<p>^^I’d say it’s a fair comment, considering people are superimposing their own experiences from 30-40 years onto this situation. </p>
<p>But the oppressor could have a point about Godwin’s Law :)</p>
<p>Yeah, but my experience 30+ years ago was with a coed bathroom in college. It just didn’t seem like that much of a big deal to anybody at the time. I guess that’s why I’m surprised that it’s still a big deal to so many people today.</p>
<p>^Exactly. It seems weird that the world would have gotten more conservative on this issue not less conservative.</p>
<p>Hunt, it may be possible that it was a big deal to a few people, but you just never noticed that they didn’t go to the bathroom in that setting. We are often clueless at 18 to the sensitivities of others. I wouldn’t have a problem with it either but with my extra years I am able to see things from another perspective.</p>
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Well, maybe. It could be that back then people were just less likely to make a fuss over something like this.</p>
<p>I think it IS a bigger deal to students today simply because more grew up with having there own bathroom or a kids only bathroom at home. </p>
<p>I don’t see it as conservative in the political sense; I see it as kids simply aren’t used to sharing and having others always in their space.</p>
<p>I can tell you, my son was attracted to certain schools because he’d have to share a bathroom with less people then he does in our home. My son is not modest, he simply wants some space.</p>
<p>It is completely reasonable for you and your son to expect that he can shower, shave his face, brush his teeth, and dress in the privacy of same gender males- without the issue being politicized. You are not overreacting. IMO, you have having a common sense reaction. I don’t share rest rooms in the mall or at a restaurant among people of a different gender nor would I want to. Schools, in part, are getting away with this because people feel powerless to effect a change in school policy and because people are afraid of being stigmatized via name calling. Call the school and follow up with a letter. Go with your gut reaction.</p>
<p>On a personal note, I know a young man who goes to a school with single sex dorms (gasp!). There is a female bathroom for guests, but no shower. He said that the guys sleep and walk to the bathroom/shower in their undergarments. They enjoy having their guy time and their private space.</p>
<p>Longhaul, I think you’re right. The idea of community baths PERIOD was a terrible thing for my D’s. D1 had a community bath dorm at college and told horror stories. D2 said “NO WAY”. She’s in a “suite bath” dorm.</p>
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<p>It was not a big deal when I was in college decades ago either.</p>
<p>But the college ensured through the room assignment process that those who did not want co-ed floors with co-ed bathrooms could select single-gender floors with single-gender bathrooms. That the college in question has a poorly thought out room assignment and bathroom designation process is one of the real issues, not the co-ed bathrooms per se.</p>
<p>The bigger real issue, of course, is the inappropriate behavior or sexual harassment that may be going on.</p>
<p>(Of course, the thread title does draw attention away from the real issues. If it were something like “inappropriate behavior in the bathroom”, perhaps the discussion would be more about the actual issues, instead of being about co-ed bathrooms in general.)</p>
<p>We may have a blind-men-and-elephant problem here.</p>
<p>People raising objections to the difficulties of a gender-neutral dorm bathroom are describing concerns that simply didn’t apply to the bathrooms of my college dormitory, for whatever reason. It was certainly not a “bar atmosphere,” nor did people dress and undress or walk around naked in the bathroom, and someone with a shy bladder would have been just fine. </p>
<p>Between the architecture of our bathrooms (which provided a curtained area outside the shower for one to dry off and put on one’s bathrobe), the very variable schedules that students in my dorm had (which meant that we were not all in there at the same time–one often had the bathroom to oneself, much as is the case in my office restroom, which has 6 stalls but is usually empty when I go in there), and the norms of behavior people adhered to (we dressed and undressed in our rooms, not in the bathroom, and wore bathrobes in the hallway–we had hooks for our towels in the bathroom so there was no particular reason to walk the halls wrapped in a towel), we very simply did not experience any of the awkward situations that are being cited as grounds for concern about gender-neutral bathrooms.</p>
<p>However, I am grasping that: architecture differs from dorm to dorm, schools have different schedules and perhaps there might be dorms where there is a “rush hour” in the bathroom, and norms of behavior may have changed such that people might be more bare than we would have considered suitable back in my dorm days.</p>
<p>So, just to clarify–I’m among those who had an uneventful bathroom-sharing experience in college, but that doesn’t mean I’d be comfortable with people walking around nude, people leering at one another in the bathroom, or having to dress and undress and to perform every function in the company of my dormmates on each occasion–whether the bathroom was single-sex or not. I wouldn’t be. But those things simply didn’t happen. If that’s what’s going on in these bathrooms…maybe the gender-neutral feature isn’t the only problem.</p>
<p>"The bigger real issue, of course, is the inappropriate behavior or sexual harassment that may be going on.</p>
<p>(Of course, the thread title does draw attention away from the real issues.)" </p>
<p>That may seem like the bigger issue to you - and perhaps it is, but the co-ed bathroom is a HUGE issue to the OP and probably her son, judging by subsequent posts. The co-ed bathroom is a “real” issue to him/her.</p>
<p>The feeling is probably (because it would be for me), that chances are the inappropriate bathroom behavior would not be happening in the first place if we didn’t have an inappropriate (at least for the OP’s son) bathroom situation.</p>
