#Women and water use

[coochiequeens]

This is why we need women to have input in housing development 

This article was originally published in Undark Magazine.

On a humid afternoon in May, a handful of local residents gathered at a one-room home in an unplanned housing settlement in Mumbai. The women greeted one another and then sat down on the small porch and on the tiled floor inside, swapping stories about the day’s events through the doorframe. Their conversation was lighthearted until someone mentioned hydration and the mood changed. “We won’t be consuming any more liquids today,” said 31-year-old Kalawati Yadav. “If we do, we might have the urge to urinate by later in the evening.” By then, the public toilets would be filthy from the day’s use, and without lighting, they would also be dark. “It’s not a safe time to go,” Yadav said.

Daytime is not much better, though, because the facilities are rarely truly clean. According to the women, the public toilets are usually dirty, unlit, and lacking in water. They are also in short supply. Two facilities, each with a dozen toilets—six for women and six for men—service the entire settlement, Subhash Nagar, which covers about one-10th of a square mile and as of 2020 housed more than 9,000 people. The municipal government is supposed to be responsible for sanitation, but there is very little oversight. (City officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

As a result, for residents of Subhash Nagar and for many low-income residents across India, bathroom schedules are often dictated not by biological need but by inadequate toilet infrastructure. Several women told Undark that they routinely hold their urine and avoid drinking liquids in an effort to reduce trips to the facilities. These behaviors lead to stomchaches and constipation, but the women said they don’t have better options. Their neighborhood was unplanned—it started as a collection of tin-plank homes, which were later replaced with concrete structures—so the houses are not connected to septic tanks. There are no private toilets, and the owners cannot afford to regularly use the fee-based facilities in other parts of the city.

This predicament is part of a larger story of India’s efforts to bring affordable and sanitary toilets to its population of 1.4 billion people. Though estimates vary, according to The Hindu, an Indian daily newspaper, nearly half of all Indians practiced open defecation as recently as 2013; people go outside in fields, bodies of water, or other open spaces. Without public sanitation—including septic tanks, water, and cleaning products—pathogens spread readily, causing serious health problems. The United Nations deputy secretary-general has called for the elimination of open defecation, and in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission, an effort that led to the construction of about 100 million toilets. Today, according to the World Bank, just 15 percent of the population practices open defecation.

Having new public toilets “is a step forward,” Sarita Vijay Panchang, a public-health researcher who did her 2019 dissertation on India’s urban sanitation, wrote in an email to Undark. But many of India’s public toilets are overcrowded, she noted. This leads to long lines, sewage overflows, and concerns about personal safety—all of which constitute their own set of public-health problems.

Surveys show that the situation is especially acute in urban areas such as Mumbai. Safety concerns deter some women from practicing open defecation as a fallback. (Some reports suggest men are more likely than women to practice open defecation even when public toilets are available.) Physicians and activists say the continued practice of caste- and class-based discriminationcompounds the harms, as some women are forbidden from using the toilets while at work.

“The ceiling plaster has fallen on me once,” said Ambika Kalshetty, the gathering’s 35-year-old host, who works as a housemaid in the nearby high-rise apartments. The men’s toilets were built atop the women’s toilets, she explained, and the men’s “leak on us at times—it’s disgusting.” She said she really doesn’t feel good until she returns home and cleans thoroughly with soap and an antiseptic.

Another woman, Sangeeta Pandey, recalled watching a pregnant woman faint while waiting in a long line for the community toilets. “It was humiliating,” Pandey said, “but also, what could she do?”

Local activists have worked to raise awareness and bring improvements. Still, the women gathered in Kalshetty’s home said that change is slow, and for now, they are on their own to manage a difficult situation.

Several years ago, researchers surveyed more than 600 women across 33 slums in Maharashtra, the Indian state that includes Mumbai. They found that among those without proper toilet access, more than 21 percent reported holding in their urine and more than 26 percent said they modify their meals to avoid using the toilets at night. These findings are supported by Panchang’s research in the region, which also found that women avoid urination and defecation when they perceive their community toilets to be unsafe.

Such behavioral changes can lead to negative health effects, says Suchitra Dalvie, a Mumbai-based gynecologist and women’s-health activist. Frequent urination helps flush any bacteria, thus reducing risk of urinary-tract infections. (The women in Subash Nagar said that they regularly experienced UTIs, some as often as every few months.)

