Gender & Bathrooms

The average American doesn’t think twice about the sign on the door when using a public bathroom. This is because the average American is cisgender, which is when one’s gender matches his or her biological sex allowing them to have no hesitation when choosing the girl figure or boy figure on the wall. But there are still many people who might not have this peace of mind, making bathroom boy/girl figures demeaning and hurtful. After viewing some of the signs shown even I was confused and slightly angry at the assumptions made through something as simple as a bathroom sigh.

From what I have observed, as an American, are people in the United States have a very narrow and close minded view of how to construct gender. Americans construct gender and associate certain things with certain genders in a very hurtful, and often untrue, way. Girls are paired with the color pink, shopping, bows, skirts, small waists, breast, and vaginas. Men are paired with the color blue, football or sports, bowties, pants, broad shoulders, and penises. By using one, or several, of these categorizations in bathroom signs would be making the assumption that every male or female should wear pants or go shopping which isn’t always the case.

There was one bathroom sign showed in this blog post that caught my attention and silicified my idea that Americans have a narrow view of the differences in gender. This sign showed one figure thinking about shopping, which was the girl, and the other figure thinking about football, which was the boy. This bathroom sign simply says that it is a man’s job to watch football and woman’s job to go shopping. I found this assumption untrue because not all men love football and I know many girls who don’t enjoy shopping, myself being one of them. This conclusion could go the other way as well by stating that some women are into football and some men enjoy shopping.

Another sign that stood out was the bathroom signs from Iran posted in this blog. The man is shown as a regular figure but the woman is shown as wearing a long skirt and a hijab. This shows how important it is in that country for women to follow the dress code and cover their bodies and faces. If the American girl sign always has a skirt on and the Iran girl sign always has a hijab on her head then the only thing to conclude is that a hijab is equivalent a skirt in Iran. This came as a shock to me because I never knew how important the dress code for women was in Iran until I saw that bathroom sign. When a bathroom sign has a certain outfit on then one knows it is a major part of that countries culture and way of life.

Culture states that men and women should look and behave a certain way which is why these bathroom signs are the way they are. From an early age people were taught the appropriate way to behave and the appropriate things to like according to their gender. We are taught these things through our family, friends, and of course the media. Luckily I have never come across a problematic bathroom sign, but I could in the near future.