<p>Just to play devil’s advocate - why? In the rest of their adult life, they’ll use men’s rooms. If / when they get married … well, many adults, myself included, don’t do certain bathroom functions in front of spouses unless it’s unavoidable. And for goodness sake, my H is an ob-gyn, so it’s not like he hasn’t seen it all, LOL. I guess what I’m asking is – what’s the actual benefit of explicitly creating a coed bathroom situation when after college, there is no need to ever be in that situation again? Again, I recognize it may be unavoidable given dorm layouts and such, but is it something worth actively configuring FOR?</p>
<p>I don’t see why co-ed bathrooms are so controversial. I am attending a women’s college and even our bathrooms are co-ed. We have lots of male visitors, male graduate students, and even male students from a neighboring co-ed school living in our dorms. </p>
<p>I don’t mind taking a shower with a guy in the room - there is a door (with a lock) and a curtain between me and him, after all. If I felt uncomfortable walking to the bathroom in a towel, I could go there in full clothing because all of our showers have a small changing room. I can brush my teeth just fine while a guy is using the toilet or shaving or… And I have never heard of any sort of sexual assault in the bathrooms. If anything, guys seem to be more self-conscious sharing a bathroom with girls than the other way round.</p>
<p>I wonder this also. I also wonder if coed bathrooms might have a negative influence on college students’ personal relationships, self-esteem, and promiscuity.</p>
<p>I wonder, though, if everyone is so hunky-dory comfortable with the idea, why the gyms and fitness centers haven’t converted into (or been designed with) coed locker rooms and showers. What’s the difference?</p>
<p>Compared to “my day,” there is also more suite-style living, with maybe 4, 6 or 8 kids sharing 1 bathroom (vs “my day” when it might have been 20-30). That, to me, signifies that people desire to share their bathrooms with fewer people, not more.</p>
<p>Oh, well, I don’t believe that. Either someone’s going to fool around or not. I mean, I lived in same-sex housing for 3 of my 4 years and I … well, never mind, LOL.<br>
And actually my one real memory of my freshman year coed bathroom was the controversy when a boy and girl were caught fooling around in the showers. It’s just a comfort / modesty thing to me. It wouldn’t be a deal-breaker, and I’m sure 99.99% of kids just up and deal with it and move on, but all else being equal, I see no reason to explicitly “architect it in” to a setting, for lack of a better word. I just don’t see any real-world benefit to it.</p>
<p>Hoo-boy! I invite you to design that study and get it funded. Homeland Security should get involved, too, since perhaps co-ed bathrooms make us more vulnerable to terrorism. If you are successful enough, perhaps some university can award you an honorary Cloacae Doctor degree.</p>
<p>The difference is that in gyms and fitness centers, the locker rooms are where you undress and dress, and the showers themselves tend to be communal. In co-ed dorms, you undress and dress in your room, and the shower stalls offer enough privacy to avoid being naked in front of anyone, no matter what gender. Also, gym and fitness center facilities serve a high volume of people who do not know one another at all, and may not have any particular incentive to get along. Dorm bathrooms are shared by a limited number of people (and, yes, their guests) who see each other on a regular basis and have every incentive to treat each other politely.</p>
<p>In years of sharing bathrooms with women, in college dorms and in group houses while in law school, I never once saw a naked woman in a bathroom, nor do I think any woman ever saw me naked in a bathroom.</p>
<p>As for dorm design, I suspect that no one IS “architecting” co-ed bathrooms into new dorms. But maybe that’s a pity. I loved the dorm design at my college, where the same building had a wide variety of room configurations, and there were no long corridors with dozens of rooms. Generally, there were entryways with 3-4 floors of 2-3 rooms and a bathroom apiece. It would be wasteful and expensive to put two bathrooms on each floor. And because of the variety of rooms, few if any people were interested in segregating floors or entryways by sex; that might cut off access to desirable rooms. (And, as a practical matter, any large enough group of people who wanted a single-sex bathroom could accomplish that through the lottery system if they cared more about that than room quality.)</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m sure no one builds dorms like that anymore, but it’s a pity. And I never thought that co-ed bathrooms were a POSITIVE feature of those dorms, they were just a natural consequence of the dorm design that wasn’t a big deal to put up with.</p>
<p>Better luck next time! LOL.
