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Mike: (On seeing Raul Julia open a random door and enter a beautiful Greco-Roman garden) Ah, he wandered into the ladies room...
Crow: Man, that's why they stay in there so long! Those ladies; they get everything.
Seeing as Most Writers Are Male, the ladies restroom naturally has an air of mystery about it. Why do women go in pairs, and what do they do in there (after all, all guys want girl on girl) and why do they spend so long doing it?
The general assumption seems to be that the ladies' room is in fact a mini-Shangri-La full of wondrous things. In extreme cases the ladies' room is portrayed as a mini-spa, complete with fountains and musicians, while in more realistic cases it's simply shown as being much cleaner and nicer looking than male facilities. While more extreme portrayals of this are not Truth In Television, as women are just as capable of making total messes as men, paid maintenance personnel tend to be much faster about dealing with them.
More generally there is some truth to this. The ladies' rooms at most places (particularly restaurants) that are fairly upscale are usually kept cleaner, and they tend to be decorated with pictures and plants compared to the usually spartan men's rooms. Meanwhile, places that don't decorate the ladies' room can't be bothered to perform basic maintenance or provide things like soap in the men's room.
While most ladies' rooms are fairly similar to men's rooms, it is not uncommon for a nice one to include a small room before the room with the toilets. This room may contain a couch, often will contain chairs, and generally will contain a large mirror that often has lights around it. This room is designed to make it easy for women to fix their hair or make-up. It is also useful because lines for ladies' rooms tend to be longer than for men's rooms since women do not use urinals, do have to deal with menstruation, often visit the bathroom in groups, and disproportionately often have young children of either sex with them who need assistance. Having a nicer room to wait in helps to balance this out a little. This is very rare in any men's room, which does provide more truth for the trope. The couches in the ante-bathroom may be placed there for the convenience of nursing mothers, or it may be a hangover from the days of fainting couches.
See also Bathroom Stall Of Overheard Insults, Womens Mysteries, Disgusting Public Toilet.
Examples:
Film
- Pretty In Pink, when Ducky complains about how nice it is compared to the boys, mistaking the tampon dispenser for a candy machine.
Literature
- In the Isaac Asimov novel The Caves of Steel, the people of the overcrowded, quasi-socialist 47th century use communal bathroom-shower-laundry facilities, called "Personals". While men are instructed from childhood that it is ''never'' permissible to speak in the Personal, women often socialize in their Personals, and this fact is an object of fascination and confusion for men.
- In Louis Sachar's There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, Bradley assumes the girls' room is nicer than the boys', with colored water in the toilets and fountains, perhaps. When he does hide in one, he finds it's pretty much like the boys'.
- Averted in Digital Fortress - Boring McNoncharacter goes to a women's bathroom and is unimpressed. Dan Brown loves revealing the secrets behind such myths.
- Averted in the Spiderwick Chronicles when one of the twins searches the girl's bathroom at school for his missing sister and is mildly surprised that other than the lack of unrinals (which he admits would have been obvious had he'd bothered to think about it) it doesn't really differ from the boy's room at all.
- In Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets the hidden entrance to said Chamber was behind the sink in a girl's restroom, even though Salazar Slitherin and his eventual heir were both male. Come to think of it, all the cool bathroom-related stuff that happens in the series (with the exception of the Prefect's bathroom in the fourth book) takes place in ladies' rooms.
- Of course, its also illustrated every once in a while that the original builders were a bit chauvinistic.
- It's also possible that the woman's bathroom just happened to be located where the tunnel entrance had to be, or that the restroom was repurposed from a men's to a woman's bathroom (as happens frequently in colleged dormitories) sometime during the previous millenium, or that Slytherin himself wasn't in any position to object. Just imagine him saying "Oh, no, you can't put a woman's room there" without arousing some suspicion.
Live Action TV
- Saturday Night Live had a sketch wherein the ladies room was a Greek garden with a eunuch lyrist who sang softly to them while slave boys fed them fruit and wrapped them in silk.
