SIVACRACY.NET

I attended the Annual Meeting of the Association for Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities this past weekend, and particularly enjoyed a presentation by Prof. Mary Anne Case of the U of Chicago Law School entitled: "On Not Having the Opportunity to Introduce Myself to John Kerry in the Men's Room." She talked about rest rooms as gendered spaces, and some of the social implications of gender segregation in this context in a very interesting way.

Recently Prof. Ian Ayres of the Yale Law School published an article about the legality of single sex, single toilet bathrooms at Slate.com. He blogged about this at Balkinization and got comments suggesting that some people find this topic rather mundane.

Well, I think both Case and Ayres are right on. When the building housing the University of South Carolina School of Law was finished in 1973 it never occurred to anyone there would ever be female faculty members who might need to routinely pee (Southern women being esteemed for their large bladders and ability to pretend to rise above bodily functions), so the faculty office floors got solitary "faculty" bathrooms, with urinals and stalls and every indicia of a comfortable bathroom, and yes I have been in them, you don't need to know when or why. Those are now the "Men's Rooms." I suppose the fact that there was one bathroom for men of both races was somewhat of a triumph, given that we didn't start graduating African American law students until about 1973, but the architects clearly didn't plan for female faculty.

Tiny ventilationless bathrooms were installed for the support staff, and that is what the female faculty has to use to this day (as do the female support staff members). It may seem like no big deal, but I drink a lot of water. I get tired of having to re-duct tape closed the toilet paper dispenser, which has fallen open and whacked me on the shoulder on more than one occasion, and makes me doubt the usefulness of duct tape in the event of a terrorist attack. Also, I don't enjoy running a gauntlet of students and knapsacks to simply access the bathroom, which is partially blocked by the only two chairs on the entire floor in which students can sit to wait to talk to faculty members. Complaints about this by me and other fluid processing females reduced the chair number from three to two, but supposedly there is no place else for them to be located, outside the Men's Room being out of the question. My male colleagues think this is all a big joke, but have not offered to cede one of the "faculty" bathrooms to the women. Where "the law" is in all this is an intriguing question.