Wondrous Ladies Room

Come with me and you'll be
In a world of his imagination
Take a look and you'll see
It's actually meant for urination

[Raúl Juliá opens a random door and enters a beautiful Greco-Roman garden]
Mike: Ah, he wandered into the ladies room...
Crow: Man, that's why they stay in there so long! Those ladies; they get everything.

— Mystery Science Theater 3000, "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank"

Seeing as Most Writers Are Male, and femininity is considered inaccessible to men, the women's restroom naturally has an air of mystery about it. Why do women go in pairs, what do they do in there 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 the 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, since the perception (accurate or not) is women are much more likely to care about such things. The idea that Beauty Is Never Tarnished plays a role too, as women simply aren't associated with bodily functions in general.

And 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 with the usually spartan men's rooms. Meanwhile, places that don't decorate the ladies' room often 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 anteroom before the restroom itself. This room may contain a couch, often will contain chairs, and possibly a lit vanity. This room is designed to make it easy for women to fix their hair or make-up without blocking access to sinks. It is also useful because lines for ladies' rooms tend to be longer than for men's rooms since women generally don't use urinals (which ladies' rooms lack anyway), do have to deal with menstruation, often visit the bathroom in groups, and are more likely to have babies or young children 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 (and as stated on The Drew Carey Show, if the men's room had a couch would you want to sit on it?). The couches in the ante-bathroom may be placed there for the convenience of nursing mothers or women with cramps, or it may be a holdover from the days of fainting couches.

Sometimes related to "Which Restroom?" Dilemma when a crossdresser or a trans girl wants to be admitted to the ladies' room but may not be allowed to. Fancy Toilet Awe is when the the toilet unit itself is fancy, or the luxurious bathroom is unisex (or the rare particularly posh men's rooms). See also Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults, Women's Mysteries, Disgusting Public Toilet, Mysterious Teacher's Lounge. Compare Girls Behind Bars, another women-only setting that suffers from the same misconstructions.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Given a minor inversion during Excel♡Saga when Excel - currently employed as a janitor - notes her excitement at seeing a urinal for the first time while cleaning the men's room.
• One episode of Heaven's Lost Property has Tomoki Tomoko enter the girls' bathroom after a failed perversion attempt. The bathroom's cleanliness leaves her amazed.
• Gender flipped in chapter sixteen of Omujo Omutsu Joshi, which features resident pervert Muni convincing male lead Shouta to let her sneak into the boys restroom for a thrill. Her wonder as she explores and comments on the urinals makes Shouta wonder just what she'd been expecting. Muni repays Shouta afterward by inviting him to explore the girls' restroom with her sometime. Shouta declines, stating that'd just get him arrested or, worse, expelled.
• One episode of R-15 has Raika invite Taketo into the girls' room so he could have a perverted reaction she could properly film, but he says there's no point if there's no-one inside. So she starts removing her pants...
• Invoked in Sket Dance. Initially, the boys' and girls' bathrooms look basically the same, but after Daisy broke one of the stall doors, Token Rich Student Mimori took it upon herself to remodel all the girls' toilets into luxury suites—with larger cubicles and fully automated toilet seats.
• Seitokai Yakuindomo has another gender-inverted example. As Ousai was formerly an all-girls school, they've only recently gotten around to making a men's restroom. When Tsuda is ordered to clean the restrooms as punishment for being late one day, the girls are excited about the prospect of seeing the inside of a men's room for the first time (Aria even inquires as to why there's no toilet paper next to the urinals). When it comes time to clean the girl's room, Tsuda expects this trope to be played straight...until he gets inside and finds that the room reeks of cosmetics.
• Played literally in Tenchi Muyo!. Resident Mad Scientist Washu created a pocket dimension to house a complete spa for use as the women's bathroom. The men got stuck with the rather small ordinary bathroom.
  • Funnily enough Tenchi is perfectly fine with this. One imagines he's just happy he doesn't have to share said small bathroom with five to six women.
  • Also in the first series Tenchi was allowed to use the bath house and there was actually a small section set aside just for him.
    • In the second series, Tenchi was teleported into the spa prior to the dimension-hopping arc. Reactions from the bathing women was... mixed.

Comedy

• Discussed by the late Richard Jeni in his second stand-up special. Jeni said that women have a cure for baldness (seeing as how men go bald but women don't), and since men are from Earth, this means women have come from some other planet. He goes on to say that they hold meetings about it in the woman's public restroom, since no man can get two steps in there without being eviscerated.