- Farscape took this to the extreme in the episode "A Human Reaction", where a world is created out of John's memories. As a result, everything is something directly taken from his memory - every random person on the street is someone he's met, none of the magazines and newspapers are from later than when he disappeared from Earth, and so on. So when John figures this out, he opens the door to the women's bathroom (because he's never been in one) and behind it is — a giant, swirling vortex of orange-brown energy. As elaborated on
 at Television Without Pity, this veers headlong into deconstruction.
- The Drew Carey Show had this, where Larry, feeling disoriented, passes out on the couch in the women's bathroom. When he comes to he wants to know why the women have a couch in their bathroom (and subsequently why the men do not). Drew asks him "If there was, would you want to lay on it?"
- A running gag in the high school years of Boy Meets World was boys becoming indignant on seeing that the girls had a couch.
- Parodied in News Radio: When the male staff complains that the ladies room has a couch and demand something similar for the men's room, Jimmy ends up refurbishing the restroom into an exclusive lounge. Then Matthew ruins it by going to the bathroom in the bathroom.
- This was a running gag in Cybill. Ira commented on the potpourri and soap on women's bathroom. During a flashback episode set in the middle ages, the king went to the women's bathroom and was surprised with the stool (you know, the thing we sit on) and the curtain.
- My So Called Life averted this by not only having a girls' restroom set, but having a boy actually in there regularly. (Granted, he's gay, but still...)
- In Popular, the girls' room (the Novak) has a tuffet and is the site of many important plot developments, though when a boy actually does go in there he doesn't seem to be too shocked either way.
- Inverted on The Amanda Show: When the girls in the "The Girls' Room" sketch have to broadcast from the boys' room, their Cloudcuckoolander is intrigued by the "waterfall machines".
- In the TV show Corner Gas, one episode has the signs on the restrooms of the gas station swapped, leading to men praising the cleanliness and women complaining about the smell. Eventually, Brett decides to just make it so that both rooms are equally filthy.
- In The Office, Michael takes all the women shopping, making Kevin very excited about getting to go inside the women's bathroom (he seems to have mixed it up with the popular women's locker room fantasy). Upon going inside his first words are "Oh...my...GOD!" Soon all the guys are hanging out in there, sitting on the couch and reading magazines.
- This annoys Creed, who has paid his female coworkers for the privilege.
- The highly-underrated Nickelodeon show The Adventures Of Pete And Pete turned this trope completely on its head. In the episode "All-nighter", Pete (the younger) and two of his friends (Wayne and Monica) end up locked in the school overnight by accident. Naturally, hijinks ensue) as all three take the opportunity to do all the things they would otherwise never be allowed to do on school grounds. Monica decides to go and check out the BOYS room, since she has never been inside one in her life, apparently. Upon entering she is utterly astounded by the presence of urinals and completely baffled as to their purpose. The two boys (who happened to be in the exact same bathroom for some reason) decide to have some fun by telling her the urinal is "a foot washer".
- A similar situation arises in The Zack Files. Gwen bursts in to the Boys' Room to yell at Zack, and has no idea what the urinals are. He tells her they are planters. For vegetables. She believes it.
Music
- Parodied in the song and video Baņo de Mujeres ("Women's restroom"), by Mexican singer Manuel Mijares. The "hero" of the video (played by Mijares himself) has to sneak in to learn who has been spreading ill rumors about him. Hilarity Ensues.
Music Videos
- The video clip for No Doubt's "Just A Girl" is a good example.
Newspaper Comics
- In Dilbert, the eponymous guy overhears two women talking about various luxuries in their bathroom.
- Then, after hearing them discuss which film they want to watch and who can sit where Wally walks into the cubicle with a tiny speck in his hand and says "Hey, they had soap today." Dilbert then slowly begins to cry.
