"The women of Bikini Kill let guitarist Billy Karren be in their feminist punk band, but only if he's willing to just "do some shit." Being a feminist dude is like that. We may ask you to "do some shit" for the band, but you don't get to be Kathleen Hannah."--@heatherurehere


Friday, July 20, 2007

Being "in Control" - ??

Last Monday evening in Chicago I enjoyably went to a Chicago Cubs baseball game. During the game I went to the men's room. It was a fairly large room with very long metal urinals and toilets in the back.

As I approached one of the large urinals I saw a 20's ish young lady moving out of the restroom. I have to presume that there was a line for the women's room and she had decided instead to use the men's room.

For me it was amusing and not an issue.

I heard several men responding to what was happening (not positively). One in particular said: "She had a smirk on her face" in apparent anger at "his" male space being violated (I'm guessing).

While not attributing too much meaning to what happened, it seemed and seems amusing to me to see what it can feel like when men have "their space" invaded and feel disempowered faintly, faintly in ways that women and girls and sometimes even boys may face in many other ways more frequently from (some) adult men.

Thanks!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Personally, I have no problems with women using the men's room.

However, men can't use the women's restroom with the same freedom; they would be looked at as dirty male pigs. There is a double standard. Maybe that's why some men feel that their space is being invaded when women use the men's room.

Jeff Pollet said...

Ah hugh...you seem to be confusing different standards with double standards, and oversimplifying the situation while you're at it.

If all else in our society/world/reality were equal, it would be a double-standard. Unfortunately, things aren't equal--most rape, for instance, involves men raping women; as such, pseudo-private, enclosed, sometimes lockable-from-the-inside spaces are considerably safer for women if they are gender-specific. (This is an extreme example, of course, and there are lots of other reasons we might want to have gender-specific restrooms.) So, there are different standards for men and women as regards gendered spaces like bathrooms because, in part, of the real-world power differences involved.

Which isn't to say that there can't still be problems in gendered spaces when everybody sticks to their own restroom--men can rape men, for instance, to say nothing of the problems involved in gender-policing such places in general, where bio-women get booted out of women's rooms for not being easily readable as feminine and the like.

Not every different standard is a double standard.