2026/02/15 The Assault on Urinals
I write to you today on a topic many would consider frivolous, but one I consider to be of the utmost importance: urinals are disappearing. I began to notice the trend some time ago. Back in 2022, I was visiting a friend in Oxford, and whilst I was there I went to the Pitt-Rivers museum. The Pitt-Rivers museum is in my opinion the best museum in the world; there, they have any item you can think of - take the comb, for example - and they have a cabinet filled with combs from all over the world, all slightly different, but all possessing the form 'comb'. Wonderful place, but it is, to put it in the tongue of today, a little 'woke'. I remember quickly passing some exhibit - I can't remember what it was now, perhaps on ocean pollution or feminism - very quickly so as to keep it squarely out of my line of sight. Contrasted with the gorgeous Victorian wooden cabinets, the exhibit of draped coloured rags in a dentist-bright room (why is modern art displayed in such bright rooms?), was such an egregious eye-sore I did everything in my power to bring about it's non-existence through ignoring it. So, because the Pitt-Rivers museum was a little woke - it was hard back then not to succumb when you held the bounty of a Victorian collector - they had 'gender-neutral toilets'.
Gender-neutral toilets: who are they for? Who wants them? Women don't want them, since the toilet is a vulnerable place for one, and for two some more delicate women may be embarrassed being seen by men to be doing something dirty - though I accept this second point today is becoming rarer; and men don't want them because there are no urinals. The way the Pitt-Rivers museum designed their gender-neutral toilets was by giving everyone a cubicle. Now, I understand the fairer sex have nothing but cubicles in their toilets; not that I've been in of course, but I have no doubt this is the case. So for them it is natural to have a series of cubicles and to use them whether for ones or twos. For a man, it is different. When pissing, a man wants a urinal. Some men may not: I have met some men who insist on using cubicles, and it is a point on which it is right to tease a man if he comes out with such a preference. There is no good reason to go through the rigmarole of using a full toilet for urinating as a man unless you are somehow embarrassed to be pissing standing up in view of other men; which you most certainly shouldn't be. It is our right, as men.
The second time I saw gender-neutral toilets, arranged in just the same way, endless rows of cubicles, was at the university pub. I say pub - it was barely a pub. They had a special knack for closing the moment you and your friends pitched up, closing with no regard for clientele nor profit. It was ran by students who didn't care in the slightest whether the business succeeded or failed; it was as if they wanted to run it into the ground to spite their fellow students. What a strange place. And over the course of my studies, the pub only got worse and worse and worse, closing earlier and earlier and earlier, until they decided to redevelop the premises. They stripped away much of the interior decor, which wasn't a nice decor to be clear, but at least it had a pub vibe. There were sofas to sit at, some wooden decor: it was sufficient. Then they decided to remodel the place, turning it from a passable pub into a kind of Ikea showroom, filled with tiny table, high chairs, and roomy pastel paint. It wasn't ugly by any means, but it most certainly wasn't a pub any longer. The bright paint and crispness to the decor was hostile to comfort; instead, like a bar or cafe, you felt as if you had no right to just sit there and hang about. One casualty of this transformation was the gents. For a little while before the makeover, the gents was closed up for some reason saying do not enter. Well, once when I was a bit tipsy I did enter and I did use the facilities, all of which worked fine. I may well have not been the only one to do this, as later on they put warning tape over the entrance with a slightly larger sign to discourage toilet use. Our university society had the misfortune of frequenting this pub for so many years that, when nature called, walking over to the gents where we have always known it to be was second nature. But it was now closed, and for good. Instead, considerably further down the corridor were their new gender-neutral cubicle toilets. What a horrid replacement.
Though, as I say, I hesitate to call Mooch a pub, there is something particularly insidious about removing urinals from a pub. Pub urinals are a great joy. There is something a bit messy about a pub urinal: sometimes they are the classic egg-shaped Armitage ones, a sign of a classier pub; sometimes they are troughs, and you can see the river of piss marble-run down to the drain; and other times there are those floor urinals, where you feel as if you are pissing onto a wall. The last kind are quite old fashioned, and I can't say I'm the biggest fan. On a recent pub crawl in St Albans, we visited a pub with these wall urinals, and interestingly the wall urinals went around the shape of the room. As a result there was a corner to the urinal, and being drunk, such a novelty of pissing into the corner couldn't be passed over. I wouldn't recommend the experience though. As Pythagoras would put it, the hypotenuse is always longer than the triangle's height. I return from the toilet, and my friend who's been to this pub before asks me, "did you use the piss corner?" Of course I did. The novelty appears to be universal to the psyche of man.
Pubs on the whole however are resistant to this change. Pubs are after all resistant to most changes; they are like an anchor to Britain's past, holding down a semblance of national identity whilst every other institution drifts away to see. Pubs may well be, if present patterns persist, the last bastion of urinals. No, the place which has gotten rid of urinals which has gotten me so worked up - so worked up to the point of writing this article - is my workplace.
