COLUMN: Women are better at bathroom talk than men
What is it about the bathroom that makes it so difficult to talk about to people?
Granted, the bathroom isn’t where I’d prefer to go for quality conversation, but I don’t understand why everyone suddenly loses their social skills once they walk into the bathroom.
Has this ever happened to you?
It happens to me all the time at work. I sit at my desk and talk to coworkers all day long about anything from donuts to baseball. But as soon as I walk into the men’s room, the linkage from my brain to my mouth snaps, and I can’t think of one intelligent thing to say (of course, some people would argue I have this problem outside the bathroom too).
From what I’ve seen, however, I’m not the only one with this problem. I’d feel a little better if I were the only person in the world who gets struck dumb when they walk through the bathroom door; I’d feel as if there is hope for humanity.
This bathroom stupidity seems to be a worldwide thing, though – or at least a Utah and Idaho thing. I haven’t used public restrooms in enough of the other 48 states to know if the problem exists beyond the Utah and Idaho borders.
Furthermore, I don’t know if it exists in the women’s room, either. I imagine there might be something different in a female’s DNA that allows them to intelligently communicate inside a bathroom. In fact, women might even communicate better in the bathroom. That would certainly explain why whenever one woman excuses herself from the table, all the other women get up and follow her into the restroom.
“Oh, thank you, Betty. I just couldn’t express myself properly out there at the dinner table. There was just so much I wanted to say. I’m so glad you felt the urge. I love the sense of freedom I feel inside the bathroom. My thoughts just roll off my tongue in here.”
“Yeah, Wilma, I needed to talk to you too, and I just couldn’t think of the words out there. I felt trapped. I knew what I wanted to say, but I just couldn’t find the words. But anyway, Isn’t Barney just a dream?”
When men walk into a bathroom it’s as though they checked their First Amendment rights to free speech at the door.
“Nice day today, isn’t it, Fred?”
“Yeah, I was just thinking to myself how nice it is today … bright and warm … How’s the kids Barney?”
“Oh they’re good, Fred … real good.”
“That’s swell … Well, it sure is a nice day, isn’t it?”
“Yeah … real nice day, Fred.”
Maybe this is why men and women have separate bathrooms. If women actually saw how dumb men become when we walk into bathroom, they’d never want anything to do with us. Word would get out, and there wouldn’t be a man on earth who could get a date. The human race would die off.
The one exception to all of this is the public restrooms at sporting venues. For some reason (and I’m not going to even pretend like I understand it) men can stand shoulder-to-shoulder in bathrooms at sporting events and carry on conversation as easily as they do at the water cooler.
“Can you believe how well Pedro is pitching tonight?”
“Oh, his curve ball is unbelievable. The bottom is completely falling out of it.”
“Oh yeah, and no one has even touched his fastball. He’s unhitable.”
“Yeah, but the Red Sox have got to get some runs or it won’t matter.”
“You said it, bro.”
It never ceases to amaze me. You’ll see guys yelling across the restroom to each other. And what’s really weird is these are the places women seem to be most fearful of the bathroom. It’s as though the curse is reversed inside places like Fenway Park or the Delta Center.
There has to be a cure out there for this illness, but no one has found it yet. I think the problem is a lack of funding. No one is taking up the fight against this social retardation, known in the medical community as BOMM (Bathroomal Override of the Male Mouth), because all the money is going to other research and special interest groups like FAB (Fight Against Baldness) and PABB (People Against Boy Bands).
If BOMM had a fraction of the funding some of these other organizations have, this problem could probably be defeated. Until that happens, however, we’ll just have to keep using seperate restrooms.
Casey Hobson is a junior majoring in journalism. Comments may be sent to
hobsonhut@hotmail.com