gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (09/19/84)
[Men are just women (i.e., people) with funny shaped sex organs] Nobody I know seems to mind using the bathroom at home which gets regular use by both men and women. I've been in many situations where women and men could share the same bathrooms, multi-person showers, clothes-changing areas, swimming areas, etc. While there are people who will always be uncomfortable without total privacy (I occasionally go thru such phases), it seems that the sex of the intruder is not the problem. Most people get along fine with "co-ed" areas once they get used to the idea. Remember, the word "co-ed" comes from the time when men and women could not sit in the same CLASSROOM together! I think the uneasiness, shock, and implications of lewdness in this discussion are due to the way this culture plays hide-and-seek with sex. Three year old boys and girls have no trouble taking a bath together, but by their teens we have taught them to have problems with it. They'd get over the problems pretty easily (kids are still flexible even in their teens) except we as a culture spend great amounts of effort "protecting" them from finding out that there's really no problem. How many boys/girls peeped into the other sex's locker room in Jr. High school? What a thrill, right? After 10 or 15 times the thrill would be gone and we'd be left with coed locker rooms. I remember how uncomfortable we all felt when the "boys' gym" and "girls' gym" classes met in the same gym for square dancing two weeks out of the year. By the end of the two weeks few people were still worrying about how they looked in gym shorts; they were back to run-of-the-mill gym classes, and when we split up again it was sad.