Comic Books

• In Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam, Billy has to transform and ducks into a school bathroom, only then noticing that it's the girl's room. After quickly making sure no one is there:
  Billy: Wow!...Look at this place. Foot massagers? Heated seats? And is that silk toilet paper?

Comic Strips

• 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.
• 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.
• In a Cathy strip, Irving realizes he is puzzled about how: Cathy is always complaining about finances, but he never sees her shopping; Cathy is always talking about the need to diet, but he never sees her eating, etc. Irving then concludes that everything happens inside the ladies' room. The last panel depicts the apparent interior of a ladies' room — complete with snack vending machines, a shopping boutique, and so forth.
• 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 on which couch, Wally walks into the cubicle with tiny specks in his hands and a big smile on his face, joyfully announcing: "Hey, look! The men's room has soap!"
• 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.
• One Piranha Club strip (back when it was still named Ernie) subverts it by pointing out that the ladies' room is exactly like the men's room... to the point where all the women encountered in it act like extremely stereotypical macho men.
• In one series of strips from Sherman's Lagoon, the gang is at a restaurant and Sherman enters the women's bathroom by mistake. He discovers that it's less a bath room and more a huge, luxurious spa which employs masseurs and also includes surveillance cameras so that the women can spy on the tables they've left and find out what the men are talking about in their absence.

Films — Live-Action

• If you watched only the first five minutes, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the 1976 version of Carrie were a softcore porno, given the way that Brian De Palma films the opening scene. Instead of being fancy, it's an adolescent boy's fantasy of what the girls' locker room at high school is like, with most of the film's female characters frolicking in various states of undress. This only amplifies the shock to the viewer once the locker room quickly turns quite un-wondrous for Carrie, who's subjected to a vicious prank by her peers when she has her period. Bet you're feeling guilty for ogling Sissy Spacek in the shower now, huh?
• In Coney Island, Fatty Arbuckle is chased out of the men's shower at the amusement park because he's dressed in a woman's swimsuit. He winds up in the women's shower, which has tables, lounge chairs for relaxing, and full-length mirrors.
• Number One: Gender-flipped. Sheer curiosity sends two kindergarten girls, Chrissy and Molly, into the boys' room. Molly has no idea what the odd objects mounted on the wall are. Chrissy correctly identifies them as urinals and knows that boys use them to pee, but isn't sure quite how.
• Pretty in Pink, when Ducky complains about how nice it is compared to the boys, mistaking the tampon dispenser for a candy machine.
• The last act of The Women (1939) takes place in an enormous, elaborately decorated powder room at a nightclub.

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 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets the hidden entrance to said Chamber was behind the sink in a girl's restroom. 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, that particular bathroom is haunted by Moaning Myrtle and known to flood fairly often, so 'wondrous' may not be the best term..
• Alluded to in Septimus Heap: Since ghosts can only go to places they visited in life, Alther cannot spy on the evil cabal's innermost workings since they meet in a converted former lady's room.
• Not actually fictional, but in her memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, author Jennifer Finney Boylan notes that the an unspoken purpose of women's restroom amenities is to give women a few minutes' peace away from their husbands.
• 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'.
• The Vampire Files: In Blood On The Water, Jack overhears two gangsters searching a ladies' restroom for intruders. One of them voices surprise that the toilets look no different from those in men's rooms.

