Dog years: A decade as a MAGA exile in Los Angeles



Twelve years ago, my mother had a manic breakdown. She was found in Molokai, Hawaii, after disappearing for several days. The fugue state — in which she turned into a nightmare version of herself, eyes afire, flagellating her loved ones with a stream of deranged insults and delusions — lasted about six months until someone finally got her on lithium.

As she returned to herself, I pressured her to get a dog. She lived alone, so it would help her get a grip on reality. She said she liked whippets, so I found a local breeder. I wanted to name him Knut after Knut Hamsun, but she decided on Eliot after T.S.

I lost many jobs, many friends, many family members, all of whom called me problematic crazy fringe incel bigot weirdo resentful loser failure. But I just couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t not see the lie.

When the fugue began, I was finishing law school. When it ended, I’d taken the bar and moved to Los Angeles. I’d already experienced my parents’ terrible divorce as an only child at 17, but this year, 27, was the toughest and most isolating of my life. The safety net had ripped open, and I’d fallen through. Everything was most definitely not going to be okay.

After hitting the ground and dusting yourself off, making sure you aren’t dead, there is a sense of relief. “That happened.” There on the ground, you see the world as most people on earth do, all victims of abandonment or neglect or abuse or poverty or other societal failure, just not the upper middle-class American suburban milieu I’d been comfortably incubated within.

And when you hit the earth, you suddenly want to tell the truth. You don’t want to “win” any more. You want to help other people figure this thing out.

I was always edgy, but a good boy politically. In fact, I thought if myself as edgy for a good cause, that cause being “equality.” I’d dutifully campaigned for Obama, and my diverse group of friends had tearfully celebrated when he won in 2008.

But now it was 2012, and I worked for a gay Hollywood agent with six other young men, all of whom were gay. The time came to vote for Obama again, but this time, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt phony, a little numb spot where my righteousness had once curled.

What the hell did this guy know about anything? He certainly wasn’t talking to me. I told my co-workers this, and they were deeply offended. Didn’t I understand their rights were at stake? I already didn’t fit in, but this made it terminal. I was out within three months.

And thus began a decade of professional, personal, and familial torment as I slowly came out of the closet as a political bad boy, just as much to myself as to the world. I was, and still am, a liberal — it’s not possible to completely erase my deracinated bohemian upbringing. But it became increasingly clear to me that the good guys were in fact a mask covering a barely perceptible leviathan pulsing under the surface, rapidly reaching its tentacles across the earth.

As Eliot grew and my mother healed, I lost many jobs, many friends, many family members, all of whom called me problematic crazy fringe incel bigot weirdo resentful loser failure. But I just couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t not see the lie.

In L.A., I became a lone Trump supporter. I had zero MAGA friends, zero contacts to celebrate with when he won, maybe only one or two even in 2020 to lament the loss. On Tuesday, I celebrated with 100 friends, all culture kids and almost all recent converts who, like me, just couldn’t bring themselves to lie any more.

The thing we share in common? A breaking. Some loss, failure, death — the cozy cloak of a bourgeois upbringing ripped off, however fleetingly. All men used to be broken by war. Now far fewer are. But everyone in that room had gotten a glimpse. Tuesday: a decade of pain vindicated in a single night.

Wednesday morning after the all-nighter, I drove down to San Diego to put Eliot to sleep. He had a tennis ball-sized sarcoma dangling off his arm and typical whippet heart issues. It was time. Two guys came to the house and did it — it took 20 minutes. A decade transcended in a few quiet moments.

Mom is doing better now, but she still hates my politics.

This essay originally appeared on the Carousel.

Corey Comperatore: Father, husband, hero, citizen



When shots rang out at Saturday's Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Corey Comperatore's first instinct was to throw himself in front of his family.

He died a hero.

Even before he died shielding his family, Comperatore was the kind of everyday hero whose regular, unsung acts of sacrifice and service help uphold American society as we know it.

That's what Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) said of Comperatore at the press conference he gave the day after the 50-year-old father of two was killed.

"Hero" was also the word Jeff Lowery found when a New York Times reporter reached him at home in tiny (population 854) Hyndman, Pennsylvania, to ask him about his friend and fellow volunteer firefighter.

More than a hero

A strange word, "hero." Usually, the people it best applies to want nothing to do with it. They shrug it off, embarrassed. It's what anyone would've done, they say.

