installation, so the cheapest possible labor can put them in to inconsistently built bathrooms with cheap parts using the least amount of materials on the cheapest hinges with the cheapest paint and cheap replacement parts when whatever is in there fails.
Also cheap to repair when it breaks.
Also, some amount of gap at the floor level means the whole room can be sloped down to a single drain when a toilet backs up instead of being contained in a single stall. That is also cheaper.
Eventually, enshittification will hit public restrooms hard and we won’t even have dividers at all. Just a single, giant hole in the floor everyone is expected to pee and shit into while a bank of CCTV cameras watches every angle of the room.
I know of one rest stop that offers stalls with doors, but half of the door is removed so that they can see if someone is partaking of questionable substances in there.
I have heard of several, but that’s the only one I’ve seen myself.
I’ve seen signs for the truck stop showers saying only 1 person is allowed in a shower stall at a time that are clearly only there because dudes be fuckin’ in there.
Eventually? My high school didn’t have dividers and that was 30+ years ago. I feel like dividers are a product of the satanic/ homosexual panic.
You’re all complaining about the gaps, but I once walked into a bathroom which had 5ft doors. The moment I walked in I locked eyes with a guy taking a dump.
It’s so hard for people to make meaningful connection, these days, in our modern, tech-driven society.