Live-Action TV

• The Adventures of Pete & 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".
• The Amanda Show had a sketch titled "The Girls' Room" featuring a Four-Girl Ensemble hosting a talk show in a high school girls' bathroom. Whenever a male came in, he always expressed the same astonishment. The trope was inverted in one episode where the girls' bathroom was flooded so they had to host it in the boys' bathroom. Debbie thought the urinals were a "water machine".
• In Community episode "Football, Feminism and You" Shirley considers this a sacred space. Although the bathrooms themselves are not remarkable, which, given this is Community, is actually sort of remarkable.
• In Corner Gas, Lacey replaces the "Men" and "Women" signs on the bathrooms shared by Corner Gas and the Ruby with "♂" and "♀" signs, but nobody except her knows what the symbols mean, causing everyone to use the wrong bathroom. The men praise the cleanliness of the women's room while the women are disgusted by the filth of the men's. After the original signs are put back, the men are outraged, demanding that Brent make the men's room just as clean as the women's. However, when Brent tries to clean the men's room, he's unable to stand the smell for even a second, so he keeps his promise by making the women's room dirtier instead.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 the men don't. Drew asks him "If there was, would you want to lay on it?"
  Larry: "...No."
• A running gag in the high school years of Boy Meets World was boys becoming indignant on seeing that the girls had a couch.
  Topanga: Sometimes we need to lie down.
• 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 after he left 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.
  • The following season John wakes up back on Earth, apparently having never left in the first place. Since he remembers the events of "A Human Reaction" one of the first things he does is check the nearest ladies' room to see if it's real. He finds a perfectly normal bathroom with a woman wondering what he's doing.
    John: Sorry, thought it was co-ed.
    Woman: Co-ed? What planet are you from?
    John: Not this one.
• The Golden Girls did this once, with a scene with a rather fancy ladies' room and a guy (Isaac, Rose's date for the evening) who came in by mistake and was surprised it was so nice. He did, incidentally, mistake the couch for a toilet.
  Isaac: I guess you have to stand back when you flush this thing.
• Happy Days played with this. At Arnold's malt shop, the restrooms were labeled "Guys" and "Dolls". While we rarely if ever saw the interior of the girls' facilities, the guys' loo was seen often enough to be recognizable. Indeed, The Fonz called the guys' john his "office". One day, for some reason Fonzie sent the 3 boys into the (empty) girls' room. From behind the door we heard them comment "There's something missing in here."
  • And when Arnold's was rebuilt, one of the girls (probably Joanie) commented that there was now carpeting in the girls' room.
  • One episode has Richie accidentally upset a girl, who darts into the "Dolls'" bathroom. Richie says frantically that he has to go in after her: "Do you know what's in the ladies' bathroom?" It turns out he doesn't either. When he comes out, his friends ask him what the mysterious ladies' room was like, and he doesn't give them much information, which Fonzie approves.
• Inverted on James May's Man Lab, where James May and the team turn a horrible bathroom into a veritable Arcadian garden of contemplation, complete with a fountain, pot plants, and... rabbits. ('Course, in real life someone would piss in the fountain within about five minutes.)
• Parodied in this photo from MythBusters's Facebook page.
  • This still came from an episode where Jamie and Adam tested which stall in a public restroom was cleaner. While they ran the test in the men's room, they did point out that the women's room had three couches available, compared to none in the men's room.
  Adam: Now we know why they always go to the bathroom in groups!
  Jamie: And why they always take so long.
  Adam: (to camera) You can email us about the sexist comments later.
• During a segment of Not Necessarily the News, Danny Breen is asked to check out a men's bathroom in a New York City subway, something he is disgusted by - it's not helped by the gunk on the doorknob. However, when he enters, he's greeted by a men's room attendant dressed as The Jeeves, with a palatial bathroom.
• In The Office (US), 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.
  Creed: I've been caught many times and paid dearly for it.
• Roseanne includes an episode with a dream sequence in which Roseanne crosses from her drab bedroom into a ridiculously elaborate bathroom, complete with jacuzzi tub, a fountain and two nearly naked male bath attendants.
• 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.
• Parodied in NewsRadio: 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 (to which Beth successfully applies for membership). Then Matthew ruins it by going to the bathroom in the bathroom.
• Brazilian TV show TV Pirata explained why women go in pairs to the bathroom - to play a round of table tennis.
• In an episode of Weird Science, after entering the ladies room, a virus-afflicted Lisa zaps herself into a soap opera set in a seaport town. Trying to find her, Chett enters the ladies room and arrives in the soap opera, too. Observing his spacious and beautiful surroundings, Chett remarked that this why women spend so much time in the ladies room.

Music

• Parodied in the song and video Baño 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.
• The video clip for No Doubt's "Just A Girl" is a good example.
• The video for Garbage's "Androgyny". The ladies room is a clean space with multiple seating areas and unique light fixtures. The men's room is visually bland (but full of men and women engaging in various acts of debauchery).