- In an Outland comic strip, Opus and some members of The Men's Kouch went on an exploratory mission to a ladies' room. They discovered some mousse ("I don't want to know what part of the moose is in there!"), and some things which offered "Maximum Protection", and got freaked out and ran away.
- In a Finnish newspaper comic B. Virtanen, the main character is once again overworking and is the last person still in his office building. Thus, he thinks of all the things he could do. And chooses to peek into the ladies room. The reader doesn't get to see the room, but his comment makes it seem like he was expecting something more stylish.
- One Adventures Of Aaron comic strip had men wondering why women always took so long in the ladies room, and then cut to the mini-spa version with the women playing board games.
Video Games
- The women's room in the Developers Room level of Blood is about as fancy as Blood can get, while the men's...well the less said about that the better.
- The video game Prey averts this trope in the first few seconds, with the ladies' room being just as grimy as the men's. The player character points this out with the smart-ass comment "Sugar and spice, my ass!"
- During one particular mission in Bully you spend some time in the girl's showers and bathrooms— not only is there not much to see, but they're just as grungy and nasty as the boy's facilities. Though this may reflect more on the overall crappiness of Bullworth Academy's campus than overall equality of standards.
- Deus Ex never has bathrooms invoke this trope by architecture, but there are a suspicious number of occasions, especially in the first half of the game, when the ladies' room is important in some way. The men's room occasionally hides a secret as well, but nothing can top the secret passage way in the women's bathroom, opened by the secret keypad under the sink.
- And if one persists in entering the women's bathroom at UNATCO, you will not only be berated by a woman in there but can receive a slap on the wrist from your boss.
- Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 had women's bathrooms, they're just like the men's. And in 2, if you call your Mission Control while in them, you get some hilarious remarks.
- Averted in Banjo-Tooie. In Grunty Industries one could go to the workers' quarters and find a Men's room and a Women's room, blowing up the men's door revealed Loggo, who had a Cheato page wedged in him. To which Kazooie had to use her face to remove. The other restroom, however, remains unopenable.
Webcomics
- The Girls' Room in the B Movie Comic.
- this strip of "Dungeon Crawl Inc" plays it straight.
- This strip of Better Days uses the "much cleaner" variant. The state of the men's room is on the previous page, though "gross" doesn't begin to describe it.
- Tedd thought this about the ladies room in El Goonish Shive, and was disappointed when he finally saw the real thing while body-swapped with Grace. In a later strip recent Gender Bender Ellen complains about Nanase's choice of the bathroom as a meeting spot with "I've long since abandoned the notion that ladies' rooms are clean, wonderful places."
- Penny Arcade, while talking about Portal, oddly enough:
Gabe: I really wanna know what they do in there.
Tycho: They pee.
- The webcomic Suicide For Hire declares one 'clean enough for neurosurgery, among other things.
- Sort of averted in Filthy Lies. Joel's sister has to borrow their bathroom in a hurry, leaves it, and tells them not to go in until she comes back with cleaning products. They go in ... and discover that she's managed to get menstrual blood everywhere, including on the ceiling.
- Minus manages to... well, make this into a beautifully heartwrenching story arc about war and sacrifice, somehow, starting with this strip.
- Sluggy Freelance:
Torg: It turns out all ladies rooms have popcorn machines and blinky Christmas lights.
Crushestro: I did not know that!
Torg: It's amazing in there.
Western Animation
- This comes up in the Fillmore episode "To Mar a Stall". While investigating vandalism in the girls washroom, O'Farrell starts going on about how much nicer it is than the boys and that it has air freshener. He then starts trying to identify the scent. (Much funnier than it sounds.)
- A series of cartoon shorts run during the Psych commercials show the ladies' room as being an all-female Mount Olympus.
- One Cow And Chicken episode has Chicken enter the girls' room on a dare.
- Not only that, but they had placed a bet on whether or not there was a "cigar dispenser" in there.
