Pee & patriarchy: The outdoor industry has a piss problem
Is that an eye-catching enough of a headline for ya? WALK WITH ME!
Want to hear something crazy? There is nothing about female urinary anatomy that makes us biologically incapable of peeing outside. We are physically capable of doing it. And yet, if you’re someone who squats to pee, you know the struggle well.
So, what the hell? Why don’t we just do it? And if we do, why isn't it easier?
Why do we settle for pants around the ankles? Bare butt exposed. Trying not to pee on our boots or pants. Trying to find somewhere private enough to drop said pants in the first place. Balancing in a squat on rocks, roots, snow, mud, or a steep hillside (and often falling). Add a heavy backpack, multiple layers, a climbing harness, bibs, limited mobility, freezing temperatures, menstruation, or an extremely busy trail. Add up all of those factors, and one of the most basic human bodily functions becomes a whole production. And not just that, it becomes a safety risk!
Meanwhile, someone who can stand to pee can usually unzip, turn around, pee, zip back up, and continue on their merry way without a second thought.
We’ve become so accustomed to this difference that most of us don’t really question it. It’s just how peeing works, right?
But what if we did question it?
Because there’s actually nothing inherently incompatible between our anatomy and peeing outdoors. A lot of the inconvenience comes from the clothing, gear, infrastructure, and social norms we’ve built around our bodies.
And if you start pulling on that thread, you end up somewhere we quite frankly shouldn’t be surprised about: The patriarchy.
Yes, I’m going to connect peeing in the woods to the patriarchy. Hear me out, pretty please.
*NOTE: I'm using the terms "female" and "women" here for simplicity. However, it's important we acknowledge there are many folks who do not identify as female or women who have similar anatomy (intersex, trans, and non-binary folks). You are not forgotten, you are included in this!
First, let’s go back to Victorian Britain
You might think the modern outdoor industry is about as far removed from Victorian England as you can get, but there’s a fascinating piece of bathroom history that feels pretty damn relevant here.
The first public flushing toilets debuted at London’s Great Exhibition in 1851. Public toilets began appearing in London shortly afterward, but they were overwhelmingly designed for men.
Women had to plan trips around where they might be able to use a bathroom, often relying on the homes of friends and family. Their ability to move freely through public space was quite literally limited by how long they could hold their pee.
This eventually became known as the “urinary leash.”
Women fought back, by the way. As we do.
The Ladies’ Sanitary Association began campaigning for women's public toilets in the 1850s. Some of the first women's facilities opened in London in the 1880s, and the reasoning behind those bathrooms is especially interesting: businesses realized women would stick around and spend more money if they had somewhere to pee. A women's restroom opened at Piccadilly Circus in 1889 for essentially that reason.
Capitalism occasionally favors feminism when feminism is profitable. Hooray, I guess? A tale as old as time...but I digress.
All this is to say: The infrastructure was designed primarily around men's needs, and women's freedom of movement suffered because of it.
Sound familiar?
See where I'm going with this?
The outdoor industry has a long history of treating men as the default
Women have always been outdoors. But our gear and our community haven't always acted like it.
For decades, much of the outdoor and sporting-goods industry designed products around male bodies first. The default. Women frequently used men's gear or were offered smaller, prettier versions of essentially the same products (an approach that became infamous within the industry as “shrink it and pink it”). And look, I LOVE PINK. If you know me, you know this. But that's not what we're talking about here.
And this isn't something critics or the "chronically online" have invented to dunk on outdoor brands. The industry itself has literally acknowledged it. I just spent a week at Outdoor Retailer and heard that term multiple times a day.
Things are changing. Slowly, yes, but progress is good. Women's backpacks are finally getting anatomically appropriate hip belts. Sleeping bags are being designed with insulation placed differently. Hiking boots are being built around women's feet rather than simply scaled down from men's models. I wish it was more, of course. But it's still progress.
So when we talk about the outdoor industry being historically male-centered, we're talking about something very literal, not just some abstract hypothesis.
Peeing is an accessibility issue
Consider the difference in experience: One person can unzip a fly, turn away from the trail, pee while standing, zip up, and move along. Another person may need to find significantly more privacy, pull their pants and underwear down, expose a large portion of their body, get into a squat, keep clothing out of the stream, balance on uneven terrain, wipe, deal with the toilet paper, stand back up, and get dressed again.
Now put that second person on a glacier and give them wobbly legs. I’m being serious. Imagine the sheer risk.
