Men are from Mars, Women are from The Land of Entitlement

[tzikeh]

Yeah, you read that right.

I am currently house managing the annual Chicago production of The Santaland Diaries. It's a great gig, and a lot of fun, but one of the less glamorous aspects of the job is clearing out the bathrooms before and after each performance. I don't have to scrub the sinks and toilets; I just empty the plastic garbage bins--each stall has its own garbage bin, and there are two larger garbage bins by the sinks--as well as the small steel catch-all under the paper-towel dispenser, and make sure that each stall has enough toilet paper. That kind of thing.

I clean both bathrooms before the shows, while the shows are in progress, and after the performances are over and the patrons have left. Every single year, I am reminded of this fact: women are pigs. They throw used paper towels on the floor, they leave puddles of pump soap on the sinks, they abandon empty cardboard toilet paper rolls on the floor *right next to the garbage can in their stall* instead of putting it IN the garbage can. They leave used tampons in the toilets *and don't flush*. This is not outlier data; this is every fucking night.

Men, on the other hand, leave a near-spotless bathroom. Paper towels in the bins, nothing on the floors of the stalls, no unflushed toilets.

I can only theorize about why women do this. My guess? They paid to see a show, so they have the expectation that someone will clean up after them. In their minds this somehow translates to not maintaining even the bare minimum of courtesy for those who will clean up after them.

Gentlemen--you have my undying gratitude. Ladies--are you for fucking real?

Comments

[montanaharper]

I used to work in a high-end women's clothing store as a changing-room attendant, and let me tell you I saw unbelievable entitlement in there. I was always raised to hang things back up after I tried them on, but these women? Left everything on the floor in a pile.

Two possible additional thoughts, though for why the women's bathroom is worse than the men's: 1) if there are children at the performances, they tend to go into the women's bathroom with their mothers, and most kids are slobs in the bathroom; 2) in my experience, men don't wash their hands in public bathrooms, which goes a long way to explaining the lack of puddles of soap and water, etc.

[tzikeh]

No kids at these shows, so... ew, I hope men wash their hands after they take care of business. That's unfortunate.

[klia]

Ewww, you just gave me flashbacks to my last two jobs, and some of the revolting scenarios I happened upon (even worse than you described *barf*).

I think you're partly right, but I've seen the same kinds of things in ladies rooms in free places, too, so I always theorized it was because a) they only feel responsible if they make a mess in their own homes; or b) they were never made to clean up after themselves, period, so they don't; or then there's c) some women are freaked out by their own bodies and bodily functions/fluids, so if something accidentally goes where it doesn't belong, they freak out and won't touch it.

[tzikeh]

Ladies, pull it together. I swear.

A cardboard tube *next* to the garbage bin? How can that even incur a split-second thought of *anything* but picking it up and putting it in the fucking bin?

[mlyn]

Seriously? Wow.

To be fair, I've seen some gnarly men's bathrooms, but I have to agree...crowds of women are disgusting. I think it's a group thing; that if they see a mess they don't feel as bad adding to it, even if they know better. (Witness the mess of a corporate kitchen after lunch.)

[tzikeh]

Yeah, maybe it's a group thing, or some kind of weird mutation of the Bystander Effect.

I'm sure there are awful men's bathrooms too, but this is a new building with great, super-clean bathrooms. There's really no excuse.

[mlyn]

There's really no excuse.

In the end, no, there's not. We can try to figure out their reasoning, but it's still dumbass shameful behavior.

Yuck.

[elke_tanzer]

I have no explanation to offer... the last time I was cleaning bathrooms outside my own home was when I was working at a golf course/minigolf/pro shop/snack bar combo place some years back, and the women were the tidy ones there although sometimes the small trash can was overfilled and paper waste landed beside it; the men left puddles (that were not soap, nor around the sink).

In any case, people should know better than to leave a mess in a public restroom. Yuck.

Re: Yuck.

[tzikeh]

Ugh, puddles. Wut.

It's just weird data to collect night after night after night, though. Like, there's never been a performance where there's been an exception.

[beck_liz]

Ewwwwww. I don't know what the difference is. I was raised to clean up after myself, and do. But I have been in some pretty disgusting women's bathrooms before, too.

[cereta]

Huh. Every place I've had to clean bathrooms (which was many places, because I was often the only employee who would do it), the men's rooms were stys, and the women's bathrooms were considerably cleaner. Weird.

[tzikeh]

I can only offer my own anecdata, but this is four years running, and it's *always* the same.

[cereta]

Oh, I'm not doubting your anecdata, which is why I said "weird." Could be a difference of venue: I mostly worked food service and lower-end retail.

[girlpearl]

I had the same experience when I worked in a convenience store. Women's bathroom was mildly gross. Men's bathroom made me retch.

