Ada Lapham
Contributing Writer
For college students, personal hygiene can be a struggle. College is busy and there never seems to be time to shower. To make matters worse, students often feel the need to methodically plan their showers to lessen their chance of accidentally running into someone else. There is always a possibility that someone will walk in, a scary possibility when the flimsy curtains never feel like much protection.
Pod style restrooms are the solution to this endless cycle of anxiety, shame and overplanning. In a pod style restroom, each toilet and shower are in their own room with a door. These bathrooms should be the norm in every college dorm. They provide students with much needed comfort and privacy. Plus, they make it easier to affirm students’ individual gender identities. Every person deserves to feel relaxed and comfortable while they attend to their basic human needs.
Showering and using the toilet are necessities. In the most ordinary form of dorm bathrooms, college students must be on constant alert while doing these things in a relatively public place. An already vulnerable position becomes even more exposed in this area where anyone could appear at any moment. Students have been stressed about this for years. Look up “college showers” and it seems that there are endless “Do’s and Don’ts” lists and “How do I shower in college?” Reddit posts. Having a private room to shower in would assuage most of these uncomfortable things. It would allow students their own much needed privacy and a safe area to change afterwards. Likewise, these pod style rooms would allow students a truly private place to use a toilet. Having less public poop anxiety is always a good thing.
These bathrooms can also very easily be for all genders. Some people may feel uncomfortable in an all-gender restroom with multiple stalls. There are a number of reasons for this, including not feeling validated in one’s own gender identity to being worried about sharing such a vulnerable space with someone of the opposite gender. Single room style bathrooms get rid of the need to think about who else is in the bathroom with you. This provides a truly safe place for transgender and non-binary people, which is essential.
Colleges can, and should, implement these bathrooms in dorms. Colleges may say that they do not have the money for this, however the average student in the U.S. pays $9,678 for in-state tuition and even more for out-of-state and private universities. Colleges claim to spend that money as effectively as possible, however, everyone deserves to feel comfortable and safe on their own campus and colleges owe it to their students to provide that. Additionally, many of these restrooms are due for an update anyway. They can easily do this with the resources they have. In fact, most colleges who already updated their bathrooms managed to fit these individual rooms into the spaces that used to be a community bathroom. This space utilization cuts down on the cost of these renovations and allows the space to be under construction for less time.
For students’ safety, physical health, mental health and just general time, schools should implement gender neutral, pod-style restrooms. The only downside to this is money, but that should not be a barrier to student comfort and safety, especially not to multi-thousand and multi-million dollar academic institutions.