By Olivia Turner | Staff Writer
If there’s one thing I’m baffled by, it’s public bathrooms — women’s public bathrooms in particular. The toilet paper and soap are free to use without limit, so why aren’t feminine products?
It can be frustrating, and even paralyzing, when it feels like everything except the one thing you really need is available to you. To be stranded in a public restroom with no feminine supplies is a scary experience, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Although women can provide for themselves in this sense, we can still be caught off guard. Life happens.
Public restrooms should serve to welcome and suit the needs of anyone who uses them. That’s why institutions like Baylor hire staff to restock soap and toilet paper and keep the facilities clean.
Baylor should do the same for the women on campus by providing free and accessible feminine products in the bathrooms. Nobody should have to go through their day with discomfort just because they don’t have a quarter for a tampon.
In recent years, other students have voiced their opinions on this issue, and thankfully not all have been met with silence. In 2016, Thousand Oaks, Calif., then-senior Raquel Katch started a Change.org petition and was presented to the Student Government; she asking for feminine products to be available for free use in campus public restrooms. Since then, the petition received over 200 supporters.
Despite the student government’s lack of response to the petition, Springfield, Mo., senior Katie Groves passed a bill 2021 that allowed free feminine products to be offered in the basement restrooms of the Bill Daniel Student Center. According to Bethel Tesfai, student body internal vice president, a senator is currently working on advancing Groves’s bill to expand access to menstrual products to all women’s restrooms on campus.
Providing feminine products for women to use freely is a gesture I’ve seen become more normalized in recent years, but I hope it continues until it’s something that is available across the board. People stocking their bathrooms with supplies for their girlfriends, sisters and female visitors has become somewhat of a trend on TikTok, and it’s one I’m totally here for. This gesture helps to better care for and value women, in addition to bringing up a generation of men who are more sensitive to women’s needs in general.
I realize, although I ask for feminine products to be provided freely to women, they do cost money, and in my desired circumstance, the money for these supplies would be coming from Baylor’s pocket. However, providing free supplies would actually be less expensive in comparison to the cost of the tampon dispensers.
This is not to say all Baylor buildings have neglected to consider these needs. Burleson and Old Main offer free feminine products at the front desk of the language department upon request. Or, in other bathrooms, I have seen tampons and pads left on the sinks for women to use freely. For example, once when I was using a bathroom on the first floor of the Baylor Science Building, free tampons had been left on the ledge of the dispenser, as if to cleverly mock the label on the dispenser which read “$0.25.”
I appreciate the few campus bathrooms that provide free products and I’m glad even for the availability of the dispensers. I wish Baylor would consider stocking all its women’s restrooms with feminine supplies because it helps the women who work, learn and live here to feel better supported.