- One episode of Dexters Laboratory depicted the girl's room as a huge meadow. He escapes by taking a Barbie doll hostage.
- In a episode of Kim Possible, Kim and Ron are sneaking into a building via an air duct. When Ron starts to drop down into a room through the ceiling vent, Kim stops him, telling him that it is the ladies room, and forces him to continue on by himself to find another entry point.
- Justified in that a guy coming out of the lady's room would have kind of compromised the undercover aspect.
- In the Superjail! episode "Superbar", the titular establishment's men's room is dirty and occupied by a naked Twister orgy. By comparison, the women's room is completely empty and pristine, with robotic Warden heads urging the user to wipe afterwards. However, seeing as how there's one woman (sort of) in Superjail, and the Warden has a crush on her, this was most likely done to impress her more than anything.
Real Life
- In Real Life, of course, ladies' rooms get more mundane things like sofas/lounging chairs, mirrors and access to server rooms.
- In Real Life often times there are side rooms to the bathrooms in more high end places (Nordstrom comes to mind) so that mothers can breast feed their babies without men ogling or Moral Guardians chewing their butts off.
- And in Real Life (especially in schools, for some reason), the girls' bathrooms can be even worse than the boys'. All I'll say is that drying blood smells and looks disgusting.
- That's probably why girls' restrooms are usually cleaned more often. Men generally don't manage to create bloody messes in the bathroom, and when they forget to flush, the results aren't as squicktastic.
- Once upon a time, diaper changing tables were only available in women's restrooms. Fortunately, this seems to be changing..
- Additionally, family restrooms are becoming more common (usually situated between the men's and women's), mainly for people who have children or must help an elderly person of the opposite sex.
- Unfortunately, herinals◊ haven't caught on yet.
- Go to the Restroom on the top floor of the Hancock Building in Chicago. The ladies' room has the best view of the city skyline ever. The men's room... doesn't.
- At Studio Ghibli, the women's restrooms were designed by Hayao Miyzaki to be bigger and nicer than the men's.
- Subverted at a certain Phoenix, AZ tech college: while the facilities in the ladies room are unremarkable and plain, the main floor ladies room has two stalls while the men's room is much larger. Presumably the original designer looked at the then-current statistics for women in tech fields and designed accordingly. The ratio is now closer to equal, and lines are horribly long.
- The women's bathrooms on the 77th floor of the Columbia Tower in Seattle (tallest building in the city) are spectacular. The bathrooms have two couches and a puffy chair, lotion, two different hand soaps (in normal bottles, not those things that attach to the wall), mouthwash, tampons, puff balls, q-tips, and once, free toothbrushes and floss. In addition, all the bathroom cubicles look out onto the Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier. It is often said that the women's bathrooms have the best view in the city. Needless to say, while the men's bathrooms have soap and lotion, they lack the view and do not have free toothbrushes and floss.
- Possibly apocryphal story: in the 1970s US passenger rail service Amtrak issued specifications for new railcars that (accidentally) included urinals in the women's room, only to discover that someone had actually invented one, and when they tried to correct the error they actually got sued.
- Subverted at the Melbourne Cricket Ground where the mens toilets in the Long Room are designed so that when you are standing at the urinals you have the perfect view of the game, right behind the bowlers arm (for Americans the equivalent would be just to the left or right of home plate).
- Inverted in the fancier sort of Boston bar, where there are TV screens in the men's room so that
worshippers fans don't have to miss one second of the Red Sox game.
- This troper's old church had three restrooms - two full-sized ones next to each other, and one single-person room crammed near the nursery. The two large ones were designated ladies' rooms, and the small closet-sized one was considered unisex. Because it was close to the nursery, several women wanted that one changed to a ladies' room, too, before somebody pointed out the problems that it would cause. The reason why this happened was because, even though the church was pretty evenly divided across gender lines, most of the volunteers were women. Thus, their input meant more. Unfortunately, they seemed to lack forethought when it came to bathroom planning.
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