There aren’t many places more sacred than the women’s bathroom.
Nature’s various callings aside, the beauty of the women’s bathroom is its almost cosmic ability to fast-track connection. You can’t play it too cool in a bathroom. Everyone knows what we’re here for, and thus defenses are down. Sure, self-consciousness can still permeate the space. For the most part, though, our shared humanity unites us.
For the longest time, there have been attempts to sanitise this reality. Women’s bathrooms have been called powder rooms, water closets, ladies’ rooms. Their doors are adorned with stencils of women in petticoats with umbrellas, or more crudely, stick figures in triangle dresses. Even that term, ‘ladies’ room’, evokes an image of courtliness that is so at odds with what goes on inside. It’s as if the creators of these spaces are terrified of what lies behind closed doors, of what happens when so-called ladies are left alone. We are all the things we are taught not to be: messy, disgusting, united. In some ways, they should be scared.
I’m reminded here of the Ladies’ Lounge in Tasmania’s Museum of Modern Art. Artist and Curator Kirsha Kaechele created “a haven of priceless treasures and enlightened conversation where the only man present is the butler, who does as he’s told.” A man, disgruntled by this concept, responded litigiously. Ironically, like a butler, he served the museum a lawsuit. He claimed discrimination for having been knocked back at the red rope. After an arduous legal battle, the museum won. It was a costly reminder of the rarity of such spaces.
We convene here, we share secrets, we gossip, we bitch. We lay it all out on the table while reapplying lipliner with various degrees of skill and success. Here, you will strike up a conversation with a woman on a disastrous date. Better yet, you’ll be approached sheepishly by a girl on a good date, five wines deep, asking if she could maybe borrow a little bit of your make-up. At this stage, you’ll hopefully be a bottle deep yourself, and thus all hygiene concerns will fly out the frosted window. Yes, you should never share makeup brushes, especially not with strangers. But a brush can be cleaned. You can’t turn back the clock and recreate the connections that these moments naturally facilitate.
Sometimes bathrooms are glamorous, other times they are makeshift disaster management zones. We’ve all seen the woman scrubbing oil stains from her silk dress before contorting under hand dryers like she’s doing the limbo. We’ve heard the woman projectile vomiting, reappearing out of cubicles like disoriented bears breaking hibernation. A girl crying over an ex in the bathroom attracts empathetic older women like a moth to a flame. We connect in moments that feel as emotionally glorious as they are grotesque.
"We convene here, we share secrets, we gossip, we bitch. We lay it all out on the table while reapplying lipliner with various degrees of skill and success.”
One such connection struck me in 2013. I’d just turned eighteen, and I was titillated by my newfound ability to go to nightclubs legally. In fact, I was so titillated that I went out by myself. This particular evening was a Friday night, and I went to Revolver, Melbourne’s most infamous club. It’s a place that is shrouded in urban folklore – no other nightclub in Australia holds the same dark mystique as Revs. I found myself at an impasse as soon as I paid the $25 entry fee: I felt overwhelmingly self-conscious being there alone, but I didn’t want to leave. So, I took myself to the bathroom. It’s a cavernous space of about eight cubicles; all covered in graffiti and reeking of urine. At the time, it was routinely patrolled by a male bouncer who’d bang on the cubicle doors every few minutes, scaring the girls who dared to share a stall.
After sitting in a cubicle for about five minutes like a bullied schoolgirl, I washed my hands in the big, ugly metal trough. As I dried them, two girls my age walked in. I smiled at one of them in the smudged, defaced reflection of the mirror, and she returned in kind. We struck up a conversation.
Their names were Joanna and Beatrice. They were from Sweden. That was so cool to me – I’d never met a Swedish person. I was entranced by the fact that we were so similar despite growing up on opposite sides of the world. We stood there for about 20 minutes, exchanging stories through thick accents before exchanging Facebooks. A few days later, we got a drink at a local bar, and I brought my best friend, Madison. We all got along so well. So, this was what it was like to connect with fellow “adults”? It felt revolutionary. After a month, they returned home, but we remained in touch.
Six months later, Madison went to Denmark with her boyfriend. After demeaning her for years, he got physical. Scared and alone, she left him and boarded a Ryanair flight to Sweden. She went straight to Joanna’s, where her parents welcomed Madison with open arms. Joanna was encouraging when Madison decided to cut all her hair off. She went with her when she decided to get a tattoo, another act of self-actualisation in the immediate aftermath of the split. The tattoo, funnily enough, was the female sex symbol, not unlike one you see on a bathroom stall door. It was a way of declaring herself and her place as a young woman. When I picked her up at Melbourne airport, I felt eternally thankful to Joanna for taking care of her. Better yet, I felt thankful for the hostility of Revolver’s dance floor for having made me take refuge in the loo.
That is what women’s bathrooms are: they are the ultimate spaces of unsupervised self-expression. So often, even without realising, women posture themselves to appease an omnipresent gaze, imagined or otherwise. We suck in, we sit up straight, we purse and pout our lips. All of that flies out the window when you’re busting for a bathroom. There’s not much more beautiful than that.
