Porta potty gender essentialism!

Or: My morning at the soccer field

I was huddled in a beach chair watching my 3rd grader play soccer in the chill of a 48° Sunday in JUNE, when my four-year-old announced he had to pee.

“Really?” I queried with a wince in my voice.

“Yup,” he said definitively.

I attempted to cajole him into peeing in the woods abutting the soccer field (we’re in rural New Hampshire so this would not have been some sort of indecent exposure incident), but he declined.

Which led me to this porta potty.

Because we all know that a woman’s index finger is NATURALLY equipped with special, gendered je ne sais quoi when it comes to pushing down on a spray nozzle of disinfectant! Women are NATURALLY good at lots of things: childcare, domestic labor, care work, and duh - porta potty maintenance.

Listen, gender equity is fine in SOME places, but have you ever had to pee in a porta potty cleaned by a “man’s touch?” [Shudders in horror]

I know I feel better peeing into a porta potty’s frightening hole to nowhere if I can tell that a woman has prepped the space for me. You know, because of the vintage milk-glass bud vase full of sprigs of lilac perched on the edge of the hand sanitizer pump, the bespoke chandelier made of tampons gently lighting the space overhead, and the fresh-baked apple pie cooling on the ledge of the door handle.

And like, only a woman really knows how to do things like restock toilet paper and empty trash receptacles, right? Properly, I mean. The way these things should be done. Sure, you could teach a man how run a Clorox wipe along a toilet seat, but would you want to SIT on that toilet seat?! BE HONEST. It just WOULDN’T BE THE SAME.

Does this slogan work? When thumbing through a booklet of porta potty vendors, did the person who chose this particular company feel a sense of comfort knowing that each porta potty would be cleaned by some sort of Donna Reed Manic Pixie Porta Potty Girl?

Why does the clip art image of the porta potty look like something these fools built?

As soon as he emerged from the porta potty pictured above, my four-year-old recited a verse of Emily Dickinson poetry. Would that have happened if he’d pissed all over the seat in a porta potty touched by men? I don’t think so!

I wonder if the womanly woman who used her innately feminine skills to polish the plastic walls of the porta potty to a gleaming shine used these paper towels? Probably not!