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Humanity stands on the verge of losing things it's had for... 0.05% of its history!
I'm thinking of two things in particular.
First, the principle that men use men's bathrooms and women use women's bathrooms, and anybody who goes into the wrong one is imperiling the whole moral basis of society. Obviously, normal people don't have "men's" and "women's" bathrooms in their homes; this is only an issue about bathrooms in public places. And it really doesn't make much difference for "single-seater" bathrooms, even in public places: the gas station probably has a men's room and a women's room, both single-seat, but if one of them is out of order, most civilized people even in the US are OK with everybody using the one that's working. So we're only concerned with bathrooms in public places that are large enough for multiple people to use simultaneously. And these days we're only concerned with segregating by sex, not skin color, religion, or social class, all of which have at various times and places determined which bathroom you could use.
Until the 19th century, many of the "public places" where there might be a multi-user public bathroom were themselves single-sex institutions (abbeys, schools, government, military), so who walked into which bathroom wasn't a concern. Aside from those, I don't think multi-user public bathrooms were very common at all, and at least at some times in recorded history they were mixed-sex, or people just excreted in the woods or by the side of the road. So the whole sex-segregated-bathrooms thing is an attempt to preserve a God-given rule that God only gave us about 150-200 years ago (while apparently dropping the equally-God-given rule about racially-segregated bathrooms).
The second is the notion that a photograph or a video depicts reality. AI and computer-graphics advances in the last five years have made it entirely feasible for someone (without the resources of a major film studio) to produce something that looks utterly realistic but never actually happened. Of course, it was always possible to produce a realistic-looking picture of something that never happened, but it was so much easier and cheaper to mechanically produce a picture or (later) a moving picture of something real that we jumped to the conclusion that "realistic means true". Now it's still easier and cheaper to produce a picture or moving picture of something real than something fake, but the price differential has dropped substantially. Which means we're in danger of returning to the epistemological situation of... 150-200 years ago. You know it's real if you saw it directly with your own eyes; other than that, your assessment of truth depends on how much you trust your information source. The fact that it "looks realistic" tells you nothing about whether it's true, only about the artist's skill.
The species H. sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years. For 99.95% of that time, we didn't have single-sex public bathrooms or mechanical recording, and somehow we survived.
First, the principle that men use men's bathrooms and women use women's bathrooms, and anybody who goes into the wrong one is imperiling the whole moral basis of society. Obviously, normal people don't have "men's" and "women's" bathrooms in their homes; this is only an issue about bathrooms in public places. And it really doesn't make much difference for "single-seater" bathrooms, even in public places: the gas station probably has a men's room and a women's room, both single-seat, but if one of them is out of order, most civilized people even in the US are OK with everybody using the one that's working. So we're only concerned with bathrooms in public places that are large enough for multiple people to use simultaneously. And these days we're only concerned with segregating by sex, not skin color, religion, or social class, all of which have at various times and places determined which bathroom you could use.
Until the 19th century, many of the "public places" where there might be a multi-user public bathroom were themselves single-sex institutions (abbeys, schools, government, military), so who walked into which bathroom wasn't a concern. Aside from those, I don't think multi-user public bathrooms were very common at all, and at least at some times in recorded history they were mixed-sex, or people just excreted in the woods or by the side of the road. So the whole sex-segregated-bathrooms thing is an attempt to preserve a God-given rule that God only gave us about 150-200 years ago (while apparently dropping the equally-God-given rule about racially-segregated bathrooms).
The second is the notion that a photograph or a video depicts reality. AI and computer-graphics advances in the last five years have made it entirely feasible for someone (without the resources of a major film studio) to produce something that looks utterly realistic but never actually happened. Of course, it was always possible to produce a realistic-looking picture of something that never happened, but it was so much easier and cheaper to mechanically produce a picture or (later) a moving picture of something real that we jumped to the conclusion that "realistic means true". Now it's still easier and cheaper to produce a picture or moving picture of something real than something fake, but the price differential has dropped substantially. Which means we're in danger of returning to the epistemological situation of... 150-200 years ago. You know it's real if you saw it directly with your own eyes; other than that, your assessment of truth depends on how much you trust your information source. The fact that it "looks realistic" tells you nothing about whether it's true, only about the artist's skill.
The species H. sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years. For 99.95% of that time, we didn't have single-sex public bathrooms or mechanical recording, and somehow we survived.
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Also, the multi-user restroom thing seems to come down only to urinals, and that's easily adjusted if they really care. In the women's room everything happens in individual stalls, regardless of how many there are, other than washing up after. Men's rooms have stalls for some uses and urinals for others, but people don't generally have urinals in their homes, so it seems to me that if men's rooms had only the toilets in stalls, and not also the urinals, that would be exactly equivalent to the situation I described for women's rooms.
Of course, it's not really about the stalls and their attendant privacy.
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