memes

Yes, and we're incredibly envious of it every time it comes up :(

In a lot of public stalls in Japan, the outer end of the door is rounded. And the wall it connects to when closed is concaved. So even though there’s a gap to allow the door to open and close freely, there no direct line of sight.

Just the USA, not all of America

I think it's meant to stop people from shooting up and/or fucking and/or falling asleep and/or dying in stalls.

It is fucking annoying though.

Yeah, here in Germany we usually have kinda big (30cm or so) openings at the bottom and at the top, but it's impossible to accidentally look through those due to their position.

The side openings of the doors are usually completely closed or it's a very small slit, you definetly cannot look through them.

In America, the reason is basically “religion”. There are architectural standards which designers refer to for guidance, and the dude who did the architectural standard for restrooms was super hardcore religious. His standard called for big gaps in all the seams, to prevent people from masturbating in the stalls. Basically, he wanted people to be able to peek into stalls, as a sort of modesty check. And eventually, it just became accepted as normal, even though everyone (including Americans who were born and raised with them as the standard) hates the huge gaps.

In modern day, they’re mostly done to deter drug use. I guess the reasoning is similar, with the large gaps intended to allow people to peek into the stalls and see if someone is doing drugs.

... except the recently renovated bathrooms at the Denver Public Library have individual locking shit-shacks with communal sinks. It's not like junkies avoid the DPL, they have a box of Narcan bolted to the outside of the building.

Sheesh, I just imagine imagine happening to walk past around the time some hairy slob is standing up to wipe his ass.

Thankfully I must have avoided whatever business were doing this.

However, I have had the experience of attending schools that had weird urinal designs.

There was one where the urinals looked like regular toilets but without tanks or lids. They also didn’t have dividers and were placed in a position where anyone walking in the bathroom or using the sink got a full view.

There were other schools that had the “trough.” Just a six foot long piss bucket.

hah! I went to military boarding high school and the old, OLD dividers were like that, no door. These were so old they were made of that black slate like an old school lab bench. Luckily I spent only one semester doing the "poop with friends" before they installed standard dividers.

Did people just slowly turn to the other people to make eye contact while blastin a dook?