Mar 11, 2019 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 5 min read

Authors often come up with topics that tend to take people by surprise.

“When you say you’re writing a book about public bathroom access,” Canadian writer Lezlie Lowe observed, “the two responses are: People are very uncomfortable, or they’re like, OK, that’s so weird and not a book.”

As she travels giving talks to promote “No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs,” Lowe generally notices a different reaction.

“People who are there instantly realize there is so much to it, and that public bathrooms really speak to who gets to access space and how well,” she said. “So in that way, I really think that public bathrooms are this perfect barometer of who matters in society.”

She will discuss her first book and the issues surrounding the subject during a free program at 7 p.m. March 21 at Mt. Lebanon Public Library.

A freelance journalist and journalism instructor based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Lowe said she often examines “broader social issues that we don’t necessarily take a lot of time to look at in our day-to-day lives,” and the research that culminated in “No Place to Go” fits that bill.

“I came to it through my realization that I was navigating the city differently once I had small kids who were toilet training and in diapers,” she recalled. “It just always seemed to be an issue. Once I started thinking about it and how many deficiencies there were, month after month and year after year, it became obvious over and over again.”

And so she decided to write the book, in part to break through the sort of taboo that surrounds the subject.

From ‘No Place to Go’

For most North American kids, the leap out of diapers happens around age three. Toilet training is a time of frayed nerves, when leaving the house goes high-stakes. Kids – non-parents may be unaware here – give little warning of impending sanitary disaster. It can be zero to puddle in under sixty.

And in the miraculous case that a new underpantser is aware enough to give the gotta-go in time, a most pressing question indeed presents itself: Where?

“In the West, we’re taught really that when we talk about bathroom issues, it’s either something that we are embarrassed about. That’s very common. I see that a lot in my research. Or it’s a joke. We kind of ping-pong between those two angles,” she explained. “What happens when we do that is it’s never taken seriously as an issue that speaks more broadly as to how well or poorly cities are working.”

In the book, she outlines examples of deficiencies that include everything from comparative availability and access to defecation and urination in public by people who are homeless.

“If a city council is never bringing it up because it’s either something that you don’t talk about in polite company, or it’s just a joke and not seen as serious, we don’t ever get to solve that problem,” she said. “And that gets worse and worse.”

Lowe discussed how the notion of “bathroom privilege” applies to her, personally.

I am cisgender. I’m not trans. So I’m never going to get questioned using a women’s bathroom,” she explained. “I am not a caregiver anymore for young kids, so I only have to really worry about my bathroom needs.”

She is not handicapped, does not have a condition like Crohn’s disease or colitis, and can pay for a small purchase if required to use a business’ restroom.

“The one point of bathroom privilege I lack is that I’m a woman. So I wait in line for bathrooms,” she said. “When you actually figure it out, it’s pretty simple to see why women wait in line. Women take longer to empty our bladders than men. We are in the bathroom for more reasons than men. We menstruate. We care for children and elderly people more frequently than men.”

Yet because of logistics – most notably, urinals take up less space than stalls – similarly sized restrooms offer fewer opportunities for women to take care of their needs.

On the bright side, Lowe said that some cities are taking positive steps, including San Francisco, which has a particularly high population of homeless people. A program known as “Pit Stop” brings toilets to places of high need and puts attendants in place.

“They maintain the queue,” Lowe explained. “They make sure that only one person goes in at a time, and they just, generally speaking, keep things in order.

In Portland, Ore., city officials designed what is marketed as the Portland Loo.

“They don’t have attendants, but they’re very, very challenging to abuse, so to speak,” Lowe said. “The hand-washing station is on the outside. It has a louvered bottom, so you can see if someone is in distress or if there’s more than one person inside. It allows privacy for the user, but at the same time a little bit of surveillance from the outside.”

For more information about Mt. Lebanon Public Library, visit www.mtlebanonlibrary.org.