Many years ago, too many to admit here, I spent some time as a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lived in the dorm. One of the strangest things about my dorm experience was the existence of coed bathrooms.
Now, I know that men and women's excretory functions are basically the same, but, up until that point, I assumed there was a pretty good reason to separate those functions with walls, not stalls. I was wrong. After a short time, I came to learn that the sexes could peacefully coexist in such an intimate and untraditional setting.
But now I find out that men and women are having a hard time coexisting on the bus. According to a recent article in the New York Times and the embedded video report from Reuters, the transit authority in Mexico City put some women-only buses into service in January. And it hopes to expand these single-sex buses from four to 15 routes in the near future. What's going on here?
As you might guess, sexual harassment is a problem on the buses, especially the crowded ones. Although official complaints are relatively rare, the incidence of groping and other inappropriate behavior has reached a point in which transit officials felt like they had to act.
One women's advocate calls this new policy "positive discrimination." Men who are told by the operator that they can't board one of these buses probably call it something else. Is it a sad state of affairs that such a drastic measure has been taken? Yeah, probably. But the women on these buses feel safer and travel more confidently. Their use of the bus system will probably rise. And men will have to wait a little longer for a coed bus, which could cause them to drive their cars more often.
For some reason, I keep thinking about the Titanic and the men who donned women's clothes to gain admittance into the lifeboats. No, I know that a bus ride to the office doesn't have the same urgency as getting off a sinking ship, but I still have mental images of men in drag trying to sneak onto these women-only buses. I hope they go away soon.
Until next time.
Steve
Comments