While on holiday in spain we agreed to meet friends for an Easter Sunday late lunch in Valencia, on the beach. The restaurant was packed and all the girls needed the toilet. The ladies toilets were downstairs in the most uncomfortable tiny corridor, directly next to the stairs, which were used by the waiters to go up and down and no space for women to queue other than up the stairs. There were always about 5-6 women on these stairs and occasionally 1 man passed by to use the male toilet upstairs. My frustrated friend and my mum went up to the mens toilets to avoid the queue. Me and my daughter stayed downstairs. A discussion started when a male wouldn’t let a lady go even though she was already queuing. The waiter kept making annoyed sounds each time he was passing a queue of the women on the stairs. I felt very frustrated that whoever designed the restaurant toilets did not consider women’s needs and the fact they use the toilets more and for longer, they have periods, they use more toilet paper, therefore they should have more toilets than men if we’re to avoid the queues and make people’s lives easier. I was quite astonished by the continuing inequality, unconcious bias in even these simplest of situations, in places that are supposedly developed and conscious, where it is still men who dictate how many toilets will women get and how uncomfortable it will be for them to use those toilets. My daughter listened to all these conversations, she didn’t say anything, but when we got home she spend a very long time drawing something on paper, cutting and glueing and she came up with this absolutely brilliant toilet design for men and women. I am mesmerised by her creative way of dealing with an unpleasant situation and with the ability to create these incredible 3d toilet shapes at the age of 8. Maybe it is worth having even these small conversations, which may be deemed unneccessary by us but can actually influence younger generations, which we didn’t even realise were listening? How did my mothers and grandmothers conversations affect the way I ended up thinking and creating as a creative child and now as an artist?
And a final frustrating thing which I am not sure I should tell my daughter is that she designed 2 cabins for boys and 2 cabins for girls but outside she added 3 urinals for the boys so in the end, according to her design, boys still get more toilets than girls and what seems totally unfair to m she seems to be fine with…but maybe it’s me who’s the problem? Maybe I’m being difficult and making a big deal out of something not very important? Google won’t even post my review as I probably used too many negative words in it:/