Corey Comperatore isn't here to object. But from the precious little we know about him — and will ever know, as our attention moves on and leaves those who loved him to grieve in peace — he was not the kind of man who'd want to be called a hero.

A good neighbor, maybe. A loyal friend. A loving husband and father.

The quotidian details of Comperatore's life reveal a man guided by a firm, yet humble sense of duty. He took care of his family by working at a local plastics factory — next year, it would have been 30 years. He took care of his community by serving as volunteer fire chief and by helping out those in need. He took care of his house, his lawn, his cars, his boat.

He took care of his two dogs. Dobermans. The Times notes that they were "well trained" — a somehow poignant detail when each new story about a horrific mauling points to another dog owner who simply couldn't be bothered.

Comperatore's steady, quiet stewardship of all that he was blessed to have didn't make him a hero. It made him something less celebrated but no less remarkable: an upstanding citizen.

Forgotten virtues

How quaint and corny that sounds. It's been a long time since we've thought of citizenship as a virtue to be practiced. To love and take pride in America, to prefer it over any other country, to understand it as a set of shared ideals and values to honor and to defend is to reject nuance and embrace the parochial. Patriotism as the last refuge of the simpleton.

It used to be easy enough to joke about these rubes. 'Murrica. NASCAR. Mission accomplished. Boomers doing Tea Party cosplay. Then 2016 happened. Suddenly, the civic-minded elites who relish urging Americans to vote lost their patronizing smiles. Yes, vote — but not like that.

The people had spoken, and now they needed to be protected from themselves. The laptop class quickly came up with the "faithless electors" scheme, a painless way to hit ctrl-alt-delete on the whole mess.

It didn't work, although we should never forget that they tried, especially when we talk about January 6. Those protesters may have acted imprudently, but their suspicions that the game was rigged had been regularly stoked since that first pre-emptive strike on Trump's legitimacy.

And which "insurrection" attempt did more damage, anyway? As Woody Guthrie once sang, "some will rob you with a six-gun / and some with a fountain pen." (For what it's worth, only one protester fired a gun that day, let alone pointed one anywhere, and he fired it into the air.)

Why so serious?

At any rate, Donald Trump kept the presidency, and a liberal "resistance" quickly formed. Resisting what? Well, the wave of oppression Trump was apparently set to unleash on women, on Muslims, on gays, on immigrants, on blacks, on Jews. But mainly, the very presence in the White House of someone so tacky and vulgar as to violate the unspoken "norm" of addressing the people with the usual stilted, self-important "false pathos," to borrow a phrase from the perceptive and prolific X poster @FischerKing.

"[Trump] never stares in the camera, expecting you to be moved by some vacuous bulls**t. He lets you in on the joke -- that government is serious, but also faintly ridiculous."

"Make America Great Again," like pretty much all campaign slogans, captures this serious but ridiculous quality. It's no more substantive than "Hope and Change," really. But unlike the latter, at least "Make America Great Again" dares to use the "A-word." It dares to address itself to American citizens.

Not just citizens of a certain race, as the media cynically tried to make us believe. But anyone with a stake not just in their own continued flourishing but also in the flourishing of the people around them: their family, their community, their state, and their country. Trump was the first president in a long time to acknowledge the many citizens for whom America had long since stopped working; that in itself is a breath of fresh air.

Liberals who call MAGA a "cult" flatter themselves that only they can separate empty political rhetoric from a candidate's substance. It's not that the people thronging Trump rallies don't recognize that Trump is putting on a show. His showmanship — and the way it triggers the elites — is part of the fun.

Critics who snipe that Trump doesn't care about these people, or won't do anything to help them, also miss the point. The more rooted you are in your local community, the more you understand that who gets elected president has little if any effect on your day-to-day life. There's a reason it's bad form to bring up politics or religion at the neighborhood barbershop. People whose relationships are mostly in person can't afford to hate each other.

You can disagree — even seriously — about the big-picture issues, but in the end it's more practical to focus on what unites you and your neighbor. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no ideologues in a burning house.

Politics above all

For the last eight years, the Democratic leadership have done everything they can to undermine this uniquely American way of getting along. With the help of a sympathetic mainstream media, they've relentlessly villainized Trump and his supporters as traitors, racists, fascists, Russian collusionists, and any number of other unsubstantiated accusations. They've worked to create an atmosphere in which everybody must prioritize political allegiance over any other concerns.

