We NEED toilets!

(This is in response to an excellent article in this group by Bella Bee on the worldwide lack of toilets for women, particularly in Pakistan.)

If just ONE female has to regularly squat to use the toilet, we have ALL failed!

Even as a child, playing in the countryside, I hated the routine of girls looking out for each other while we dropped our trews in long grass. I especially hated the fact that the boys didn't have to.

The 'Three Ps' are the essential requirements for every girl on the planet - Privacy, a Pot, and Paper - and if they aren't readily available everywhere, we must - as women - do our utmost to see that they are. Because men won't.

Needing to urinate without privacy and paper, and with the potential of other females seeing you is one thing (and should by itself be at the top of a 'to be stamped out' list), but having to defecate without cover, or with the possibility of males seeing, is so horrendous that it should be immediately prevented by International Law and First World countries be sued for not funding alternatives.

Unfortunately male standards are still too often the norm.

Standards which do not meet female necessities are not questioned by people in power or with money. We are not talking here about a Western obsession with make-up or hair salons or nail bars - we are talking about fundamental rights of decency which girls and women are being denied.

A male body does not need the 'Three Ps' - therefore, it is argued, they are not necessary for anyone. But they are, and depriving one female of any of them is enough to make all females feel ashamed.