Are you laughing yet?
This is Potty DISparity- something I hate about London: the above picture speaks for itself. If you can't tell what is going on here, let me tell you: this is a picture of women standing in line for the toilets. Also, if you can't tell, no men are waiting in line.
The voice you hear is Lars saying, "Ist geil!" or "is funny," loosely translated, as I turned the video setting on. Lars knows how much I abhor the queue for the washroom/restroom/WC/toilets or powder room, depending on your dialect.
I am not exaggerating; this is a real problem everywhere I went in England. I can't tell you how annoying it is to stand in line for 15 minutes and watch 15 men or so walk by into the men's room giving you the pity smile. They are thinking, "oh man, glad that isn't my line."
Ever noticed that men never stand in line?
As a woman, I feel that I have two choices, I can either hate the women in the line because there are too many too many of us, or I can hate the men, because they don't have to wait. What do you choose? The correct answer is neither. Someone else is responsible for this. The planners, engineers and lawmakers are responsible.
Well, the US has improved a lot in this regard due to regulation and parity laws. I talked to Brant, my stepfather, about this. He works for the Florida Department of Transportation and told me that this issue is called, "potty parity." The fact is that women need more toilets than men for various reasons. It takes us longer to use the restroom because we have to do more than pull down a zipper. It also takes longer because, for physiological reasons, we use the restroom more often. Apparently, incontinence and urinary tract infections are more common in women, confounded by menstruation, which partly explains this. There are technical differences to the way men and women use restrooms too; women use the same stall for all uses whereas men have a streamlined separation of use system: urinals and toilets. The result is, men need less time to use the restroom because of zippers and urinals, and need to go less often.
There is a third factor and that is that the elderly need to use the restroom more often than the young for biological reasons again, and most older people are statistically female. So, if you are a person, who needs to use the restroom, you are most likely going to be a woman, and you are going to need more time than the minority of men going to the bathroom. This is why equal stalls for men and women is not fair. Equal is not fair in this situation. It is counter-intuitive, sure, but engineers can calculate what the ratio of toilet facilities should be for women and men.
There's no shame in being a woman! I feel insulted waiting in line. Time standing in line is time wasted for me, and there is nothing I can do about it, even if I try not to drink at all, I'll never be a man, so I'll never get the fast line. It was all planned this way. No one cares that me and the little old ladies are waiting in line and we really gotta pee!
Maybe I don't need to continue on this point, but here is a little factoid: the term "potty parity" became popular when a California lawyer, a man- by the way-, started a movement by saying that an equal number of toilets for men and women is not fair. His motivation was not entirely selfless; he admits that he was tired of waiting on his wife while she waited in line to use the restroom.
From Wikipedia
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