When Sherrie Austin ran in marathons and nature called, she hated waiting in
long lines for the portable toilets. The alternative, ducking into the bushes
somewhere along the route, wasn't ideal.
"You'd rather not squat there," she said. This spring, Austin, 37, a market
researcher from Portland, Ore., was delighted to find she could do the deed like
a man. She purchased PMates, waxed cardboard funnels that enable women to
urinate standing up.
PMates, one of a number of devices that offer women vertical relief, have
been around since the late 1990s. Over the last year, the apparatus made a
splash when it was distributed for use at She-pees, or female urinals, at music
festivals in Britain and Australia. The inventions were hailed by upstanding
women as an easy, sanitary solution at outdoor events in place of conventional
public restrooms.
The equipment also let women realize their dreams of going to the bathroom as
swiftly as men. "Everyone says they wish we could do it and then hey, this comes
about," said Cassandra Legault, 24, a customer support officer in Lowell, Mass.
All users have to do is slip the P-Mate through trouser zippers or under
skirts, hold it in place, and go with the flow. Although disposable, they can be
used several times.
Aside from convenience, PMates offer an option to women who don't like to
hover above dirty public toilet seats.
"I'm very impressed with the precision," said Austin, who was initially
skeptical when her German au pair told her about the P-Mate. "It was very easy
to use right away."
Lori Radbourne, who sells PMates online and is the exclusive distributor for
the devices in Canada, first discovered PMates five years ago while reading
about them in a health magazine. Radbourne, 42, a nurse in Coquitlam, just
outside Vancouver, ordered them from the Netherlands, where they were patented.
She was instantly hooked.
Previously, the avid runner and soccer player found that she invariably
splattered her legs and shoes when relieving herself behind bushes in the middle
of a game. Having used PMates for a while, she decided to sell them online.
Since last October, Radbourne has been selling PMates under the banner of
Female Freedom Enterprises. They cost 5.50 Canadian dollars each ($4.40) and
come in packs of five. In the first two months of this year, she sold 253 packs
online, 84 of them to customers in the United States, where there is currently
no distributor. In Canada, PMates are also sold at pharmacies in Ottawa and the
Vancouver area.
Competition comes in the form of the Pee-Zee, TravelMate and Freshette, which
are made of plastic. The main competitor appears to be the heavy paper Whizzy,
which is sold online out of Chicago and at stores there and in San Francisco.
Radbourne's youngest daughter, who is now 5 years old, has been using PMates
for about two years on long car rides. "Every time we're traveling and she needs
to go, she'll say: 'I need a P-Mate,'" Radbourne said.
Rudimentary toilets in Indonesia inspired Dutch traveler Moon Zijp to create
the P-Mate when she returned to Amsterdam. After a flamboyant demonstration on
Dutch television in 1999, the device caught on in Europe, where over a million
were sold last year.
On the Internet, the P-Mate has been praised, ridiculed and proclaimed as the
ultimate in equal gender rights.
"Now the fight back of women in the world of equal rights has surely reached
its zenith," the Web site shiola.co.uk proclaimed. "The goal was not to get
equal salaries, votes, rights, priviledges (sic) or even respect--the goal was
to pee standing up."
This is certainly not the first generation of women trying to emulate male
postures. Urinals for women have been around since at least the 1950s, after
leading toilet producer American Standard introduced the Sanistand, a women's
urinal. It wasn't popular with restroom designers and more recent versions by
other companies have not caught on.
"Women, unlike men, are conditioned to accept a certain amount of privacy,"
said John F. Banzhaf III, a legal advocate for urinary gender rights and a
professor of public interest law at the George Washington University Law
School.
Banzhaf has pushed for legislation to give women more public restroom
facilities to shorten the lines women endure.
He is, however, skeptical that the average woman will take to the P-Mate
easily, because they wouldn't want the hassle of carrying them around. He is
equally pessimistic that women’s urinals will make a comeback with the P-Mate.
Even fans admit that many women who have sat their whole lives will feel
uncomfortable about this new approach.
"It's a little bit out of the ordinary," Radbourne conceded.
E-mail: sh2303@columbia.edu