The widespread rioting in summer 2020 allowed such allegiance to be enforced with violence. As writer Matt Mehan recently noted, Democratic leaders "created a new norm that violent protest is acceptable if it is in the service of certain partisan goals & that peace, law, & order were political spoils withheld from the American people unless they voted the right way."

This campaign to intimidate Trump supporters has been effective on the internet and in certain "high-profile" industries subject to public pressure, but it has failed to gain much traction in the many places where Americans can still speak freely. Butler, Pennsylvania, to name just one. Anyone who's been to such a place knows that partisan mistrust in our country mainly runs in one direction. People might think you're a fool for having a Biden bumper sticker on your Prius, but they won't think you're evil. As long as you mind your manners and your business, you'll be fine.

If only the left would accord its opponents the same courtesy. As a Trump victory grows more plausible, we've seen increasingly heated rhetoric about the existential threat it would pose to the country and the unprecedented urgency of making sure it never happens. This culminated with the depiction of Trump as Hitler on the cover of the New Republic.

Lurid revenge fantasies

The recent calls for moderation ring hollow, to say the least, coming from the same people who have spent almost a decade encouraging the public to indulge their most lurid revenge fantasies. These fantasies have included various humiliations for Trump, ranging from arrest and rape to, yes, assassination.

Most of these fantasies satisfy a particular, sadistic need: the need to see Trump exposed for who he really is beneath the alpha-male, insult-comedian swagger, finally stripped of his wealth, power, and charisma. It's not enough to usher Trump off stage; first everyone must watch to see their hero reduced to a blubbering, pathetic weakling, begging for mercy like Nick Offerman's Trump analogue in this spring's box office hit "Civil War."

If anything could crack Trump's confident facade, you would think almost taking a bullet to the head would. And yet Trump somehow never broke character, having the presence of mind to turn this harrowing brush with death into a victory, both for him and for his supporters.

The image of Trump in the seconds after the bullet grazed his ear, his face streaked with blood, fist raised in defiance, is already iconic. It will no doubt be remembered as long as anyone cares to recount America's history. Say what you will about Trump, his elevation as a kind American folk hero no longer seems so risible. He may not have meant to, but he almost made the ultimate sacrifice in service to his country.

Hero ... and martyr

The public record of Corey Comperatore's sacrifice is far more modest. A reply he made on X stating his plans to attend the Trump rally where he would be killed, the thousands of comments now beneath it forming an impromptu memorial. A few mundane, low-resolution photos from Facebook to accompany the articles about him. An image of Comperatore's uniform and helmet hanging outside his old fire station.

The word hero comes from the ancient Greek hērōs, which means "protector" or "defender." Even before he died shielding his family, Comperatore was a hero of sorts. The kind of everyday hero whose regular, unsung acts of sacrifice and service help uphold American society as we know it.

If the fabric of that society has frayed in recent years, it won't be the politicians who repair it. It will be people like Comperatore, whose simple action of showing up to support his candidate demonstrated an unwavering, optimistic faith in the promise of America. And people like each of us, if we are up to the task.

The family, friends, and neighbors who loved and depended on Comperatore will grieve him in private, in days and weeks and years to come, and in a thousand small ways. We should each aspire to live in such a way that our eventual deaths are as deeply felt. May this brave man's senseless death encourage us to meet the challenge.

How to raise perfect children



As a mother, I've always been ambivalent about that old saw "it takes a village." Sounds great when another mom volunteers to drive your kid to the laser tag birthday party an hour away. Less appealing when a stranger offers you unsolicited parenting advice as you're managing a Target toy aisle meltdown.

My children are well into their teen years now, which means I don't need to get them rides as often (they or their friends can ... gulp ... drive themselves), and friends and bystanders are less prone to offer their own child-rearing tips.

A lot can go awry, especially when raising willful little expletives with dreams of their own.

Why? Well, teens (mine at least) usually don't take kindly to being spoken of in the third person. And they're happy to answer even the most benign suggestion with a withering, ego-destroying remark most people aren't prepared to process on a given Tuesday afternoon.

Also, let's face it: For better or for worse, teenagers are already more or less formed. Whatever development they have ahead of them, they don't offer the tempting blank canvas that, say, a 4-year-old does.

And what person in their right mind would want to participate in endless exchanges like this if not obligated by blood?

Why are you yelling?
Because the 19 times I asked you nicely haven’t worked.

