What we need is unisex restrooms to prevent the rising spread of homosexuality.
Surely she should be writing about Judaism and the near east, instead of public rest rooms. Yeef!
What a load of crap.
So "Gershenson recommends the Museum of Toilets in India...[but] she was able to conclude that the actual museum might not be easy to visit."
Do I smell a grant application in the making?
Liberals can't seem to get past their genitals in anything they talk about or think about.
Ph.D = Personality has Departed
I have a number of questions about toilets, gender and space:
Does a man in a unisex bathroom automatically get arrested for exposure when he uses a urinal?
Is passing gas in a unisex bathroom a sign of misogeny--or a form of "hate speech"?
Since it always takes so much longer for women to use the toilet, many public venues give more space/toilets to women's facilities. With unisex toilets will the mysteries of long stays, creating long lines, by women be revealed? Is the secret problem: a)fitting problems on panty hose. b)make-up application. c)gossiping d)all of the above.
When I first saw the ''Call for Papers -- Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets" posted on an academic website, my beeswax detector went off. There can't really be two professors planning to publish a book working from ''the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division" . . . can there?
Olga Gershenson, assistant professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, didn't respond to my initial e-mail, so I asked UMass spokesman Patrick Callahan if this might be a hoax. ''Possibly," opined Callahan, who sees a lot more academic life than I do. ''But something tells me it's not."
Good call, Patrick! When I did reach Gershenson, she confirmed that her book endeavor, co-edited by Barbara Penner of University College-London, was a ''very serious project in an established field of inquiry combining feminist architecture and feminist design." Penner is the author of two journal articles on related subjects, both published in 2001: ''A world of unmentionable suffering: Women's public conveniences in Victorian London" and ''Female urinals: Taking a stand."