In Vienna, Austria, men’s urinals (Pissoirs) are free, but women have to pay to use the toilet. A Lemmy post on the German-language community c/dach picked up a taz.de article reporting that a woman had sued the city of Vienna over this disparity. The thread saw clashing views — some defending the setup by arguing “if men had to pay too, they’d just start peeing in public more,” while others countered “that doesn’t actually benefit women at all” — with the debate spilling into who should bear the cost of maintaining public restrooms and what responsibility local governments have. Wordplay also took off, since “Wiener” can also mean a type of sausage.
Why do women have to pay for the toilet while men don’t? The woman suing Vienna
Re: #19 So if women just start peeing in some unsanitary underpass without holding back, does the toilet become free too?
10Anonymous2026-09-06 07:11
Re: #2 Yeah, obviously that's not happening. If a woman did that she'd be instantly arrested and harassed to hell by the cops. But sure, I guess we don't need feminism anymore (/s)
12Anonymous2026-09-06 10:43
Re: #2 No joke, that's literally the answer
19Anonymous2026-09-06 04:52
Re: #11 This is the usual counterargument — if you made men pay too, they'd just turn around and piss against a wall instead.
3Anonymous2026-09-05 21:37
Blame the city government of Vienna for this.
13Anonymous2026-09-06 04:11
Re: #3 Heh… you said 'Wiener' (sounds just like the sausage, lol).
4Anonymous2026-09-06 04:33
Re: #24 What we should be aiming for is women not having to pay to pee either.
5Anonymous2026-09-06 00:20
Re: #24 If the fee is just there to cover maintenance costs, then this just means women stop being forced to cover the men's share too. Isn't that fair?
8Anonymous2026-09-05 22:21
Re: #24 What? The current situation is just straight-up garbage, of course people are going to complain.
24Anonymous2026-09-05 22:11
So in the end men would just end up having to pay too. What's the actual benefit for women in that?
6Anonymous2026-09-06 05:44
If I had to pay just to relieve myself, I'd rather do it wherever I please. This should be a basic right regardless of gender, and I think businesses should be obligated to let even non-customers use their restrooms.
14Anonymous2026-09-06 09:21
Re: #6 I don't think the second part of that idea is good. Doing that just lets the government off the hook for maintaining public restrooms and dumps the whole cost onto restaurants and cafes. Better to nationalize Sanifair (the company that runs highway rest-stop toilets) instead.
7Anonymous2026-09-05 21:53
Vienna's clearly got a soft spot for people with a 'wiener' attached 🤭
9Anonymous2026-09-06 07:33
Why are the doors so short to begin with anyway? Come to the Netherlands sometime — our toilet doors have gaps at both the top and bottom. (Sorry, my German isn't great)
21Anonymous2026-09-06 20:16
Re: #9 It's for ventilation
22Anonymous2026-09-06 12:40
Re: #9 Whoa, feisty today, kid
11Anonymous2026-09-05 22:22
There's no way anyone's actually paying to use a men's urinal to begin with.
15Anonymous2026-09-06 09:52
Re: #14 There's actually a system called 'Nette Toilette' ('the nice toilet'), where the city pays restaurants and cafes to open their restrooms to the public. Nationalizing Sanifair is a good idea, but that alone wouldn't automatically increase the number of public restrooms.
16Anonymous2026-09-06 05:31
Had no idea the Wiener sausage was treated as practically a cultural heritage item.
18Anonymous2026-09-06 10:32
Re: #23 So because some men are absolute pigs, all women end up paying extra for it. Guess this is that 'socialism' America loves to demonize — terrifying stuff. Yeah, really, I just love this society (/s).
23Anonymous2026-09-06 08:18
Re: #5 Sounds fair on paper, but in practice there's no benefit for women. Instead of paying to pee, men will happily just do it outside. And for the city, keeping urinals free is cheaper than paying for street cleaning and everything else that comes with public urination.
20Anonymous2026-09-06 12:39
Re: #2 Exactly. Things in this society almost never change just because it's the fair thing to do. At the end of the day it comes down to the capital interests of the ruling class. Public urination damages property and lowers its value, so keeping urinals free works in their favor. If women want equal treatment, they need to actually threaten those capital interests.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The backdrop here is a long-standing complaint in German-speaking cities: men’s restrooms are free, while women’s restrooms charge a fee — a structural asymmetry. The lawsuit against the city of Vienna, reported by taz.de, puts this practice on trial. The thread’s disagreement boils down to one question: is the fee a “fair way to split maintenance costs,” or is it simply “a penalty that falls on women alone”? The argument that charging men too would just lead to more public urination cuts both ways — flip it around, and it becomes the criticism that “women are getting the short end of the stick because of how men behave.” Notably, both sides reach opposite conclusions from the same set of facts. Also worth noting: in German, “Wiener” can mean both “a resident of Vienna” and “sausage,” which kept a steady stream of wordplay running alongside the more serious debate — a pun that didn’t really come through in the Japanese translation of this piece.
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