While I do occasionally miss the baby years, I'm just as often grateful we've moved on. Especially having recently read about all the newish moms paying for parenting advice on Instagram.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

While in-utero and throughout their first years, my children showed many signs of the superlative futures I had envisioned for them. Indeed, I comforted my sleep-deprived self, they would become the Nobel Laureate-Supermodel-Olympic athletes I’d dreamed of as morning sickness morphed into all-day nausea.

Anyone and everyone could see the signs; I went into labor on the very day my OB/GYN predicted for each of their births. They held their heads up and rolled over ahead of developmental schedule and remained on target — even ahead of schedule, sometimes by days — throughout their toddler years.

Obviously, this was an omen; my privileged progeny were perfectly suited to fulfill my dreams for their lives. What could possibly waylay them on their way to world domination — and me on my path to Mother of the Millennia?

Turns out a lot. A lot can go awry, especially when raising willful little expletives with dreams of their own.

Children are humans. Sentient, separate, imperfect individuals even ... with their own opinions about everything — including their lives’ trajectories. The nerve.

But even if my offspring had manifested my wunderkind dreams, I’d still be me. Yes, I might have been the mother of humanity’s next evolution, but I’d still be this not-meant-for-mass-production, flawed version of my "best self" who is writing this about a minute before it’s due.

Ironically, it's in my children's recalcitrance that I most see myself. Like me, my children have strong wills. Their ferocity drives me mad in different ways — but always screaming, often toward Chardonnay.

In these moments, I regard my strong will as a hindrance. I bang my head against metaphorical walls. I undertake Quixotic causes that zap my strength, time, and focus for naught. I see my offspring tilting against the same windmills.

And yet I must admit that my strong will also serves me well. I persist. Against career obstacles, chronic disease, and family foibles. Some of what I first identify as stubbornness in my kids often turns out to be persistence.

Like a contorted funhouse image, my children reflect a twisted version of my best and worst traits. When I see my worst self in a 34, 16, or 11-year-old version, I pray that gene-editing techniques will evolve so that my grandchildren will only reflect the best of my progeny and me.

But they won’t. So, I take a deep breath, and dig deep until I find faith. I say a prayer for the wherewithal to direct my powerhouse progeny toward a worthwhile purpose.

Let go and let God, in other words. I've heard worse advice.

Horror movies hit different when you're a mom



I used to enjoy watching horror movies. They were a lighthearted thrill, something ironic and far-fetched, a casual little fear simulator for the overly cozy and safe last (wo)man. I had a constantly updated list of favorites and wasn't rattled by gore, sadism, or edgy themes. It was fun.

After having children, this pastime has vanished. And it's not because I worry my children will catch a glimpse of some mentally scarring chainsaw massacre. I'm just over it. Every time I stumble upon a horror movie, there's something newly sickening about it. It's not that the tomato sauce or the jiggly latex monstrosities are gross — it has finally, deeply occurred to me that these are movies about death.

Adding disquieting layers of humanity to some sorority sister who is inexplicably showering alone during a killing spree is not an effect of parenthood I expected.

With motherhood, I've acquired the world's most questionable superpower, a fuzzy, persistent rumination on the finitude of life, with a twist of cosmic horror.

Even though it sounds painfully corny, and I cringe as I write this, every person hacked to death in a slasher is, at the very least, someone's child. Adding disquieting layers of humanity to some sorority sister who is inexplicably showering alone during a killing spree is not an effect of parenthood I expected. But it's there now. When she gets gleefully hacked to pieces, death — real death, not just its fun Hollywood simulacrum — is suddenly there, too.

Even beyond the horror genre, I would love a *child is getting hurt* warning on the odd drama or thriller. Yes, one of those dreaded trigger warnings would be nice. I can't afford to add to my burden of terrors. I now think about death quite enough, thank you very much.

Treating life with light-heartedness was much easier when all I had in custody was my own and I was young and healthy and preoccupied with the small amusements and anxieties that filled up the day. My own life was instinctively eternal and felt somewhat flimsy. My children's lives — my perfect, vulnerable, helpless, careless, and relentlessly suicidal (in the case of my toddler) children's lives — are another matter. Far more precious and substantial than my own life has ever been to me and in my questionable custody, their lives are my biggest blessing and my starkest responsibility.

In "Warriors and Worriers," Joyce Benenson posits that children are a unique source of worry, a new, unprecedented burden of negative emotion for the mother. This level of negative emotion was beneficial when danger was much more prevalent in our environment. It kept women and their offspring alive. In the long history of our species, feeling bad is the evolutionary price of love.