The toilets at my workplace have always been a bit rubbish. It was a coin flip whether the cistern could manage to flush a number two, and it took what must've been over five minutes to refill again for the second flush. They were annoying, and a refurbishment was necessary. What was most certainly unnecessary, however, was the removal of all the urinals. What possessed them? As you will observe in the image above, there are four cubicles in the new toilets. There used to only be three. The fourth cubicle at the end, the one behind the supporting pillar they couldn't remove, that cubicle was where the urinals were. That whole back wall used to be urinals. Replaced with a single cubicle. I'm not sure if it's quite clear in the picture, but that fourth cubicle is really big compared to its siblings; that cubicle is enormous. The room was clearly designed to have urinals at the back, so it was designed to have a cubicle-and-a-half's space. But now they've gone through with this ridiculous makeover, they've created a one-and-a-half width cubicle instead.
What then have been the responses to this change? Absolutely nothing. I can't say whether it's just the general sense of resignation people assume in workplaces so as to protect themselves from everyone else's tomfoolery, or whether they actually don't mind. I've talked about this, complaining, to a quite a few people. Most are a little disappointed they're gone, but none were up in arms about it. To me, this is clearly a problem. I now have to take far longer to use the toilet at work, the place I spend the lion's share of my waking hours. It just feels so wrong not using a urinal outside of a private dwelling. How can these people not understand?
The question I ask is simply this: why? What good did removing the urinals do? A urinal is likely cheaper than installing a full toilet, and with a few you can improve the throughput and efficiency of the toilet. Seems clear and reasonable that the tradition is continued - it doesn't even rely on a Chesterton's fence argument to maintain the tradition of the urinal. So why? I have only one answer, and bear with me since it's a conspiratorial one.
I remember when I was a child I was with my family in the British museum. I needed the toilet, so my parents took me over to where the toilets were, and there was an almighty queue. The queue spanned a long line following a wall, and then once I got closer, I saw the queue descend quite far down the staircase for where the toilets were. I really needed to go, so I was worried. But I remember my mum reassuring me, saying that these people were waiting for the women's toilets, and that I can just go down to the men's. I walked past all the women waiting - honestly, it must've been nearly a hundred (at least it looked that way when I was young) - and went straight to the men's toilets, not a single person queuing. This incident left quite a strong impression on me growing up on the value of urinals. The difference can be startling. So here is my theory: the removal of urinals is not done for any good reason at all, only out of a misplaced sense of equality. Men clearly have had an advantage since the time of Adam and Eve, namely that they can urinate while standing and point it where they please. This is a kind of biological inequality between men and women, the worst kind of inequality to modern minds, and can only be ironed out by force. But you can't create a contraption to help women do the same, since any such device would be invasive or unhygienic - it just wouldn't work. So how do you achieve such an equality? By dragging the men down, down to the level of having to queue. Only by removing the urinals will the queue for the men's toilets equal the queue for the women's.
The assault on urinals is just that, a way of weakening man in the name of equality. This is no doubt the worst kind of equality, the kind of equality Communism has so often been denounced for, that being the equality which doesn't make the weak strong, but rather makes the strong weak. We can't make the slower child run any faster, so let's weigh down the faster child. I find this psychology, however prevalent it may be, to be utter madness. Man was born unequal; we are all unequal in terms of the flesh. Some men are taller and have better chances with women and jobs: this as been studied and it is true. You can't argue the platitude that everyone is given different gifts, because this simply isn't true. Some people appear to have been given all the gifts, they are smart, athletic, and handsome, and others have none of the gifts, and are left stupid, autistic, and ugly. This is the way of the world. The many gifts of God were not distributed evenly across His children, it is plain to see.
But given this truth, what do we do about it? I've found solace in the image in Isaiah, one which C. S. Lewis references, that of the lion and the lamb living side by side. The lion is strong, an eater of other animals, and lounges around all day like the fat-cat aristocrat he is; and then there's the lamb, young and feeble, finds defence in the pack, and is vulnerable to predators like the lion. In the state of nature, the lion would simply eat the lamb by virtue of its nature. But in being called to lie side by side, the lion is called to control and tame his blood lust, and the lamb in being called to lie beside the lion is called to control and tame his fear. Both animals have to control their natures in order to live in harmony and love, but importantly neither animal subverts and undermines their natures. The lion isn't called to be a lamb.
What we see here in the example of urinals, is the request to train a lion as a lamb. It is a drive to not accept our natural differences and accept them, but to iron over the beauty in natural inequality, peaceably and lovingly living in the understanding of it, and instead flatten all distinctions out of a sense of envy. It is just envy. Urinals are a joy to men, and I can't stand to see them disappear. There will always be holdouts should this trend continue, small urinal enclaves like pubs, but general public life will just be made ever-so-slightly worse for men. That is not a future I wish to see. I can only hope for the continued longevity of the urinal, and the men begin to realise how important what they have is.