That's essentially how Gnara came to exist. And no, this is not a secret advertisement. I really do want to talk about these brands because they’re proof of concept that designing for female anatomy makes logical sense and is possible.
Gnara’s founder, Georgia Grace Edwards, got the idea for her GoFly tech while working as a glacier guide in Alaska. Her male coworkers could discreetly unzip their flies to pee. But she had to cross dangerous crevasses looking for privacy, then remove three or four layers of clothing in freezing temperatures when she finally found it. She became so cold during the process that she started reducing how much water she drank instead.
Read that again.
The solution to my clothing makes peeing so difficult that I get freezing cold became drink less water.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about! Real danger. Real risk. Real consequences.
We encounter a product that doesn't work particularly well for our anatomy, and instead of asking why the product wasn't designed differently, we change our behavior, often at the expense of our own safety out of necessity.
We have accepted a ridiculous pee routine. And not ridiculous in the fun way.
If you squat to pee outside, you probably know it by heart. Find a tree. Check both directions. Walk farther away because somebody is coming. Take off the backpack. Pull the pants down. Pull the underwear down. Hold everything forward. Squat. Adjust. Squat again. Panic because you think you hear someone coming. WHY IS THE GROUND SLOPED LIKE THAT? Try not to pee on your boots. Well, shit, now your socks are wet. Try not to moon an unsuspecting family coming around the corner. Realize you forgot toilet paper. Wiggle your butt. Question every decision that led you to this moment.
And then somehow we collectively decided: Yep. This is fine. Nothing to see here.
And there are situations where it becomes much more than an inconvenience, right? Squatting can be difficult for people with mobility limitations, balance issues, pain, injuries, or disabilities. Getting half-naked is much less whimsical when it's freezing, raining, snowing, or windy. More complicated clothing and technical gear can make the entire process harder. And finding privacy can mean traveling farther away from a trail or campsite.
It's one small barrier among the many that can make outdoor recreation feel less accessible. And the outdoor industry should care about those small barriers because the demographics of outdoor recreation are changing quickly.
Women aren't some niche outdoor market, so why are we an afterthought?
In 2025, 183.2 million Americans participated in outdoor recreation—about 59% of everyone in the country age six and older. That's nearly 30 million more outdoor participants than in 2019. And women reached a record 53.4% outdoor participation rate in 2025.
The previous year's data tells an interesting story, too. In 2024, women represented 83.5 million of the country's 181.1 million outdoor participants, and 52.3% of new outdoor recreation participants were female.
So when brands invest in gear that works better for people who haven't historically been treated as the default outdoor customer, this isn't catering to some microscopic corner of the market. It's responding to who is actually outside. It just makes good business sense.
My favorite pee pioneers. Pee princesses, if you will.
Gnara: What if we changed the pants?
Gnara pants have a patented GoFly zipper that allows you to unzip, squat, and pee without pulling your pants down. Simple.
The company was originally launched in 2018 and called SheFly. Their early pants went through more than 50 prototype iterations. The company eventually received patents for the design, won Outdoor Retailer Innovation Awards in 2022 and 2023, and rebranded from SheFly to Gnara in 2023 partly because the founders wanted a name that included customers who don't use “she” pronouns. Because more people than just those that use that pronoun use their pants!
By September 2025, Gnara said it had put more than 30,000 pairs of its pants, shorts, leggings, biker shorts, and overalls into the world.
All because somebody looked at the way pants were constructed and asked: "why the hell are we still doing it this way!?"
pStyle: What if we changed the way we pee?
pStyle takes a completely different approach. It's a personal urination device that allows people with vulvas to pee standing up while remaining fully clothed.
You don't necessarily need to find somewhere suitable for a squat. You don't need to pull your pants around your ankles. You don't need to expose your entire butt to a freezing alpine breeze.
It's such a simple tool, but I think that's what makes it so interesting. We tend to think of squatting as this unavoidable biological reality for anyone with this anatomy. It isn't! Give someone a different tool and the entire process, the entire experience changes.
Kula Cloth: What if we changed what happens after we pee?
Then there's one of my personal favorite examples because it's local to Washington: Kula Cloth.
Founder Anastasia Allison was a park ranger and backpacking instructor when she encountered a giant pile of discarded toilet paper behind a tree in Washington's Alpine Lakes Wilderness. She started researching Leave No Trace alternatives and experimented with using a piece of microfiber as a pee cloth.