The counterweight for every precious gift your children give you is the looming worry it could be taken away tomorrow. Every video of miraculous first steps, wobbly puddle jumps, and adorably mispronounced words is torture in waiting if any one of the 1001 terrible things you've been worrying about happens (not to mention the other million other things it hasn't yet occurred to you to worry about.)

I'm generally not a worrier; even now, as a mother, I'm relatively carefree compared to most. I'm even less of a worrier than my husband, but we worry differently. I'm in charge of wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat type worries, like the non-specific worry that our luck will run out based on some eldritch calculation that ticks away in my subconscious. He, much more reasonably, thinks about things like drowning and traffic.

My reality is that I have two perfect children. I can spend the vast majority of my time with them. I am healthy, and so is my husband. We are lucky beyond belief, almost suspiciously lucky. In my mind, our many blessings sometimes feel like a spring that's gradually loading.

I've had my share of personal and familial tragedies, but because these burdens are not officially on the ledger of my young family, it doesn't feel like it counts. We started with a blank canvas; so far, it's been only goodness and light. In the back of my mind, the spring is loading.

I do worry at least a bit about specifics: accidents, predators, abductions, disease, and the like. But my primary anxiety is about a more essential quality of this world. This is not a kind place; it is an indifferent place, and it is often filled with casual indignities and cruelty. Kindness is definitely out there, and I'll teach my children to cultivate it in themselves and their environment, but you can't really bet on it.

I hope my children will be spared, but I know they won't. They, too, will be taunted in school, lured into vices, and they will have to wrestle the demons that are seeded into all of us. And even though I'll try to help them, they may not win some of these battles.

These are absolutely normal things, but they are heartbreaking in a totally new way when you have children. It's easier to make your peace with the tragedy of life when it's just your suffering you're risking. I've learned that the thought that your child will inevitably suffer, even if you can't predict precisely how, is and will be a constant companion.

The sum of all remote probabilities of disaster always appears to be greater than 100%. I will experience (more) devastating events, and they will experience them as well.

It is what it is. But, in the meantime, please don't remind me.

Alex Kuschata is a writer, cultural critic, and podcast host from Transylvania, Romania. This piece was originally published on her Substack.

How '1984' Has Failed.

How '1984' Has Failed.

'Anti-racist' prof Ibram X. Kendi wondered if daughter inhaled 'smog' of 'white superiority' amid attachment to white doll at daycare



"Anti-racist" professor and author Ibram X. Kendi in his Tuesday essay for the Atlantic wondered if his daughter inhaled the "smog" of "white superiority" amid her attachment to a white doll at daycare.

What are the details?

Kendi wrote that in the summer of 2017, he and his partner, Sadiqa, and their 1-year-old daughter, Imani, moved to Washington, D.C. During that time, Imani grew attached to a white doll with blue eyes and began throwing fits when she had to put it down, Kendi's essay states.

He added that he and his partner "wondered if our black child’s attachment to a white doll could mean she had already breathed in what the psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum has called the 'smog' of white superiority."

Kendi detailed the history of dolls' skin color, including a recent study concluding that white children "displayed a high rate of 'white bias,' identifying lighter skin tones with positive attributes and darker hues with negative ones." He added that black children also displayed white bias, but far less than white children; the study's author said that's because "black parents actively work to protect their children from bias by 'reframing messages that children get from society' about racial preference." White parents “don’t have to engage in that level of parenting," the study's author found.

"Regardless of your race, it’s never too early to consider the messages a child is receiving from the world around them. Color blindness is not an option," Kendi added in his piece. "Research has demonstrated that even at 1 year old, our children notice different skin colors. We can impress upon children the equality of dark and light colors."

He also wrote that "we can use dolls to acknowledge difference in skin color but dismiss the racist notions that the darker, the worse. A diverse assortment of toys in general can 'open dialogue around prejudice and enable discussion and empathy,' the psychologist Sian Jones has written. 'If such toys are not there, the opportunity for this discussion is lost.'”

At home, Imani had a wide array of diverse toys. But Sadiqa and I hadn’t thought about their presence at Imani’s day care.

'Anger overtook me'

After picking up his daughter at daycare later on, Kendi wrote that he "rummaged through" toy chests there "and did not come across a single doll that looked Asian, Native, latino, middle eastern, or black. Every single doll I saw looked white."

He added that "anger overtook me. Not at the day care’s owner — at myself. Imani had been going here for several weeks, and not once did I examine the toy chests."

