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Thursday, September 2, 2010

SEX Where Do You Pee?

Posted by Ned Lannamann on Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 3:40 PM

bathroom1.png
The Society Pages has a long and intermittently interesting post about the difference in male and female bathroom signage, with plenty of examples from around the world. The idea is that an easily identifiable symbol to determine the sex has its basis in long-established roles of inequality:
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Washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.

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And so on. But what's really cool about the post is the sheer volume of examples used, of some very normal looking bathroom signs to some bizarre ones, funny ones, incredibly sexist ones, and completely incomprehensible ones. The post also links to the great Toilet Signs blog, which has more of this stuff. Anyway, read the whole post here.

It also got me thinking about local bathroom signs. It seems like we're a city of unisex bathrooms—almost every place I can think of has a unisex room. What are some of the more interesting men's/women's room signs around town? I'm coming up blank.

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