[raine]

I can attest to the fact that women can be absolute pigs. Years ago, I was in Army basic training. About four weeks into the eight-week-long training, we had a surprise white glove inspection. The male captain found a used tampon on top of a locker. The entire company did diamond push-ups for forty-five minutes while we were lectured on cleanliness.

My only theory in the years since (especially after cleaning movie theatre, drugstore, and big-box retail restrooms) is that some women have no class. My sympathies.

[tzikeh]

It's just weird that it's so constant, you know?

[raine]

Yeah, well, some things transcend time. Unfortunately, that's one of them. ((hugs))

[sakana17]

Something I've observed among my female co-workers is: after washing hands, they take a bunch of paper towels to dry hands, use them as covering to open the bathroom door, then toss the used paper towels onto the bathroom floor as they depart. A few (very few) will keep the door propped with a foot and lean back to try to reach the garbage bin for their toss; they sometimes miss.

I can't even.

I've also seen them wad up paper toilet seat covers and leave them on the floor. When there's (a) the toilet to flush it in (the box they come in says "flushable"), (b) a small metal garbage can inside the stall, and (c) a big garbage can outside the stall.

Pigs. It's distressing!

[klia]

Eww, what? Why do toilet seat covers even need to be touched? Doesn't that defeat their whole purpose? And if they're THAT concerned, wouldn't it be better to apply hand sanitizer back at their desks instead of leaving a disgusting mess behind for everyone else. JFC.

[gwyn]

Interesting. I used to say to my male companions who were fine with cleaning the kitchen, while I was not, that I'd rather clean the men's room in a dive bar than clean a kitchen sink with food in it, because that was always the nadir of cleanliness. But it sounds like your ladies are pretty bad.

[thefourthvine]

I've seen this particularly in theaters and other places where there's only a small period of time to visit the bathroom. In my experience (which is, uh, outdated, because I haven't been to any live anything since the earthling was born three and a half years ago), the longer the lines, the messier the bathroom, so I suspect it's one of the following:

"Fuck I have to be done in FOUR SECONDS to get back to the theater!"

"I need to get out of here fast so someone else can go - fast fast fast!"

"This theater can't be considerate enough to have sufficient bathrooms for women? Well, I see no reason to be considerate when it comes to using those facilities."

So it would be interesting to see what women's bathrooms vs. men's bathrooms are like in places where time is not a factor.

[tzikeh]

it would be interesting to see what women's bathrooms vs. men's bathrooms are like in places where time is not a factor.

Our artistic director bought the Bailiwick theater building about five years ago, gutted it, and collaborated with an architect to create a theater space based on ten years of his experiences working in theaters all over Chicago. He knew everything there was to know about what *not* to do, up to and including how to build a bathroom.

There are eight stalls in the ladies' room (seven standard plus one handicapped)--nearly three times the number of required-by-law stalls for theater spaces of the same size. Plus, this particular show doesn't have an intermission you have to rush back from. There has never ever been a line for the ladies' room in the four years I've been house managing.

ETA: I probably should have made the size ratio clear in the original post. The theater space I'm house managing seats 104 people.

[thefourthvine]

Then I am completely mystified. The last time I was in a position to do direct comparison between bathrooms was the men's and women's bathrooms in my college dorm, and while the women's bathrooms were totally a pit, the men's rooms were even worse.

But, uh, wow. Maybe your audience will all be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Cleanliness soon? Here's hoping.

[dexwebster]

Interesting. When I had to clean bathrooms (also in foodservice, like cereta), the men's were without fail dirtier. Makes me wonder what it might be about different environments that might make people behave differently.

[giglet]

Yeah, I don't know. On the private college campus where I work, there are plenty of women students who are slobs in the bathrooms, and I don't understand why. The library bathrooms are the worst. (There's also the matter of someone consistently sabotaging the toilet tanks in the Japanese building, so that the toilets run all the time. But I'm told that that's a cultural thing.)

I mean, it's entirely possible that some of them have never had to clean anything. It's someone else's job to do everything but wipe their butts.

It is also possible that they're acting out, trashing the bathroom in private as a way of getting out aggression they can't show in public.

I also wonder if it's just that there's a few people who are slobs and leave trash around, and then there's a lot of people that figure that adding to an existing trashy environment doesn't matter. It's that first broken window, or first paper towel on the ground or first piece of graffiti on the wall.

[xenacryst]

I don't have the women's to compare it to, but you should see the men's at my work at the end of the day. First off, they've rigged the plumbing so that it takes four flushes to empty the sit down toilets ... and most folks flush once (they can't help it, it's an infrared flusher). The urinals are constantly wet underneath, and on the wall behind. And most guys do not score two points on the toss to the wastepaper basket with their paper towels. And people come in to clean this place a couple times a day, at least.

But maybe male geeks are the same kind of messy as female theater goers. Who knows.