Separate but unequal

It’s a question I’m sure every girl asks on a somewhat regular basis. Maybe she’s visiting a friend in a different part of campus, or maybe she just has better things to do with her time than to memorize a half dozen different three- to five-digit numbers for the buildings in her residential college. Either way, in my experience, a girl present will tell her the number, usually with a hint of frustration and usually within earshot of any boys who might live nearby.

The University began putting locks on female restrooms in 1978 when Princeton was still figuring out how to accommodate women in the dorms. The locks were considered security measures installed as a reaction to reported sexual assault in women’s bathrooms.

I recognize and will not deal with the relevant but separate issue of gender-neutral bathrooms, especially as they pertain to transgender people. Though eight ‘Prince’ articles in the last year focused on issues relating to Princeton’s bathrooms, those eight articles about toilet paper ignored some of the real bathroom issues. The discussion about transgender people and gender-neutral bathrooms is beyond the scope of this column and deserves its place in the annals of the ‘Prince.’

Many freshman girls initially learn about bathroom codes in the first (and maybe only) e-mail from their residential college adviser that needs to be addressed to a demographic of the advisee group. Many freshman boys initially learn of this security measure during a conversation like the one described above. This discrepancy puts into place a system whereby women are told to be wary of the voyeuristic and predatory nature of those who live around them.

‘Prince’ articles from the 1970s indicate that the bathroom intrusions which galvanized the enactment of the policy were perpetrated for the most part by nonresidents. This demonstrates the anachronistic nature of the policy, for buildings are now efficiently protected from nonresident interlopers by the prox system, which has enabled dorms to be locked 24 hours a day since the fall of 1999. Therefore, the locks are not fulfilling the role for which they were originally intended, but rather an entirely different role: protecting women from other students.

One might claim that although the effect of the locks is not what was originally intended, there is no reason to change the status quo. Yes, women are not vulnerable to nonstudents, and maybe the policy wasn’t made to protect them from other students, but why not allow the policy to do this now? But this thinking makes an enemy out of someone who wasn’t previously an enemy: the fellow male student.

The existence of the unequal security measure makes women think that they need protection every time they walk into a bathroom. There is maybe nothing worse than feeling unsafe in your own home, but that is the feeling evoked whenever a girl uses a secret code to gain entry to a secure lavatory. Women should be empowered to walk around the dormitories without fear, not babied by a patriarchal conception of safety.

Likewise, whenever a boy walks into his bathroom while hearing the loud beeps that signal a girl walking into hers, he is reminded that she is being protected from him, a potential attacker. He is told that he is the stronger, more aggressive and dominant one, and if he doesn’t take care to keep in check his insatiable drive to assault women, he may put them in danger.

There may be truth to this exaggerated description of gender relations, though I hope this column’s discussion doesn’t descend into a bitter battle of over the validity of rape statistics. And it is not hard to imagine a drunk idiot with a video camera and access to the Internet destroying a girl’s privacy. But we must strike a balance here between protecting privacy and safety, and promoting a society in which men and women interact with each other as equals. The current system is a quick fix that doesn’t seem to do a lot to actually protect privacy and safety. A lockless system is conducive to an end goal where women no longer need special protection from men, who no longer view themselves as superior or dominant to women.

This system is a relic of a time when there was less building security and more trepidation about women and men living in the same building. All it serves to do now, other than to inconvenience girls across campus, is to tell women they should be frightened of the men they live near and to further enforce an essentialist binary and hierarchy between those whose use the room marked “M” and those who use the room marked “W.”

Luke Massa is a sophomore from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.