Video Games

• The women's room in the Developer's Room level of Blood is about as fancy as Blood can get, while the men's...well the less said about that the better.
• 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.
• In Dead Rising, saving a security guard from the Monster Clown mini-boss will convince him to reveal a secret passage in the Ladies Room that allows you to skip the Convicts in the park. Why the security guards needed a secret passage into the ladies room is not explained, but doesn't really need to be.
• 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.
• The new Normandy in Mass Effect 2 has both a men's and a women's bathroom. Both are identical, but entering the opposite sex bathroom gets a snippy response from EDI. And in Mass Effect 3 Shepard is prohibited from entering the opposite-sex bathroom altogether.
• Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 had women's bathrooms, they're just like the men's. In both you can call your Mission Control while in them, and get some hilarious remarks.
• In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Snake finds Gustava Heffner in the women's room, which, unlike the men's room, has an elevator.
• In a weird inversion, Metroid: Other M has a couple times where Samus has to enter the lady's room, and it's a little fancy but nothing special. In both cases, you can't enter the men's room - one has collapsed and the other is just closed off.
• No More Heroes: In all games, before Travis has to fight a boss, he saves by... taking a nap on the can. Most places he goes have a simple bathroom for him to use. Meanwhile, whenever Shinobu in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle needs to save, she... takes a shower. In an immaculate bathroom. Which just happened to have a sterling tub and shower. Even in an abandoned movie studio...
• Possible (as are most tropes dealing with human habitation) in The Sims 2 after the introduction of gendered restroom doors; though premade community spaces have men's and women's bathrooms identical, it would be easy to make a Wondrous Ladies Room.
• OMORI: The men's room in the Last Resort is your average grimy public restroom. The women's room, on the other hand, is a perfectly clean restroom with decorated walls, potted plants, and a makeup station.
• In Persona 4, you can prompt your character to try and peek inside the girl's bathroom, but the game claims you lack the Courage (as in, the skillset "Courage") to do so. If you raise Courage to the maximum level, the message changes to reflect how fearless you are... but you still can't bring yourself to go in.
• The video game Prey (2006) 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!"
• Silent Hill: The two ladies' rooms in Otherworld Midwich are Warp Zones.
• The Girls' headquarters in South Park: The Stick of Truth is in, you guessed it, the girl's bathroom of the public park.
• In Super Paper Mario, there is a quiz-show staged in the ladies room.

Web Comics

• The Girls' Room in The B-Movie Comic's second movie is enormous and full of richly decorated furniture.
• 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.
• Ryan Pagelow's dark-humored strip Buni has him entering a ladies' room imagining a wonderland with unicorns, fountains, a couch... and finding a bunch of smoking women gambling on a cockfight.
• In Episode #23 of Dungeon Crawl Inc, the party splits up to investigate a dungeon's restrooms. While the men's room is a dark, smelly horror, the ladies' room is amazingly shiny and elegant:
  "This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen."
  "We are unworthy of its splendor."
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Tedd thought this about the ladies room, and was disappointed when he finally saw the real thing while body-swapped with Grace.
  • In a later strip, 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."
  • Parodied with one panel from this strip, where the inside of of the ladies' room is labeled as a perpetual pillow fight.
• Amusingly inverted in Girls of the Wild's: Wild's High hasn't had a men's locker room up to this point, due to being an all-girls school until this year. After a few of the inevitable embarrassing mishaps and as an indirect way of appealing to Jae Gu, Queen hires contractors to build a bathroom that is up to her usual (read: astronomically high) standards, with this result.
• minus. manages to... well, make this into a beautifully heartwrenching story arc about war and sacrifice, somehow, starting with this strip.
• Penny Arcade, while talking about Portal, oddly enough:
  Gabe: I really wanna know what they do in there.
  Tycho: They pee.
• 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.
• Suicide for Hire declares one "clean enough for neurosurgery", among other things.

Web Original

• A series of Retail Hell videos on YouTube had an episode where the male employees regularly had to clean up the Disgusting Public Toilet of the men's room. They actually wonder if the girls ever have to do this and find a Wondrous Ladies Room, with plants, too. The women explain that they actually take pride where they do their business, then the Guys leave to their own bathroom to wonder if they'll ever be able to do the same, only to spot a customer:
  Customer: "I'm pissssin' on the wall, just pissin' on the wall!"
• CollegeHumor's rather disturbing solution to the mystery. Apparently girls are being taken to a secret holding tank that expels all of their gas, which is so painful that they look like they are having an orgasm.
• A male writer at BuzzFeed explores this trope, positing many ridiculous scenarios that might be going in the ladies' room.
• One episode of YogLabs had Simon and Lewis investigating a complaint about a "dimensional rip" in the ladies' restroom. They go into the men's room first, which is just a small cramped space with a single-basin sink, a shower stall, and a "urinal" made of a two-by-one hole in the floor full of water (which Simon had always mistaken for "where you soak your feet"). Then they go into the women's room, which is not only much larger but contains an L-couch, a stocked bookcase, a fireplace, and a pizza dispenser. And a portal to another dimension in one of the stalls, but that's not supposed to be there.
• The 2000's Men's Room Monologue Flash animation briefly depicts the women's room like this, with a bouncer selectively letting individual women into a colorfully-lit, unseen room, reminiscent of a nightclub, explaining the frequent lines.