Eventually she had question: Why was the piece of gear coming into contact with one of the most sensitive parts of her body basically an old rag?
So she designed an actual piece of gear for it!
Allison spent nearly three years researching and developing the product, put it through hundreds of hours of field testing, and sent prototypes to more than 30 testers before finalizing the design.
The result is a reusable antimicrobial pee cloth that clips to the outside of a pack. And it's cute too.
It solves another HUGE problem while we're at it: toilet paper waste. Two birds, one stone. Leave No Trace has long recommended packing out toilet paper in places where you're required to carry out your waste. A reusable pee cloth gives people another way to reduce the amount of disposable toilet paper they're bringing into the backcountry in the first place.
Again: Tiny problem. Thoughtful design. Better outdoor experience. Multiple problems solved!
This is why inclusive design matters
None of this means every woman needs special “women's gear.” Bodies aren't standardized by gender. Women come in wildly different shapes and sizes. So do men. Trans, nonbinary, and intersex people diversify the binary even further. Disability, age, height, weight, mobility, pregnancy, injury, and a million other things affect how gear interacts with our bodies.
That's kind of the point, though, isn't it? There shouldn't be one default outdoor body.
The goal for brands should be more options, more thoughtful design, and more willingness to question the assumptions baked into gear we've been using forever. And I know that's a tall ask. I understand millions of dollars go into building ONE product. But what if we started asking these questions more frequently and baking them into the design process from the get-go?
The benefits of more inclusivity can extend far beyond the population a product was originally designed to serve. A zipper that makes it easier for a woman to pee outside might also help someone who can't easily pull their pants up and down. A device that eliminates the need to squat might help someone with balance or mobility limitations. A reusable pee cloth might help reduce toilet paper waste.
Better design can make somebody more comfortable. Comfort leads to confidence. Confidence means getting outside more often. And that's where this becomes especially interesting from an industry perspective.
Inclusivity makes financial sense, too
I firmly believe the outdoor industry should become more inclusive because it's the right thing to do. But let’s be honest, brands exist to make money. The fuzzy, feel-good obligation to do the right thing doesn’t pay the bills, it doesn’t make the shareholders happy. SO let’s talk money.
There are 183.2 million Americans participating in outdoor recreation, and the industry's own research says its next major challenge is turning a growing population of casual participants into people who get outside more frequently. The average participant now takes five fewer outdoor outings per year than they did in 2019. So the industry should be asking: How can we get more people out more frequently? And that comes back down to accessibility and everything we've discussed here.
That means removing barriers matters. Cost, representation, community, safety, sizing, and accessibility all matter. And yes, being able to comfortably take a piss matters.
Every little barrier the industry removes makes participating easier. And every person who feels more comfortable participating is also, from a purely capitalist perspective, another person who might buy hiking pants, backpacks, tents, kayaks, sleeping bags, boots, skis, climbing gear, camping gear, and everything else this industry sells.
We saw this exact realization happen in Victorian Britain. See, I told you it would all make sense together :) Did you trust me?
Some of London's earliest women's toilets were built near shopping districts because businesses figured out that women who had somewhere to pee could stay longer and spend more money.
More than a century later, I would love for the outdoor industry to learn the same extremely basic lesson: People can participate more fully in public life when their basic bodily needs are actually accommodated.
So yes, I'm talking about pee and the patriarchy
For generations, women were told through the literal infrastructure of cities that public spaces weren't designed with them in mind. And for decades, women have entered outdoor stores just to find products designed around male bodies, sometimes shrunk down and recolored as an afterthought.
Today, plenty of us still wander behind a tree, drop our pants around our ankles, stick our butt into the wind, and accept the entire ridiculous process as simply the price of having our anatomy. It doesn't have to be.
That's why I'm so excited about brands like Gnara, pStyle, and Kula Cloth.
They're solving a very specific problem, sure. But they're also doing something I wish we saw more of across the outdoor industry: looking at something we've accepted forever and asking whether we could design it better.
Women have always belonged outside. Disabled people have always belonged outside. Trans and nonbinary people have always belonged outside. Beginners belong outside. People whose bodies don't fit neatly into whatever the industry once considered its “core customer” belong outside.
So cheers to the pee pioneers. The piss princesses. Cheers to better design. Cheers to questioning the tiny inconveniences we've been told to simply tolerate.
And, respectfully: Piss on the patriarchy.
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