I was thinking about this article today as I went into a public bathroom and the woman I was with went into the other bathroom. I wondered if perhaps we urinated from a different place other than our sexual organs, would we not have segregated bathrooms? If we peed from our ankles, for example, would urination not be a big deal? After all, eating is not a big deal. We put food in our mouths in public. Men and women, together, masticating openly in groups. Would we do so if we were constructed with our genitals in the same place as our mouths? If so, would men and women eat in separate rooms? Would we demand privacy when we eat? In fact, if we urinated from a place in our bodies far from our sexual organs, we would probably have toilets built into our dining rooms and you would simply pee without leaving the table. Do you think so?
I suspect the reason we don't evacuate our wastes in public is, mostly, because it's smelly. I don't don't know why we have separate men's and women's bathrooms, though. It might just be an extension of old-fashioned, separate, gender roles, where men-folk went off to do men stuff in one place and women-folk went off to do women stuff in another place.