The bathroom laws

All this coverage of who goes where into what public bathroom makes me think about them as I rarely have before. My experience of women and men in public bathrooms is from the common enough male experience of helping women to enter the mens room when it was essentially empty in the stall area when there was a dramatic overflow of women waiting.  Men as a rule don't have to wait.  Once at a performance of "Ragtime" when the audience were largely ticket holders sponsoring a major gay charitable institution, a woman in our party heard another say unwittingly in the ladies room "How queer it is, there is no line to the ladies room."  I remember once at a matinee at Lincoln Center the line for the mens room stretching into the corridor and I joined it perplexed and the old gent ahead of me said: "Welcome to the prostate nation!"  Yes, I certainly know noww.  I am an old man and I prefer not to stand to urinate since the urine coming out of the penis tends to spray; it's because the pressure is so low in the urethra, the tube bringing the liquid down from the bladder.  Spraying just means I have to worry about wetting my pants or dripping on the floor, so sitting down in a stall is in theory better.  The stalls in men's public toilets, however, are often awash with liquid around the porcelain receptical which is meant to be the target.  That's because men use the sit down toilets as urinals.  Several have made a clumsy attempt cover the mess by pulling toilet seat tissues and laying them on the wet ground which of course quickly soak up and become soggy.  Women who have thought to use a men's stall in desperation cannot believe the mess in them.  For a man my age standing at the urinal can mean a long wait as the liquid not under pressure makes its way down by gravity's laws and into its final destination in the porcelain urinal.  Nothing is more strikingly demonstrative of age than to have a very young man come in hurriedly unzipping his flies pulling himself out and directing a powerful stream into the bowl.  It sounds like a fire hose has been unleashed.  Seconds later he is zipping himself up and on his way, while the elderly gents around him are patiently waiting the drip, drip, drip, or indeed waiting for the flow to commence.  I don't quite get all this hysteria surrounding toilets.  I well remember on hiking outings with my children, their going al fresco, boys and girls, not to mention my wife who had a small bladder, as she claimed, or as was otherwise the case, pregnant again.  I cannot think how many times I have stood at a urinal in southern Europe while the bathroom attendant, always a woman, was busy with her mop, no distance at all from where I was doing my business.  I remember once on a ferry crossing the Adriatic, I believe, standing at a urinal and not quite believing my eyes as I glanced at a normal looking young fellow standing next to me who was, I am sure of this, taking the occasion to masturbate privately between the two panels demarcating his space.  Men at least keep their heads down, do their business, get out as quickly as possible. That's why when there is desperation as at a convention or some other outsize gathering and women have commandeered stalls in mens rooms,  nobody seems to mind.  I guess women have mirrors in their area, and they have to use the mirror for a touch up, and that's when all the transgendered people are going to be revealed, exposed, flaunt themselves.  Actually I don't quite get it.