<p>I think some of the posters here who shared their experiences with gender-neutral bathrooms 30 or so years ago, went to Harvard. </p>
<p>Like Yale, it looks like times have changed at Harvard, and now all bathrooms are single-sex in both the Freshman and upperclassmen houses. See,</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> College Admissions § About Harvard: Tour a Dorm](<a href=“http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/about/living/dormtours.html]Harvard”>http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/about/living/dormtours.html)</p>
<p>[Living</a> at Cal 2012-2013, UC Berkeley Housing](<a href=“http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/comparehalls.html]Living”>http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/comparehalls.html)</p>
<p>I lived in Unit 3 which appears to be just how it was when I was there. Both co-ed and single sex floors with a single bathroom aligned with the floor designation. I like the chart.</p>
<p>I think I acknowledged many, many pages ago that my experience with co-ed bathrooms at Yale (and Hunt’s and mathmom’s in similar circumstances) may have been affected by the particular architecture of my residential college, vs. larger bathrooms for more people on a large, open hallway of a large dorm. In the circumstances I knew, to refer to a “bar atmosphere” would be absolutely, 100% ludicrous. As I said before, it was completely a sibling kind of relationship, like sharing a bathroom with my sisters at home, except in college everyone was nicer and more considerate to each other.</p>
<p>As for the ability to select same-sex bathrooms . . . not really, at least not in my day. Effectively, the people at the bottom of the housing lottery determined whether the bathrooms were same-sex or co-ed. Most bathrooms served two or three rooms. The first person or group to pick a room had no control over who picked the other room(s). My sophomore year, we (a group of four sophomore boys) shared a bathroom with two junior women who selected their room long before we did. Effectively, we could have chosen to have a male-only bathroom by choosing a room on a floor in an entryway where there were only men in the rooms already, but by the time we got to choose there weren’t that many quads left, and the one we chose was a lot nicer than the others, or so we thought. We didn’t ask the junior women for permission or anything. They knew when they picked their room that they would be sharing a bathroom with a sophomore quad, and that it might be boys; I don’t know what other options they had when they picked, because I was only paying attention to the available quads.</p>
<p>In theory, there may have been a way to designate some bathrooms single-sex if someone invoked it. That’s what they probably told parents. In practice, I never heard of that happening. It would have been too hostile to tell unwilling people they had to go to another floor to use a bathroom rather than use the one two steps from their front door. Effectively, then, you would need everyone on two contiguous floors to agree to the change, and since most people didn’t think sharing a bathroom was a big problem, that wasn’t likely to happen easily.</p>
<p>Freshmen did have single-sex entryways, and thus bathrooms, at least on the Old Campus. I don’t know what happened in the colleges where freshmen lived from Day 1.</p>
<p>Harvard seems to allow only single-sex room groupings, and to have all or most of the bathrooms in-suite. At Yale, in my day, some colleges allowed co-ed groupings for larger suites; as a practical matter these were only going to be available to groups that were predominantly seniors.</p>
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Similar to so many other things school do in the student life arena, such as overpriced (and sometimes overcrowded – doubles turned into triples, etc.) dorm rooms and meal plans.</p>
<p>My first year I lived in a very traditional dorm with singles and doubles off a hallway. I think there was just one bathroom for the entire floor so it was shear laziness that made us all prefer mixed gender bathrooms. 
We also had changing areas outside the showers, so there was really no need to be at all exposed in the bathroom.</p>
<p>JHS
You still knew way in advance of move in what type of bathroom you were getting. That theoretically gives you options if you don’t like it.</p>
<p>Carleton had coed bathrooms 25 years ago. It surprised me at first, then life went on. I think, however, since it does bother your son, and I do think it is very sexist to give the girls privacy and not the boys, that he needs to speak to administration about it. I would even consider stepping in to speak to administration.</p>
<p>Also…if the girls are doing this to bother the boys in September, they will likely get tired of it by November and will stop.</p>
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<p>It sounds like someone berated his mother in public for speaking German and called her a Nazi. I don’t know how old he was at the time, but frankly I think it could be quite traumatizing to a child to see their parent shamed and humiliated in this way. (Or to see a screaming fight between their parent and another adult. We don’t know for sure how the mother reacted.) I doubt that most children who see their parents subjected to humiliation born of prejudice shrug it off. I’m sure it remains an open wound on some level, even if they don’t think about it constantly.</p>
<p>Bay,</p>
<p>Not always. </p>
<p>Unless you can present an exceedingly great excuse, you’re usually stuck with the dorm/room assignment you’re assigned. While my LAC was somewhat flexible, that wasn’t the case for other undergrads I knew…and that previously mentioned flexibility had definite limits. </p>
<p>Did I also mention that my LAC mandated all students live in dorms for at least the first 2 years unless they had serious health/allergy conditions which couldn’t be accommodated by dorm life and the cafeterias/student-eating co-ops. Considering the co-ops had many vegan/vegetarian options…it was exceedingly difficult to be excused on such grounds.</p>