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Amadan touched on this, but I feel it's worth joining in: men very much do not show off their penises in the men's room. The norm is to give other men as much space as you can (leaving at least a urinal between you, especially in the case of urinals without privacy barriers), and to politely refrain from looking at other guys' penises even if one might catch a glimpse. In fact, someone who is showing off his penis (or deliberately looking at someone else's penis) is considered extremely rude and subject to social consequences for it. I'm not sure if you meant this claim literally or just as a rhetorical flourish, but either way reality is the exact opposite of what you describe.
We're talking about, like, 100 out of 300,000 trans women misbehaving. Do you really think there are not 100 men in the UK that have waved their penis around and tried to make people uncomfortable? Or are just socially oblivious and therefore always take the closest urinal instead of spacing out?
My personal experience with locker rooms is that if you take 100 guys, there'll be at least one that Really Clearly Does Not Mind Showing Off. Maybe they're not actively strutting around with an erection, but they're making zero effort to hide it, they're taking their sweet time changing, and they're more than happy to walk over for a conversation with it danging right there. Congratulations on you not personally being a victim of all that, but as a victim... I find it really weird that everyone here just wants to ignore that and reassure me that no, unlike my experience, everyone ELSE gets taken seriously an there's consequences when it happens to THEM.
But also, if the standard is purely "subjected to social consequences", then... what's the problem? It still feels insulting to me to say that cis women are utterly incompetent and can't even handle a simple disruption like this, but somehow it's absolutely zero problem for men to handle it. In what other areas are women too psychologically frail to handle things that don't affect men? If women can't even handle one person behaving inappropriately in the bathroom, why in the world are we trusting them to be police officers and politicians?
Ok you've moved the goalposts twice in one reply. First, I didn't say diddly squat about trans people so that's irrelevant. Second, we were talking bathrooms (and specifically the urinals therein), not locker rooms. The two are different situations so you're going to get very different results.
Sorry, I'm having a dozen slightly different conversations, and it can be hard to keep track of them. My point on urinals is that merely seeing a penis is not harmful. I have seen vastly more penises in the men's bathroom than I have seen in any other context. Stadiums and those big trough urinals are especially awful here. There are a lot of penises on display, even if supposedly no is trying to "show off."
I also, separately, think you're wrong about how often guys do enjoy showing off, but maybe I just got unlucky growing up. The core point is that people routinely have their entire dick out and exposed, and strangers are going to accidentally see a bunch of penises in there whether they want to or not. Maybe not every time you pee, but over a lifetime you're certainly going to see a lot more cocks than if we didn't have urinals. Some bathroom designs are certainly better here, but if we actually cared about privacy I dare say we could do a lot better.
Thank you for calling out the stadium trough. I don’t know how those can be a good idea just from a sanitation perspective.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one a little horrified by those :)
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