Even the relatively well-off are affected. Dalvie recalls a conversation with the state’s former minister of health, a young woman who often needed to travel for work. The health minister would limit her water intake, knowing that the public toilets she would encounter on the road might not be adequate. This is an example of how women’s problems have been normalized in India, says Dalvie.

Toilet infrastructure is not just an issue of sanitation, says Deepa Pawar, a social activist focusing on gender and youth issues in marginalized communities. “It is a much larger problem that encompasses health, gender, and social-justice issues,” she says.

Pawar’s organization, Anubhuti, started conducting several toilet audits across Mumbai in 2017. Its audit of the K/East Ward found conditions similar to those that Undark reported: damaged toilets, lack of water, and inadequate cleaning services. And though the central government has called for one commode per 30 individuals, the audit found far fewer.

Pawar grew up in Mumbai’s low-income neighborhoods, so the issue is personal. “When you use your toilet at home, there is no struggle involved,” she says. But in using public toilets, one must contend with an array of concerns.

The problems were aggravated during the COVID lockdowns, Pawar says, when many of the city’s free public toilets were closed. “They only kept the pay-and-use toilets functional. From where will the poor get the money to use these toilets if they are not allowed to work?” she asks. The closures particularly affected the nomadic communities that compose nearly 10 percent of India’s population. These are communities that traditionally moved around, and although many have now settled, they are economically weak and face discrimination.

Read: India under coronavirus lockdown.

Women and men in Subhash Nagar were also forbidden from using many toilets during the lockdowns, but they say they used them anyway. And across Mumbai, many men simply defecated outside. Although the city government ordered toilet fees to be waived for everyone, Pawar and residents of Subhash Nagar say that in practice, women were still charged. “Essentially, women were being penalized for their gender while men were being given a free pass,” Pawar says.

As a member of a nomadic tribe, Pawar is intimately familiar with the social dynamics that prevent some women from accessing basic services such as toilets. “During our campaigns, we question local officials about the disparity in access to toilets for members of nomadic tribes like ourselves, and they often respond by asking us why we don’t use the free public toilets in malls instead,” she says.

The reality is that those spaces cater to the middle and upper class, and people of lower socioeconomic status are not welcome there. “Will a female laborer with a bullock cart be allowed to enter a mall? Has our society inspired such courtesies among those who work at and visit these malls to allow nomadic laborers within their complex?” she asks rhetorically.

Mumbai is a large commercial city that relies on the labor of women and of marginalized communities, Dalvie says. Businesses, government, and wealthy residents should therefore “accommodate the conveniences” of everyone.

Going forward, Panchang would like to see India strive to build more in-house toilets that are connected to sewers. Residents will be able to maintain them well, and women will not have to pay such a heavy price for the country’s efforts to eliminate open defecation. “Public toilets,” she wrote in her email, “are not a substitute for household toilets.”

Ruchi Kumar is an Indian journalist currently working in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, among other outlets.

[inkskinned]

love when men cry about body hair bc "it's hygiene" and yet 15% of cis men leave the bathroom without washing their hands at all and an additional 35% only just wet their hands without using soap. that is nearly half of all men. that means statistically you have probably shaken hands with or been in direct contact with one of these people.

love when men say that women "only want money" when it turns out that even in equal-earning homes, women are actually adding caregiver burdens and housework from previous years, whereas men have been expanding leisure time and hobbies. in equal-earning households, men spend an average of 3.5 hours extra in leisure time per week, which is 182 hours per year - a little over a week of paid vacation time that the other partner does not receive. kinda sounds like he wants her money.

love that men have decided women are frail and weak and annoying when we scream in surprise but it turns out it's actually women who are more reliable in an emergency because men need to be convinced to actually take action and respond to the threat. like, actually, for-real: men experience such a strong sense of pride about their pre-supposed abilities that it gets them and their families killed. they are so used to dismissing women that it literally kills them.

love it. told my father this and he said there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. a year ago i tried to get him to evacuate the house during a flash flood. he ignored me and got injured. he has told me, laughing, that he never washes his hands. he has said in the last week that women are just happier when we're cooking or cleaning.

maybe i'm overly nostalgic. but it didn't used to feel so fucking bleak. it used to feel like at least a little shameful to consider women to be sheep. it just feels like the earth is round and we are still having conversations about it being flat - except these conversations are about the most obvious forms of patriarchy. like, we know about this stuff. we've known since well before the 50's.

recently andrew tate tried to justify cheating on his partner as being the "male prerogative." i don't know what the prerogative for the rest of us would be. just sitting at home, watching the slow erosion of our humanity.