The toilets at my workplace have always been a bit rubbish. It was a coin flip whether the cistern could manage to flush a number two, and it took what must've been over five minutes to refill again for the second flush. They were annoying, and a refurbishment was necessary. What was most certainly unnecessary, however, was the removal of all the urinals. What possessed them? As you will observe in the image above, there are four cubicles in the new toilets. There used to only be three. The fourth cubicle at the end, the one behind the supporting pillar they couldn't remove, that cubicle was where the urinals were. That whole back wall used to be urinals. Replaced with a single cubicle. I'm not sure if it's quite clear in the picture, but that fourth cubicle is really big compared to its siblings; that cubicle is enormous. The room was clearly designed to have urinals at the back, so it was designed to have a cubicle-and-a-half's space. But now they've gone through with this ridiculous makeover, they've created a one-and-a-half width cubicle instead.
What then have been the responses to this change? Absolutely nothing. I can't say whether it's just the general sense of resignation people assume in workplaces so as to protect themselves from everyone else's tomfoolery, or whether they actually don't mind. I've talked about this, complaining, to a quite a few people. Most are a little disappointed they're gone, but none were up in arms about it. To me, this is clearly a problem. I now have to take far longer to use the toilet at work, the place I spend the lion's share of my waking hours. It just feels so wrong not using a urinal outside of a private dwelling. How can these people not understand?
The question I ask is simply this: why? What good did removing the urinals do? A urinal is likely cheaper than installing a full toilet, and with a few you can improve the throughput and efficiency of the toilet. Seems clear and reasonable that the tradition is continued - it doesn't even rely on a Chesterton's fence argument to maintain the tradition of the urinal. So why? I have only one answer, and bear with me since it's a conspiratorial one.
I remember when I was a child I was with my family in the British museum. I needed the toilet, so my parents took me over to where the toilets were, and there was an almighty queue. The queue spanned a long line following a wall, and then once I got closer, I saw the queue descend quite far down the staircase for where the toilets were. I really needed to go, so I was worried. But I remember my mum reassuring me, saying that these people were waiting for the women's toilets, and that I can just go down to the men's. I walked past all the women waiting - honestly, it must've been nearly a hundred (at least it looked that way when I was young) - and went straight to the men's toilets, not a single person queuing. This incident left quite a strong impression on me growing up on the value of urinals. The difference can be startling. So here is my theory: the removal of urinals is not done for any good reason at all, only out of a misplaced sense of equality. Men clearly have had an advantage since the time of Adam and Eve, namely that they can urinate while standing and point it where they please. This is a kind of biological inequality between men and women, the worst kind of inequality to modern minds, and can only be ironed out by force. But you can't create a contraption to help women do the same, since any such device would be invasive or unhygienic - it just wouldn't work. So how do you achieve such an equality? By dragging the men down, down to the level of having to queue. Only by removing the urinals will the queue for the men's toilets equal the queue for the women's.
The assault on urinals is just that, a way of weakening man in the name of equality. This is no doubt the worst kind of equality, the kind of equality Communism has so often been denounced for, that being the equality which doesn't make the weak strong, but rather makes the strong weak. We can't make the slower child run any faster, so let's weigh down the faster child. I find this psychology, however prevalent it may be, to be utter madness. Man was born unequal; we are all unequal in terms of the flesh. Some men are taller and have better chances with women and jobs: this as been studied and it is true. You can't argue the platitude that everyone is given different gifts, because this simply isn't true. Some people appear to have been given all the gifts, they are smart, athletic, and handsome, and others have none of the gifts, and are left stupid, autistic, and ugly. This is the way of the world. The many gifts of God were not distributed evenly across His children, it is plain to see.
But given this truth, what do we do about it? I've found solace in the image in Isaiah, one which C. S. Lewis references, that of the lion and the lamb living side by side. The lion is strong, an eater of other animals, and lounges around all day like the fat-cat aristocrat he is; and then there's the lamb, young and feeble, finds defence in the pack, and is vulnerable to predators like the lion. In the state of nature, the lion would simply eat the lamb by virtue of its nature. But in being called to lie side by side, the lion is called to control and tame his blood lust, and the lamb in being called to lie beside the lion is called to control and tame his fear. Both animals have to control their natures in order to live in harmony and love, but importantly neither animal subverts and undermines their natures. The lion isn't called to be a lamb.
What we see here in the example of urinals, is the request to train a lion as a lamb. It is a drive to not accept our natural differences and accept them, but to iron over the beauty in natural inequality, peaceably and lovingly living in the understanding of it, and instead flatten all distinctions out of a sense of envy. It is just envy. Urinals are a joy to men, and I can't stand to see them disappear. There will always be holdouts should this trend continue, small urinal enclaves like pubs, but general public life will just be made ever-so-slightly worse for men. That is not a future I wish to see. I can only hope for the continued longevity of the urinal, and the men begin to realise how important what they have is.