Western Animation

• Briefly discussed in first season episode of Alpha Teens on Machines where the team is rambling through an experimental cyber skyscraper's Air-Vent Passageway and accidentally ends up in (fortunately unused) women's bathroom. When Lioness declares it's called the Ladies Room, Hawk exclaims that he was always eager to see how such place looks and is disappointed, that it's just a regular bathroom ... with deadly cutting lasers.
• Gender Flipped in As Told by Ginger. The girls' bathroom is fairly mundane. The boys' bathroom in Lucky Jr High however is like a flea market, complete with under-world-esque trading of school projects.
• An inversion in the "Bathroom Blues" episode of Angela Anaconda where Angela is determined to discover the mystery of the boys' room since the boys are in and out in moments while there is always a huge line outside the girls room. When she manages to sneak in, she mistakes the urinals for drinking fountains and thinks the reason the boys are so fast is because they are only in to get a drink.
• 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 Dexter's Laboratory depicted the girl's room as a huge meadow. He escapes by taking a Barbie doll hostage.
• 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.)
• 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.
• Played with by an episode of Pepper Ann, in which a male character expresses astonishment over basic facilities in the girl's toilets.
  You have doors on your cubicles!?
  • This one's actually Truth in Television - it wasn't uncommon for High Schools to remove the doors of men's room stalls as a deterrent to smoking (easier to catch them in the act), while women's rooms remain intact due to privacy concerns.
• In Recess, Mikey starts a rumour about himself to make people fear him. What does he say he did? Push another guy into the girls' bathroom. When Gretchen wonders what's so bad about that, TJ claims that for boys it would be "worse than getting kissed".
• The Simpsons takes this trope and applies it to the two halves of a gender segregated school.
  • There's also an episode where Homer gets the key to the executive bathroom at the nuclear plant; it's enormous and has a fountain and live musicians playing.
  • Moe has set up an office in the ladies' room at his bar, since no women ever come in.
• Stōked!: In "Surf Surf Revolution", Johnny and Broseph are being chased and lose their pursuers by running through the ladies room. Afterwards, Broseph comments on how much nicer the ladies room is than the mens room.
• 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 only one woman in Superjail, and the Warden has a crush on her, this was most likely done to impress her more than anything else.
• The Teacher's Pet episode "Attack of the 50-Inch Girl" has Leonard, Spot/Scott, Taylor, Tyler, Trevor and Ian enter the girls' room and find it to be luxurious and pink.
• Subverted in Tear Along the Dotted Line by Zerocalcare. In the first episode Zero laughs at Sarah when the latter suggests that he can simply change his pants in the restroom, saying that while the women's bathroom is a place of courtesy and cleanliness (and he pictures it in his mind like some sort of ballroom) the men's one is an unclean place where everyone has to fend for himself. Sarah replies that a) no matter how dirty it is, men can always empty their bladders by standing up, while as a woman she has to squat if she doesn't want to touch the thing and b) if another male accidentally opens the door of an occupied stall he just sees another man with his back turned on him, while as a woman you are caught from the front "like a deer in the headlights."

