I’m writing in response to your article in the Jan. 26 Daily Orange article by Meghin Delaney about coed bathrooms. I think this is an issue that deserves a lot of discussion, so I thank you for the article.

When I was finishing college, back in 1972, Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton) was just starting to have a few coed bathrooms. I did not get a chance to see how well they did or didn’t work then.

Nearly four decades later, I am not surprised that coed bathrooms don’t protect some women’s privacy sufficiently. Now, and in the recent past, I put a lot of my time and energy leading and attending Men’s Liberation workshops, connected with the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI). NCBI men’s leaders all realize that we men need to do a lot more work just to reduce, let alone end, sexism. Sexism is something that all men are consciously and unconsciously immersed in and carry with us, no matter how aware we are of sexism’s harm to women and to all of us.

While writing an essay about ending our current wars, I learned that in 2008 41 percent of women veterans at the LA Veterans Hospital had told their doctors that they had been sexually assaulted while serving in the military and 29 percent said they had been raped. In another article, 80 percent of U.S. service women said they had been sexually harassed. Some could argue that the huge male majority in the military and the awful, atrocious stress of combat exaggerate the effects of sexism. But I don’t think that anyone could say that women in coed bathrooms should feel safe at all times from the serious harm of sexual harassment and possible assault.

Robert Rimmer wrote a provocative novel, ‘The Harrad Experiment,’ that I read in college. He suggested that each dorm room at his fictional college have a male and a female in it. He thought this would teach young men and women a lot about getting along and about relationships between the sexes. As a young idealist, Rimmer’s ideas seemed exciting and fresh to me, with great potential. I still hold on to a lot of hope for humanity’s future, but I believe that we need to do a hell of a lot of work on sexism, on false masculinity and on homophobia before coed bathrooms would work as they are intended to, let alone coed dorm rooms.

Rick Olanoff