[ashtrayfloors]

When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker’s books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender class and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No shit. Pussy, I thought.

—Lidia Yuknavitch, from The Chronology of Water

[mooncheese3]

[whathorselegs]

Been rewatching Jurassic Park so obviously now I'm imagining a silly SKK Jurassic Park AU for the fun of it.

Dazai is the hotshot arrogant chaotician who is adamantly against opening a dinosaur park and spends most of his time flirting with Chuuya, the disgruntled but secretly full of wonder paleontologist, who is at first taken in by the miracle of dinosaurs being back until they get attacked by them.

The Akutagawa siblings are the children they end up having to protect from dinosaurs. Little Ryuunosuke has read Dazai's book on Chaos theory and follows him around like a puppy. Gin is terrified of dinosaurs after the T-rex until Chuuya shows them dinos aren't monsters and they pet the Brachiosaurus together.

Dazai tries to have a stand off with a T-rex and gets his shirt ripped open so he can lay sluttily across a table and tease Chuuya for looking.

Oh and years later Atsushi is the kid from the third movie that survived on dino island all by himself for three weeks because he read Chuuya and Dazai's books on dinosaurs.

[sixth-light]

Finished watching the Netflix ATLA live adaptation, having gone into it with absolutely no expectations whatsoever or intention to necessarily go past the first episode if it didn't catch my attention. While it was firmly unnecessary when ATLA existed as an entire piece of art as its creators intended it...it's not half bad? Like, talented cast including the newer actors, decent cinematography/costumes/etc, but what worked most about it for me is that it takes a very similar approach to the WoT TV show in regards to its source material.

Namely, it's working with a closed canon and it's very clearly trying to adapt the entire story rather than do a 1:1 adaptation of each section. So, like WoT, it's unafraid to chop and change up the story order, to introduce characters earlier who only came into prominence later in the original work, to give more depth and space to its villains, and to straight-up write new material rather than trying to stick meticulously to the original text wherever possible. It also does a lot of work to tidy up some of the less-well-aged parts of its source, which lands probably 90% of the time. Basically, it's doing the work to keep me as someone who knows the original story well interested by giving me new scenes and things to chew over without losing the essence of the original. If you're going to do a fairly unnecessary high-budget live-action remake of a twenty-year-old cartoon series, that's not a bad way to go about it.

Let it not go without saying that it has also cast Asian and Native actors as well as handing the story over to Asian-American/Canadian writers and directors and that does matter. Unlike WoT it doesn't have a gay agenda, but to be fair the first season of ATLA (original flavour) barely had a romantic agenda period.

As I said: it's not necessary, but it's not at all bad, and I will watch the next season at least on purpose. I think if we're going to be trapped in remake/adaptation hell for the foreseeable future we can do worse than have them made by people trying to give some new dimensions to the story. I also think the people making this show would do a hell of a job with a Legend of Korra live-action show, and that is a story that didn't get its full due originally and would benefit from being made for an older audience. Plus, the gay agenda is right there. If this show does well enough to greenlight a Korra show...I could find some genuine excitement about that.

[saetoru]

and before i part with you all once again i wanted to share that i have for the first time (and perhaps last time) 36 starred abyss

[axolotlclown]

I suppose I'm a little late to the party, but I needed time to collect my thoughts.

Here's the thing, everyone's caught up on Caiti's age and whether she consented. To me, that isn't anywhere near the point. Her being so young is certainly creepy and strange, but not the point.

Here's the first thing, though less important than the next. As an adult, it is blaringly clear how irresponsible these "adults" were. Two grown ass men supplying alcohol to underaged girls in a hotel room. They were up drinking until 6am. They were one noise complaint away from getting the cops called.

Second thing. While underage drinking in the US is fairly normal, 18 is still pretty young here. Also, publicly admitting to supplying alcohol to an 18 year old is crazy, but not the point.

