{"id":1399,"date":"2003-04-05T22:14:50","date_gmt":"2003-04-06T03:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/?p=144"},"modified":"2003-04-05T22:14:50","modified_gmt":"2003-04-06T03:14:50","slug":"cultural-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/?p=1399","title":{"rendered":"Cultural divide."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Men&#8217;s Restroom is a place of almost monastic silence.  When men enter the restroom, all conversation ceases.  If two men are talking about something and they both need to use the bathroom, they&#8217;ll pause the conversation.  Once they&#8217;re both done with their business and outside the bathroom, the conversation will resume.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nIf two guys who haven&#8217;t seen each other for years meet accidentally in a public bathroom, any reunion conversation would be limited to &#8220;Hey, how&#8217;s it going?&#8221; and &#8220;Good.&#8221;  Any further discussion would have to wait until they were outside.<\/p>\n<p>As a man, you are forbidden to react to someone else&#8217;s appearance in a public bathroom.  If you walk in and you see some guy wearing a custom-tailored three piece suit and a fluorescent purple spiked mohawk, the most you can do is nod.  Once you&#8217;re outside, you can say &#8220;Nice suit&#8221; or &#8220;Nice hair&#8221; or whatever, but inside the hallowed halls of the Men&#8217;s Room, no comment is allowed.  It&#8217;s as if the material of the bathroom is designed to absorb all sound.<\/p>\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t seem to be the case with women&#8217;s restrooms.  I checked with my Fiancee.  Apparently, conversations continue unabated there.  According to my Fiancee, if two women wander, chattering, into a bathroom, it&#8217;s not unusual for them to keep talking through the whole thing.  Their discussion can&#8217;t be halted by something as trivial as the metal walls that separate the different stalls.  For women, a bathroom is a perfect place to conduct a reunion or to inquire about a person&#8217;s coiffure or wardrobe.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect that overcoming the differences in &#8220;commode culture&#8221; could be one of the great stumbling blocks for cross-dressers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Men&#8217;s Restroom is a place of almost monastic silence. When men enter the restroom, all conversation ceases. If two men are talking about something and they both need to use the bathroom, they&#8217;ll pause the conversation. Once they&#8217;re both &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/?p=1399\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-1399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/quirkblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}