Maybe we’re talking in circles because we’re all envisioning different setups. For example, the bathroom setup I recall in college - the showers had curtains, but you would absolutely be briefly naked outside as you removed a robe / towel and hung it outside. Other shower set-ups have anterooms, if you will, for each shower stall, where you are hanging your robe / towel - and frankly you could get fully dressed / undressed there if you so desired and no one would ever see you in anything less than your street clothes. I guess it’s so dependent on individual layout it’s hard to make a blanket statement whether the notion is modesty-compromising or not.</p>
<p>I’m yet another parent who was living in a co-ed dorm 30 years ago with co-ed bathrooms. This was our state flagship. Rather then having all the men living on one side of the floor and all the women on the other, the room arrangement alternated down the hallway MFMFMF style. The bathroom shower stalls were the type where you have a small changing room with a solid locking door (similar to what’s on a toilet stall, where you can see feet) and attached shower. No urinals. No separate men’s/women’s toilet stalls.</p>
<p>It was not awkward at all. There were no issues with people feeling exposed or with people changing outside of the changing rooms. There were no issues with people of two different genders being in adjourning stalls, one sitting, one standing. There were no issues with brushing teeth/shaving/doing a facial care regime at adjoining sinks. There was no towel slippage, because people used bathrobes to pad back and forth from their room to the bathroom if they didn’t want to wear PJs or get dressed in the changing room. This part was no different than the following years when I lived in a co-ed house, and people congregated in robes and PJs in the morning waiting for their turn at the shower. </p>
<p>I agree that the shower-curtain-only, no locking changing room arrangement seems rather skimpy, and that the college facilities should offer a leetle more privacy. If guys are really changing out in the open, I also think it’s reasonable to have a dorm code stating that no, we don’t walk around naked in public spaces. I also agree that if a college student doesn’t feel comfortable with a co-ed bathroom they should have the right to choose a single-sex dorm, and this should be done with initial dorm assignments. But I’m surprised that co-ed bathrooms in dorms are a surprise to parents and students. </p>
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<p>Sorry, this isn’t computing for me. My understanding is that on co-ed dorm floors, you don’t date your floormates. No dormcest, or floorcest. My co-ed dorm floor of about 30-40 people did end up producing a couple of post-dorm-life relationships and one marriage. But nobody dated until after they moved out.</p>
<p>I’m interested to know if there are any parents or students who lived with co-ed bathrooms and felt uncomfortable with them. Because it seems like everyone who did live with this kind of arrangement had no issue with it.</p>
<p>Really, if parents are concerned about what what my grandparents used to call “doing the hanky-panky,” it’s the presence of single rooms that facilitates that, not coed bathrooms.</p>
<p>While I’m sure single rooms facilitate that, my experience (and I’m sure yours, and that of others, too) is that NO rooming arrangement (not to mention bathroom arrangement) is effective to prevent hanky-panky, or even to limit it much.</p>
<p>In general, I doubt that there’s anyone who thinks that co-ed dorm bathrooms are a positive good that will bring about world peace or an end to gender conflict. Given a choice between otherwise equal alternatives, I’m sure my college-age self would have chosen single-sex bathrooms, and I expect that today’s college-age people would have the same preference. But alternatives are rarely otherwise equal, and I believe that in a reasonable person’s mind there are about 400 factors about a college and its housing arrangements that are more important than whether men and women sometimes share a bathroom. If co-ed bathrooms are associated with something desirable in those more important areas, then it’s no big deal.</p>
<p>I agree with Slithey’s suggestion that this is the kind of pseudo-issue that exists primarily in the minds of people who are considering it hypothetically rather than living with it. Hurting self-esteem? Increasing promiscuity? The position of Saturn in the zodiac has more effect on those things than co-ed bathrooms.</p>
<p>don’t co-ed dorms kindof take the mystery out of things…</p>
<p>I think that is the point, for those who are comfortable with them.
They may prefer to get to know people on a different level, than the way our grandparents got to know the opposite sex.</p>
<p>However, there are many gradients in between arranged marriages and co-ed bathrooms, and while my daughters college had co-ed bathrooms, if someone is uncomfortable with that, and the college is not providing an alternative, that seems to be a major concern that should be addressed.</p>
<p>I wonder why this is? Do you know? This was not a term/rule that I heard of when I was in college 30 years ago. We did not have coed bathrooms, but we did have alternating M/F hallways with a single-sex bathroom.</p>
<p>One of my hallmates had a terrible problem with IBS. She spent a couple of hours per day in the bathroom and, to put it delicately, we “knew” without looking when she was in one of the stalls.</p>
<p>Another of my friends once told me she could not “go” if she thought guys could hear her. I imagine both of those girls would have had problems with coed bathrooms, but presumably their problems were severe enough that they would have investigated the issue before committing to a dorm.</p>
<p>Glad I’m not the only one! I wouldn’t say I read it daily, but that particular article struck me.</p>
<p>…I’m shocked by this whole thread. I honestly have come to believe I care way less about flossing next to a dude on the can than I thought I would. When I said most places have co-ed bathrooms, I meant colleges…and as far as I know, the vast majority do. Like others have said, even the Women’s Colleges I visited had co-ed bathrooms. Scripps would have to. They allow male guests for quite an extended amount of time, and plenty of males from the other claremont campuses wander around. I think many have set-ups with options, (I believe ASU certainly does) and like I said, my College even has Gender Neutral housing which doesn’t really bother me.</p>
<p>Bay, the ban on floorcest wasn’t a written rule, just a widely understood one. General wisdom. </p>
<p>For your hallmate with IBS, I imagine that either she was going to be embarassed just by being in a public restroom, or she had just gotten inured to the entire issue. Would she have been more embarassed if guys could overhear her? Possibly. Maybe not. If it was an issue, or if someone cannot relieve themselves if they think a member of the opposite sex could overhear them, that would be the kind of thing that would allow people to specify single-sex bathrooms.</p>
There were no issues with brushing teeth/shaving/doing a facial care regime at adjoining sinks. There was no towel slippage, because people used bathrobes to pad back and forth from their room to the bathroom if they didn’t want to wear PJs or get dressed in the changing room. This part was no different than the following years when I lived in a co-ed house, and people congregated in robes and PJs in the morning waiting for their turn at the shower. </p>