When "Unnecessary" Means "We Don't Wanna"
http://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/when-unnecessary-means-we-dont-wanna/2/16/11
by dentedbluemercedes
In many ways, of course, it's not fair to compare civil rights struggles. There are many different unique aspects to each that get lost in comparison. And yet, there is some value in doing so, as patterns emerge, and they inform our understanding of civil rights movements as a whole. I don't mean to erase or be insensitive to historic and ongoing hardships when I do.
But modern society has this ongoing and irrational fear of others in the washrooms. In the US south, decades earlier, there was reluctance to desegregate washrooms because of "delicate sensibilities" and beliefs in the inferiority and impurity of entire groups of people. In my I-won't-say-how-long-ago social studies class, I remember participating in a debate that drew from current events at that time about washrooms for the disabled... and whether physically challenged people "making others uncomfortable" was a valid reason for a separate designated third restroom (and although the third washroom we're familiar with today now addresses important accessibility issues, remembering the discussions that led to them sure puts a weird and unquiet spin on them, huh?). In the advent of HIV, there were ignorant comments about gay men in washrooms, borne by fears that had not yet been dispelled by science that AIDS could be contracted from a toilet seat. I don't know if it's because we feel so particularly vulnerable when our pants are down that we forget that everyone else values their privacy just as much as we do, but the public washroom continues to be the perennial final frontier.