Kendi concluded that his daughter "did not choose to play with the white doll over dolls of color" but simply didn't have "another option. After all these years, how many children still don’t have another option in their toy chests, libraries, or schools? What does the overrepresentation of white dolls tell children about who their caregivers think is important?"

Anything else?

Here's a sampling of other ways Kendi has been making headlines:

'Girl dad' writes viral post on how he protects his daughters by taking them into public women's bathrooms



Muhammed Nitoto of popular Instagram account Chronicles of Daddy has documented why he will always take his young daughters into ladies' bathrooms when faced with the decision to use public women's or men's rooms.

What are the details?

According to "Good Morning America," Nitoto went viral for a recent Instagram post regarding his young daughters' bathroom habits.

Nitoto — who lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife Hejira Thompson and the couple's young girls, Zendaya and Zuri Lily — said that he's found himself faced with a decision to expose his toddlers to the unsanitary conditions of a men's room, or take them into a more comfortable and accessible women's room when it comes time to use the bathroom.

"I never thought the bathroom would become as big as a [sic] issue as it is," he wrote on Instagram. "Usually we would go to places and they have a FAMILY bathroom which are [sic] for people with children but what I found was most places don't have them and dads are left to decide between taking their daughters to the men's bathroom or the women's."

Nitoto said that when he began taking his daughters into the men's room, he was disgusted.

"Men's bathrooms are DISGUSTING," he wrote. "They smell like pee and nothing is setup [sic] for a woman or a person with a child. The changing table was right next to the urinal which means my child literally would be next to where men pee which [sic] she's being changed."

He said that it took just one time to entirely change his mind on where his girls should go to the bathroom: the ladies' room.

"I try to be as respectful to women as I can while doing so which consists of knocking on the door before entering and announcing myself," he wrote. "Making sure if someone is inside that they know I am a Dad coming in with his daughter and making sure they are comfortable with that. Now once inside our stall I still am aware of the door and whenever I hear it open and someone new is coming in I announce myself again and make sure they know I'm inside with my child so that they aren't surprised."

He added, "Women's bathrooms are so much cleaner and setup prefect [sic] just incase [sic] they have children. The changing station is usually insure [sic] a stall instead of just in the open and it's always clean. As a girl dad I can't help but want to protect my daughter's [sic] from all things that aren't for them and the men's bathroom is 100% one of those things."

In a statement, Nitoto told "Good Morning America" that he aimed to spark a conversation with his now-viral post and show "support to other fathers who have been or will be in the same situation."

"Being a girl dad, I find myself having to navigate things that I don't have a book I can read from to help me with solutions," he added. "It's almost like the parenting story isn't shared in-depth from a father's side. That's why I started my Daddy Chronicles. I wanted to tell the dad's side of stories — some that have been heard from the mom's side and some that haven't even been talked about before."

At the time of this reporting, the Instagram post has received more than 10,100 likes.

You can read Nitoto's full post below:

As a dad being out with daughters I never thought the bathroom would become as big as a issue as it is. Usually we would go places and they have FAMILY bathroom which are meant for people with children but what I found was most places don't have them and Dads are left to decide between taking their daughters to the men's bathroom or the women's. Now when first hit with this choice I did what most men would do which is, I went to the Men's bathroom. Now I've been to a men's bathroom millions of times but walking in with your daughter makes you look at it completely different. Men's bathrooms are DISGUSTING. They smell like pee and nothing is setup for a woman or a person with a child. The changing table was right next to the urinal which means my child literally would be next to where men pee which she's being charged. Not to mention that their are men going in and out while you're in their. After doing that 1 time I decided I'd never take my daughter's to the men's bathroom again. I use the women's bathroom when I'm out with them. They are too young to go on their own so I have to go in with them. I try to be as respectful to women as I can while doing so which consists of knocking on the door before entering and announcing myself. Making sure if someone is inside that they know I am a Dad coming in with his daughter and making sure they are comfortable with that. Now once inside our stall I still am aware of the door and whenever I hear it open and someone new is coming in I announce myself again and make sure they know I'm inside with my child so that they aren't surprised. Women's bathrooms are so much cleaner and setup prefect just incase they have children. The changing station is usually insure a stall instead of just in the open and it's always clean. As a girl dad I can't help but want to protect my daughter's from all things that aren't for them and the men's bathroom is 100% one of those things. Am I the only one? Ladies how does this make you feel?