photo credit: Kenyon Jank

Here at Kenyon, we all have bodies and all bodies need bathrooms. There are a lot of bathrooms on campus, some of which are nice and some of which are very scary. Most Kenyon students have a mental list of the bathrooms they like most and prioritize the patronage of those. However, even in the safest bathrooms, you can experience something that can chill you to the bone. These are their stories. 

Okay, first off, men don’t wash their hands ever, and it’s disgusting, but we’ve covered that. (Seriously, avoid shaking a man’s hand at all costs. You don’t know where it’s been. Or where it hasn’t been, eg. the damn sink.) There are also minor gripes like sinks that barely drip, sinks that are so powerful the stream tears some of the flesh off of your hands, and empty soap dispensers. There are the woes and perils of living with a lot of people, some of whom don’t care about the spaces they’re sharing, like massive loads of glitter in the sink after Deb Ball, or the rare but grotesquely unpleasant shit-in-the-shower. But there’s one other thing that irks me to my very core.

Okay. Here is the Big Thing. This is why I wrote this article and single-handedly brought this campus’s collective begrudging half-respect for the Thrill into the literal toilet. The urinals in Peirce are all made for children. Like, every single one.

look at this thing! it’s so tiny!

The Peirce bathrooms are pretty nice. Save for on-the-hour, when people are flushing in after class, they’re fairly private. They stay pretty clean, there’s usually soap, the flush is powerful. But then we get to the urinals. What is up with this?

I’m not that tall and these puppies still come up to my thigh! I don’t really use urinals as a way of performing non-masculinity/extreme laziness but I sometimes appreciate the option! Especially since there’s only one stall on the ground floor bathroom. But nope! To be eligible I either have to get, like, 5 inches shorter or do some silly thing where I squat and hope for the best. This is true of a grand total of zero other bathrooms on campus. What makes you special, Peirce? Bathrooms are weird hell spaces where you’re reduced to the simple physical necessity of needing to shit and then you also have to do it often with other people going through the same experience in silence. Please make it a more comfortable experience and just make your urinals go somewhere more sensible.