Standing Up for Bathroom Diversity

Why can't a man have a urinal in his home? Screenwriter Joel Stein sought to fulfill his lifelong dream but then ran into a neighbor who “explained that urinals, to my shock, gross women out.” Unsanitary lidlessness, along with an unfortunate name—which conjures the word “crapinals”—are only part of the problem, Stein writes. The fact is, urinals “are simply too aggressively male.”

Yet he plowed ahead with his plan, he writes in an LA Times op-ed, after his wife gave him the okay. Stein figured he could always rip out his dream and replaster when they sold the house in 10 years. Yet he found that he was “more than a little grossed out by my wife, Cassandra, for not being grossed out by the home urinal in the first place.” (More bathroom stories.)