NewbieRunner

Free standing public toilets in various parts of the city also had slots for coins and/or what looked like scanners for credit cards. The only ones which did not seem to have any locking mechanism (and therefore free?) appeared to be pissoirs. I don’t know how they can get away with it in a country where gender equality is taken very seriously.

GUWonder

Those indeed are generally money-charging public toilets, except for the few “pissoirs” — the latter of which I’ve seen but never gone inside myself in this country. There seem to be not enough of the “pissoirs” or those that there are don’t seem to be used frequently enough in Stockholm, as evidenced by the amount of urine traces I encounter in elevators of the public transport stations and along or near the shaded steps and other built-up areas in the city even a minute walk from free “pissoirs”. Given the amount of grassy areas there are in Stockholm, it would be better if some of those “desperate to take a leak” guys would do so in grassy/tree areas or walk to the “pissoirs”, but they don’t do so often enough; and consequently even less than a minutes walk to the closest free “pissoir” to the Arlanda Express platform a few days ago, I again had to walk by a guy taking a leak on the side of the steps. Barely a week goes by as of late where I don’t see a guy making his mark or having left his mark in Stockholm. But it wasn’t but a few months ago where at the train stop closest to the US Embassy in Copenhagen that I had to again walk by a pile of human feces on the paved path, and that’s something I’ve never encountered in any other developed country’s capital city before.

Bathroom use at 5 or 10 crowns per use is just not all that affordable to the unbanked/underbanked and poorest in the area. While they used to be able to fund their stays in homeless shelters and their bathroom use easily enough with bottle returns, it is no longer as cheap and easy for many of those people to do so in these countries and the consequence of that is more human urine — and even feces — on and along the places where people walk.

While it indeed seems to be a form of gender discrimination with free “pissoirs” but not free toilets of other sorts around on the public grounds in Stockholm, the problem of open human urination (and even defecation) on the built-up areas in Scandinavia capital cities seems to be mainly a male contribution in my experiences in the area. About gender equality in this region, I find it to be more talk than reality unless and until workplace sexual harassment (and other sorts of discrimination) is as much (or more) of a risky societal and business faux pas in Scandinavia as it is in the US, but take the bathroom situation as being yet another sign of the same kind of dynamic.