Real Life

• City Lab has an excellent piece on the rise and fall of the 19th-century ladies-room-adjacent lounge ... they actually predated the development of indoor flush toilets, when many large public buildings offered separate gender segregated lounges, where women's were more generously appointed.
• 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.
  • Once upon a time, diaper changing tables were only available in women's restrooms. Fortunately, this seems to be changing..
  • Unfortunately, herinals◊ haven't caught on yet.
• In New York City and other jurisdictions, there are "Potty Parity" laws requiring that public places (like stadiums and theaters) have a 2:1 ratio of female to male toilet fixtures. So there are typically larger, though not necessarily nicer, bathrooms for women. This is mainly because, on average, women take twice as long as men to use the bathroom. While men can just unzip their fly and use the urinal, women have to lower their pants or skirt and sit down or squat no matter what. Men also don't have to worry about tampons or pads, and are less likely to be watching over and changing the diapers of small children (though the latter is changing). While men's rooms can easily serve large numbers of men quickly, the same number of women using a bathroom the same size will typically produce a line and overcrowd it. As a result, many women, when pressed, will often opt to duck into the (single stall) men's rooms if there's a line in front of the ladies' room. Such laws are designed to prevent this from happening.
  • Pay toilets were outlawed in the U.S. for similar reasons. They were found by the courts to be discriminatory, because women always had to pay, whereas men didn't have to pay to just use the urinal.
• In single-sex schools this can be the case. In an all-boys school, the women's room is often only used by teachers and is much cleaner. In an all-girls school, men's rooms are often just one toilet versus the normal-sized ladies room.
• Go to the restrooms on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Center the next time you go to Chicago. The ladies' room has the best view of the city skyline ever. The men's room... doesn't. They must settle for the observatory on the 94th floor.
• At Studio Ghibli, the women's restrooms were designed by Hayao Miyazaki to be bigger and nicer than the men's. When the Ghibli Museum did a series of videos showcasing different areas, one of the videos was focused on the women's restrooms.
• 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 Mount 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 the free toothbrushes and floss.
• 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 that's going on at Fenway Park. Or the Celtics game, or the Patriots, season depending.
  • Even some lower-rent places will helpfully tack the day's sports page up there.
  • Not to mention the Bleacher Bar which is under the bleacher sections of Fenway Park, and even has a wide opening that views straight out to the outfield at ground level. When standing at an urinal in the men's room, you're looking through a window into the bar and out onto the field. It's not a great view during games, but still pretty cool and pretty useful for seeing home runs while you are relieving yourself.
• There is a women's restroom in the lobby of a Penn State dorm that has an extra unusual for women's restrooms: a urinal. (The dorm was converted from all-girls to coed; for some reason the urinal survived the transformation.)
  • It is not uncommon for the restrooms in co-ed college dorms to be effectively unisex so that parts or all of the dorm can be switched from one sex to the other without renovating. This means putting a few urinals in the women's restrooms and things like tampon dispensers in the men's ones (other co-ed institutions simplify the situation even further by only installing stalls in bathrooms and mandating that everyone sit down to pee).
• When pressed for space, building designers will typically put the women's bathroom in a more accessible place than the men's to accommodate women with children and/or pregnant and nursing women. And just in general, even when the men's and women's rooms are right next to each other, the women's will usually be closer to the main hall/staircase/etc.
  • When men's and women's restrooms are right next to each other in, say an office building, they're usually near-mirrors of each other placed back-to-back for cost reasons (i.e. one set of plumbing mains instead of two). The only major difference when looking at the blueprints is that the men's restroom will usually be about 50% urinals while the women's restroom won't have any.
• Most British pubs have the women's loos situated further away from the bar than the men's loos. This may be because older pubs only used to have a men's room, so the women's room was added later on, perhaps, but it's a rare pub where the ladies' is a shorter walk than the men's.
• The old tradition of ladies 'withdrawing' after dinner leaving the men with their port and cigars — the point in the evening when conversation about business matters, politics, or whatever else the men considered Serious Business was usually had — may actually have been the result of this. Rather than it being a 'get the women out of the way' time, it's now speculated that the custom arose because after an hour or so at the table, most of the women would need to relieve themselves, but would be too embarrassed to leave individually lest anyone guess what they'd gone for.
• Most people who work as janitors, regardless of gender, will tell you that actual use of the facilities in real life tends to invert this trope no matter what the amenities. Women habitually leave public restrooms much more of a mess than men, and in so many different ways — toilet paper everywhere (American women are the world's biggest consumers of TP by country and gender, statistically), puddles of urine around toilets because so many women think they'll get STDs from the seat (or just think it's icky) and refuse to actually sit on it while doing their business, feminine hygiene products and diapers inadequately disposed of (leading to clogged toilets), puke in the sinks, etc. The real ladies' room is far from wondrous.
• Idina Menzel has admitted to using the bathrooms in her dressing room to warm up her vocals, claiming the acoustics are best suited for it.
• Prior to November 2019, the [now-demolished] Student Activities Center (originally built in the late-1940s/early-1950s) at El Camino College in Torrance, California had a wardrobe closet in the student women's restroom. It also had carpenting in the anteroom, which was replaced with tiles. Due to El Camino's on-going construction, Activities was moved somewhere else on campus, while their initial building was demolished for newer classroom buildings.
• Speaking of Torrance, the former Mitsuwa Marketplace, which was located near the Torrance DMV until Spring 2020 when they moved to Del Amo Mall, had a stylish ladies' room with red wallpaper, while the men's had white tiling.

---