Let Us Rise Up and Bridge the Gaps… in Public Restroom Stalls

My fellow Americans,

I feel the need to come before you and tell you that we have a problem on our hands, a problem that affects every single one of us:

Friends, I’m talking about the gaps in public restroom stalls.

Who among us hasn’t innocently looked up at the mirror while washing her hands at the sink, only to meet the outraged eyes of a person seated on the toilet in the stall behind her? Which of us hasn’t struggled to pull up her drawers while a curious eight-year-old watched intently through the half-inch crack in the door?

We as a nation have come to take the gaps in public restroom stall doors as an immutable condition to the terms of our existence. Get online and you’ll find hundreds of websites offering commiseration and advice on how to deal with those infernal gaps– Some suggest hanging toilet paper over them, others recommend keeping a large cloth on hand that can be draped over the entire stall door.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

Wikihow even offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to handle the problem. Number four is my personal favorite:

This makes me chortle every time I read it, mostly because in my experience, the eyes peering at me generally belong to some elderly woman who’s just trying to find an unoccupied toilet. I can’t WAIT to say loudly, “Stop it you pervert,” the next time that happens.

Maybe you’re wondering now why I care about this subject so much. Stay with me, people. There’s a point to this diatribe, and it’s going to rock your world. Not long ago, I read a blog post about the many things that foreigners find strange about the United States. Guess what made the list SEVERAL times?

Yes, readers… It’s true. Other countries have pooled their collective brainpower and managed to design and implement gapless public restroom doors.  Reports from Japan, Italy, Germany, and the UK all indicate that their public restroom stalls do not allow any opportunities whatsoever for pervert peeping.

Witness this typical restroom in Italy:

And we call ourselves a superpower.

The reasons I’ve found as to why we Americans have to endure restroom stall gaps have varied, but all of them are unacceptable.

One is that it’s cheaper– yes, cheaper to make us share one of our most private moments with a complete stranger. NOT ACCEPTABLE.

Another is that the gaps are necessary to ensure that nothing inappropriate is going on in there.

Um.

One public restroom designer loftily explained online that there was simply no point in creating a more private public restroom stall– because the American public would simply defile and destroy it in much the same way it has the current restroom stalls. To him, I say maybe we’re destroying our current bathroom stalls in a radical act of protest against your stupid gaps. 

Or maybe not. It’s just a theory.

Finally, there’s this supposition from an academic, Margaret Moran, who wrote an entire book about what she calls “that supreme object of utility, shining, hygienic, gleaming in all its ostensible neutrality, that grand signifier of twentieth-century modernism, that white porcelain of the toilet bowl.” On the subject of America’s public restroom stalls, she had this to say:

One might wonder: why are those gaps there at all? Surely the stalls could be constructed without those narrow spaces through which looks into and out of the stall can be exchanged. It is almost as if to heighten the tension between public and private and to raise the possibility of an ostensibly prohibited exchange.

You just have to imagine that this woman must be a real hoot at cocktail parties.

We may never know the root of the problem, but we can as a nation call for a solution.

Friends, Romans (I guess), Countrymen, lend me your ears. It is time to Bridge the Gap…. preferably with opaque materials that are durable and resistant to graffiti and biohazardous fluids.

I am calling now for an end to the cracks in public restroom stalls, and so should you, too.

Contact your state legislators! Your city council! Your Rotary Club! Your homeowners association president! Your best friend’s nephew’s son who sings in that band that was on Jimmy Kimmel a few weeks ago! The Supreme Court! Bill Freaking Gates!

TELL them that you’re tired of being watched by perverts and elderly women while you tinkle, and URGE them to help put a stop to it! Our nation’s future depends on a resolution to this widespread problem!

Thanks for your attention, and may you go in peace… AND PRIVACY.

Header image via ttarasiuk/Flickr