Thanks for the picture.  That helps.  It reminds me of boot camp a little bit.

It's interesting how privacy is paramount to us in present time and it wasn't important then, isn't it?  I know there are schools of thought that believe we are "ashamed" of our bodies and their natural functions and all that jazz.  I think those "schools" believe that we have become somehow 'less than' our predecessors as time has gone by, but I find that stance irritating.  

Maybe it's a confluence of factors.  Back then it was simply not practical to build individual stalls and such, so they didn't and voila ~ social toilets.  Therefore people learned to not be ashamed of their natural bodily functions and individual privacy would have been an alien concept.

Nobody's better, it's just life.

/End rant.  (sorry)