I never understood why this is bothering anyone, it's part of life! A bit like those toilet sprays...stuff stinks that's it.
For me this is a solution for a non-existing problem.
You can be the only person on an entire floor to use that bathroom. Having your coworkers hear what is going on inside can be very distressing (especially when we consider existing taboos).
Some neutral bathrooms that share a room between genders can amplify this, for example where I work there is a shared sink but cabins have wooden doors that go from floor to ceiling. Great to hide from eyesight, not so great for sounds. Exiting the cabin and noticing that a coworker of another gender was in the same room hearing everything you have done can be anxiety inducing.
People with health conditions also come to mind. IBS for example can result in some violent evacuations. Not everyone wants their coworkers to be aware of their health conditions.
People expect privacy, that's it.
This is a very real and very legitimate problem to be solved.
Surely, you must feel perfectly comfortable walking around naked, having people watch you defecate, or having sex in public? After all, it's part of life!
Doing your business next to a stranger in Tevas with hobbit feet and a serious gastro intestinal issue is nightmare fuel for me.
Looks like the actual number is somewhere closer to 2.8% - 16.4% of people [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28554367/]. (This study was specifically about "shy bladder" but that seems a pretty close proxy)
The whole reason we all agree that having a locked room to do your business in is ideal is because it's such a vulnerable position to be in. We feel better about being in a locked room, but you can never get your basic instincts to not feel vulnerable when you're mid defecation/mid urination. It's animalistic and can never go away.
Quite literally, knowing people can hear us take a dump triggers survival instincts because our brains think we could be alerting predators to our whereabouts while we're not in a position to run or fight
I think it's also highly dependent on your cultural background and upbringing.
I'm not sure that's true. Given enough time it could change. I'm just not sure why we'd want it to. I'm perfectly content to leave some things a mystery and that includes what anyone else is doing in the bathroom.
Eventually we are going to have to face and accept our natural human bodies as a species. For hundreds of years the market has offered us escape from them, with new technologies to plaster over our "faults" every decade. If only we had listened to the hairy armpit feminists when they were shouting this at us in the 60s and 70s...
That was a bit of a mind opener for me.
[edit: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/skin-irritated... ]
But there is another series of products, you drop a few drops in the toilet before pooping and it's remarkably effective at eliminating the after stink that wafts out smelling up the building.
First one (which I could never find again) was called "Whoopsie Poopsie" but there is also one called "Just A Drop Before You Go". Both were very effective and there are probably other brands that do the same thing.
Passing along because I wish I'd known of these a long time ago they would have saved a lot of discomfort and embarrassment.