{"id":267802,"date":"2025-10-29T16:04:33","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T05:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.russh.com\/?p=267802"},"modified":"2025-10-29T16:04:33","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T05:04:33","slug":"the-girls-bathroom-connection-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.russh.com\/the-girls-bathroom-connection-community\/","title":{"rendered":"How the girl’s bathroom became an unspoken ecosystem for community"},"content":{"rendered":"

There aren\u2019t many places more sacred than the women\u2019s bathroom.<\/p>\n

Nature\u2019s various callings aside, the beauty of the women\u2019s bathroom is its almost cosmic ability to fast-track connection. You can\u2019t play it too cool in a bathroom. Everyone knows what we\u2019re here for, and thus defenses are down. Sure, self-consciousness can still permeate the space. For the most part, though, our shared humanity unites us.<\/p>\n

For the longest time, there have been attempts to sanitise this reality. Women\u2019s bathrooms have been called powder rooms, water closets, ladies\u2019 rooms. Their doors are adorned with stencils of women in petticoats with umbrellas, or more crudely, stick figures in triangle dresses. Even that term, \u2018ladies\u2019 room\u2019, evokes an image of courtliness that is so at odds with what goes on inside. It\u2019s as if the creators of these spaces are terrified of what lies behind closed doors, of what happens when so-called ladies are left alone. We are all the things we are taught not to be: messy, disgusting, united. In some ways, they should be scared.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m reminded here of the Ladies\u2019 Lounge in Tasmania\u2019s Museum of Modern Art. Artist and Curator Kirsha Kaechele<\/a> created \u201ca haven of priceless treasures and enlightened conversation where the only man present is the butler, who does as he\u2019s told.\u201d A man, disgruntled by this concept, responded litigiously. Ironically, like a butler, he served the museum a lawsuit. He claimed discrimination for having been knocked back at the red rope. After an arduous legal battle, the museum won. It was a costly reminder of the rarity of such spaces.<\/p>\n

We convene here, we share secrets, we gossip, we bitch. We lay it all out on the table while reapplying lipliner with various degrees of skill and success. Here, you will strike up a conversation with a woman on a disastrous date. Better yet, you\u2019ll be approached sheepishly by a girl on a good date, five wines deep, asking if she could maybe borrow a little bit of your make-up. At this stage, you\u2019ll hopefully be a bottle deep yourself, and thus all hygiene concerns will fly out the frosted window. Yes, you should never share makeup brushes, especially not with strangers. But a brush can be cleaned. You can\u2019t turn back the clock and recreate the connections that these moments naturally facilitate.<\/p>\n

Sometimes bathrooms are glamorous, other times they are makeshift disaster management zones. We\u2019ve all seen the woman scrubbing oil stains from her silk dress before contorting under hand dryers like she\u2019s doing the limbo. We\u2019ve heard the woman projectile vomiting, reappearing out of cubicles like disoriented bears breaking hibernation. A girl crying over an ex in the bathroom attracts empathetic older women like a moth to a flame. We connect in moments that feel as emotionally glorious as they are grotesque.<\/p>\n

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“We convene here, we share secrets, we gossip, we bitch. We lay it all out on the table while reapplying lipliner with various degrees of skill and success.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One such connection struck me in 2013. I\u2019d just turned eighteen, and I was titillated by my newfound ability to go to nightclubs legally. In fact, I was so titillated that I went out by myself. This particular evening was a Friday night, and I went to Revolver, Melbourne\u2019s most infamous club. It\u2019s a place that is shrouded in urban folklore \u2013 no other nightclub in Australia holds the same dark mystique as Revs. I found myself at an impasse as soon as I paid the $25 entry fee: I felt overwhelmingly self-conscious being there alone, but I didn\u2019t want to leave. So, I took myself to the bathroom. It\u2019s a cavernous space of about eight cubicles; all covered in graffiti and reeking of urine. At the time, it was routinely patrolled by a male bouncer who\u2019d bang on the cubicle doors every few minutes, scaring the girls who dared to share a stall.<\/p>\n

After sitting in a cubicle for about five minutes like a bullied schoolgirl, I washed my hands in the big, ugly metal trough. As I dried them, two girls my age walked in. I smiled at one of them in the smudged, defaced reflection of the mirror, and she returned in kind. We struck up a conversation.<\/p>\n

Their names were Joanna and Beatrice. They were from Sweden. That was so cool to me \u2013 I\u2019d never met a Swedish person. I was entranced by the fact that we were so similar despite growing up on opposite sides of the world. We stood there for about 20 minutes, exchanging stories through thick accents before exchanging Facebooks. A few days later, we got a drink at a local bar, and I brought my best friend, Madison. We all got along so well. So, this was what it was like to connect with fellow \u201cadults\u201d? It felt revolutionary. After a month, they returned home, but we remained in touch.<\/p>\n

Six months later, Madison went to Denmark with her boyfriend. After demeaning her for years, he got physical. Scared and alone, she left him and boarded a Ryanair flight to Sweden. She went straight to Joanna\u2019s, where her parents welcomed Madison with open arms. Joanna was encouraging when Madison decided to cut all her hair off. She went with her when she decided to get a tattoo, another act of self-actualisation in the immediate aftermath of the split. The tattoo, funnily enough, was the female sex symbol, not unlike one you see on a bathroom stall door. It was a way of declaring herself and her place as a young woman. When I picked her up at Melbourne airport, I felt eternally thankful to Joanna for taking care of her. Better yet, I felt thankful for the hostility of Revolver\u2019s dance floor for having made me take refuge in the loo.<\/p>\n

That is what women\u2019s bathrooms are: they are the ultimate spaces of unsupervised self-expression. So often, even without realising, women posture themselves to appease an omnipresent gaze, imagined or otherwise. We suck in, we sit up straight, we purse and pout our lips. All of that flies out the window when you\u2019re busting for a bathroom. There\u2019s not much more beautiful than that.<\/p>\n

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