Uni-Sex Tinkling

Though I have never encountered this in Sweden (or anywhere else, for that matter) before, I have to say it is so uniquely Swedish, I felt obligated to take the photo. The ABBA museum has a gender neutral bathrooms. Well, they have a handicapped/nursing bathroom and one shared men's and women's bathroom.

I do not really have an opinion on it in either direction. Shocker! Hey, when I have to pee, I do not really care if it is an extraterrestrial/ human restroom, I am going in. I am not above using the men's restroom either. So, a unisex bathroom means little to me.

At the end of the day, I know this is not an exercise in better use of resources or space and more a socio-political move. An illustrative exercise to help shift the societal view that, yes, men and women are very much the same. This, ofcourse, is very Swedish and I accept that. Not that I necessarily believe it. I very much believe the world shook out the way it did for reasons and as the pendulum shifts one way it will eventually shift the other.

This rest room, though, was sort of a half hearted effort. A baby step in the direction of gender equality. Men and women waited in separate lines and went to separate sides of the rooms to their stalls. "Weak sauce", I thought. Unless you are going to be stall by stall-she making all sorts of menstrual related noses and him, stinking the place up as only a man can do, why then we are still, pretty much, admitting to differences and differing needs between the genders.

ETA: I noticed the mixed gender rest rooms yesterday at Gröna Lund. Funny, I had never encountered them in all the time I was here but now I am running into them everywhere. Either way, they were certainly unisex, all the way.  There was a man in this one undergoing a full bathing ritual in the sink, replete with finger brushing his teeth sans toothpaste.