18 year olds can't compete with grown adults when it comes to alcohol. They don't have the same tolerance. There never should have been any "one upping."

No one should have gotten that drunk. The fact that there was a girl leaving, vomiting in her hand is fucking ridiculous. When someone, regardless of their age, is drinking too much too quickly, you cut them off and give them water. This is how college parties are run. Once you start wobbling a little too much, your speech is slurred, and you stop being a person, someone gives you water and walks you home.

And nobody walked her back to her hotel room?? Two grown men. I don't give a shit how tired you are. You always walk a girl home. Who the fuck raised you??

I am an adult man in college. I have been around a lot of different men. I have hung around men that behave like this. Let me promise you this: they got those girls drunk like that on purpose. They both wanted something. When they didn't get it, they just let the girls go. They were never interested in their safety. They were never interested in who they were.

And let me promise you this: there's never just one girl. And any well brought up man would have cut them all off and sent them on their way. There is way more to this situation than lets on.

And of course George never asked for her consent. It was never a question. They brought those girls back to that hotel room with the thought that they'd get something out of it. To George, he heard 18 and thought, "oh cool, she's legal."

I see this happen all the time in college. Usually men don't grow out of all of it, but they usually grow out of begging like a shitty dog in some random girl's DMs. To hear a grown ass man, 26 years old, behave like a fucking 19 year old sophmore in college is pathetic. I'm not interested in giving pathetic men any more time.

Also, love and light to Caiti, she looks like she's 16. "I didn't know she was 18!" First off, doesn't matter. Second off, I would've guessed she was a minor, so I know you checked first. Or else you're even dumber than the fucking college kids. Damn.

[sponsoredbyanxiety]

always found the allegations that Dune is sexist because the women have no power funny because it’s really that the women are extremely powerful in the most sexist way possible

[gremlingirlsmell]

we should've never dropped the w from twerf

[nervoustragedyluminary]

"all people who talk about transandrophobia are white " Zionists" ... Oh also all the Black trans men who talk about it are sexual predators if they exist which they don't because everyone who talks about transandrophobia is white "

Do some of you hear yourselves?

Like ive seen contradicting accusations in the notes one person says "they sexualise everything" the next is "they're prudes who hate sex positivity " like not to mention the infantalisation and "stolen trans valor" & "you're not the sexuality you say you are actually" like how is this criticising misogyny and transmisogyny?

Also just the sheer hatred and erasure of intersex and multi gender people like geez

Like what was actually said because all of the notes aren't talking about that they're just making up a caricature of a "theyfab trender who isn't really as trans as real trans people but are invading lesbian spaces to force real lesbians to fuck men" to be mad at rather than "this specific thing they said was misogynistic /lesbiphobic"

Instead it's all just like "no you have to detransition to reclaim misogynistic slurs that have been used against you or to be a lesbian otherwise you hate women" or "trans men must be binary & only use binary terms and" male terms" or else they're fakers" like what? In the 70s radfem fried fuck is going on?

Like you know that nonbinary people exist right?

That trans butches (of all agabs) exist right?

That intersex people who might use language that seems "contradictory" at first exist right? Like idk if someone is being misogynistic surely there's misogyny to point to rather than claiming that their identity/existence itself is misogynistic?

[ausetkmt]

Jasmine Crockett Knocks the Karen Out of Marjorie Taylor Greene

if you lookin for a laugh, with some truth sprinkled in - Hit Play and let Reggie Waters give it to you

Jasmine was tired after the all day no business and being there at 10pm for the Bleached Blond Bad Built Butch Body Capital Hill Karen to continue with this charade

white tears are really tasty a on hot day

[eastsidepapi]

We live in Hell

[sillyrandomwriter]

Divorced sitcom lol Adam used to super model exes in bikinis, impractical for a lot of fun water games and lake shit, beaming over Lute in swim shorts and bikini top

honestly real. i love the idea that Lute doesn’t wear bikinis while going out for a beach or lake shit just so she could end up having fun as well and make it practical while having her boyfriend beam over her.

(i relate to Lute in this)

[queen-boudicca]

Me when doing my environmental science homework, at every available opportunity:

[gamergirl929]

If someone gets hurt because of this ref, I’m going to walk to NZ to start some shit, I swear.