I would like to address one of the great architectural mistakes of our time:
The unisex restaurant bathroom.
I understand the thinking behind it. One bathroom. Everyone uses it. Efficient. Inclusive. Modern.
Terrible idea.
Men and women have spent thousands of years maintaining certain mysteries about one another. There was a reason for this.
We were happier.
Let’s start with men.
Men cannot be trusted with a toilet seat.
This isn’t an opinion. It’s closer to a law of physics.
If the toilet seat is up, a man will leave it up.
If the toilet seat is down, rather than taking the enormous physical journey required to lift it approximately fourteen inches, there is a statistically significant possibility that he will simply pee on it.
Apparently, lifting the seat requires the same physical exertion as moving a refrigerator.
This was never a major societal problem because men’s bathrooms were essentially containment facilities.
Women didn’t have to know what was happening in there.
Then somebody invented the unisex bathroom.
Last night, I was at a nice restaurant.
A beautiful woman walked out of the bathroom.
Not just attractive. Beautiful. Elegant. Perfectly dressed. The kind of woman who looks like she has never perspired, sneezed or had an upset stomach.
She smiled.
I smiled.
She walked away.
I walked into the bathroom.
And my life changed.
There are smells that are unpleasant.
There are smells that make you leave a room.
And then there are smells that cause you to reconsider everything you thought you understood about the human digestive system.
This bathroom smelled like a horse had eaten eight doses of Ex-Lax and then been locked inside a sauna.
I stopped.
My brain could not reconcile the information.
Her?
Impossible.
I had just seen her.
She looked like she smelled like Chanel.
Apparently, she did not.
For several seconds I actually considered the possibility that there had been a horse in the bathroom.
That seemed more plausible.
I wanted to go find her and say:
“Ma’am, I don’t know what happened in there, and I don’t want to know, but I think you should contact the CDC.”
Instead, I stood there realizing that something had been taken from me.
Mystery.
This is precisely why civilization gave us separate bathrooms.
It wasn’t discrimination.
It was romance.
Men don’t need to know everything women do.
Women absolutely don’t need to know everything men do.
We need boundaries.
We need imagination.
We need to be able to look across a candlelit dinner table and believe the person sitting opposite us is somehow exempt from the basic biological processes governing every other mammal on Earth.
That’s part of love.
Unisex bathrooms have destroyed this.
Now we’re all sharing one tiny room, passing one another like forensic investigators changing shifts at a crime scene.
“Good luck in there.”
No.
I don’t want luck.
I want ignorance.
I want the beautiful woman to remain beautiful.
I want her to float mysteriously through life sustained entirely by champagne, salads and excellent lighting.
And women deserve the same fantasy about men.
They should never have to walk into a bathroom after a 58-year-old man named Gary has spent eleven minutes in there after ordering the chili.
Some doors should remain closed.
Some mysteries should remain mysteries.
And some bathrooms should have a little picture of a man on one door and a little picture of a woman on the other.
Not because we can’t share.
Because there are certain things about each other…
we were simply never meant to know.