Toilet

Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing

Harvey Molotch, Laura Noren, Harvey Molotch, Laura Noren

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780814795897
• eBook ISBN: 9780814761205
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A sociological study of public restrooms So much happens in the public toilet that we never talk about. Finding the right door, waiting in line, and using the facilities are often undertaken with trepidation. Don't touch anything. Try not to smell. Avoid eye contact. And for men, don't look down or let your eyes stray. Even washing one's hands are tied to anxieties of disgust and humiliation. And yet other things also happen in these spaces: babies are changed, conversations are had, make-up is applied, and notes are scrawled for posterity.Beyond these private issues, there are also real public concerns: problems of public access, ecological waste, and—in many parts of the world—sanitation crises. At public events, why are women constantly waiting in long lines but not men? Where do the homeless go when cities decide to close public sites? Should bathrooms become standardized to accommodate the disabled? Is it possible to create a unisex bathroom for transgendered people?In Toilet, noted sociologist Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén bring together twelve essays by urbanists, historians and cultural analysts (among others) to shed light on the public restroom. These noted scholars offer an assessment of our historical and contemporary practices, showing us the intricate mechanisms through which even the physical design of restrooms—the configurations of stalls, the number of urinals, the placement of sinks, and the continuing segregation of women's and men's bathrooms—reflect and sustain our cultural attitudes towards gender, class, and disability. Based on a broad range of conceptual, political, and down-to-earth viewpoints, the original essays in this volume show how the bathroom—as a practical matter—reveals competing visions of pollution, danger and distinction.Although what happens in the toilet usually stays in the toilet, this brilliant, revelatory, and often funny book aims to bring it all out into the open, proving that profound and meaningful history can be made even in the can. Contributors: Ruth Barcan, Irus Braverman, Mary Ann Case, Olga Gershenson, Clara Greed, Zena Kamash, Terry Kogan, Harvey Molotch, Laura Norén, Barbara Penner, Brian Reynolds, and David Serlin.

1
Introduction

Learning from the Loo

Harvey Molotch

PUBLIC AND TOILET do not sit well together. The discord goes beyond words. Using the facility—let’s call it that for now—involves intensely private acts. Focusing on the public restroom, as the contributors to this book make it their business to do, thus opens a tense domain. But it is a route worth taking, precisely because of the shadow under which it normally falls. By going there, we have the potential to make discoveries with implications for personal hygiene, psychological stress, and social betterment. We can also learn about power and the capacity to shape others’ life chances. Hence a group of scholars, drawn from the diverse disciplines of sociology, anthropology, law, architecture, archaeology, history, gender studies, and cultural studies, conjoin to face the facts, unpleasant or otherwise, of the loo.

Even the home bathroom can unleash embarrassment, shame, or criticism when family members detect by sight, sound, or scent what one another are up to. Places such as restaurants or shopping centers introduce anonymity (often welcome) but also concerns about having to share intimate space with people whose intrusions may make us anxious and from whom we want to keep our intimacies separate. The person in the next stall may be the boss or a rival co-worker. The open-to-all facility, as in a public park or train station, invites its own range of anxieties—a person of filth or stranger ready to attack.

So here we have the problem at hand: the toilet involves doing the private in public and under conditions only loosely under the control of the actors involved. By using this tension as springboard, we open up larger issues of what people think they need to protect, how they go about securing that protection, and who succeeds and who does not. We examine the forces that organize such accomplishment and failure—how neighborhoods, cities, cultures, and nations provide for some and not for others. Put bluntly, peeing is political, and so is taking a shit and washing up. We use the word toilet inclusively, calling on its French connotation, to cover people’s acts of intimate caring to keep themselves decently competent and without bodily offense.

The toilet is a foundational start point where each of us deals directly with our bodies and confronts whatever it provides, often on a schedule not of our own making. The animal in us comes to the fore, and we must accommodate to its tendencies and demands. It is “bare life,” as it surfaces in social existence.¹ When we are away from home, we must use some variant of public provision to civilize and prepare for the social world to follow. When on the road, it becomes the ultimate “backstage” of life (in Erving Goffman’s famous term)—where we set up our “presentation of self.” And when we are readying that performance, it becomes truly important who knows what we are up to and just how they know it. It also matters what precisely we have to work with when we prepare. Without adequacy in these regards, we are almost literally nothing in this world.

There are the material practicalities. How far away is the facility? Is it clean and clean in the sense that matters to me? Do I have access by right? By money? By force? Will there be a proper Western toilet on which I can sit, or will I have to squat? If I am from a squatting part of the world, must I risk physical contact with a public appliance? Toilet paper must be present for an American or European. For an Indian in India, water through a wash pipe that can be directed toward anus or vulva is the utter necessity. Will there be paper covers I can put on the toilet seat, or must I—as women often do in the United States—hover over the seat rather than make the physical contact? And if I lack the muscles to hover, will the waste deposited by prior hoverers with poor aim have been cleaned away by some others (and just whom?) or be a basis for subsequent filth and cringe-worthy horror?

Even within the rich parts of the world, toilet suffering occurs. People in poor neighborhoods have fewer places to go, in part due to lower density of restaurants, bars, and shops, as well as of public restrooms. Besides picking and choosing to whom courtesy will be extended, commercial establishments are not always open, and indeed those in poor neighborhoods commonly have irregular hours.² The law in most U.S. states requires that all commercial establishments have toilet facilities and that these facilities must be open to anyone on the premises—whether employee, customer, or even bystander. Most people do not know such laws exist or the procedures for their enforcement. The result is nonenforcement and more problems for people who need a toilet.³

Businesses that do provide restrooms, out of respect for either the law or human need, hence end up doing more than their share. In New York City, Starbucks has been called “the city’s bathroom.” According to one study of Manhattan Starbucks restroom use, the great majority who go into the restroom are not customers; they come and go without buying anything.⁴ Company policy gives Starbucks managers discretion over whom they will allow to use the restroom. Sometimes, especially if there is no Starbucks nearby, people must fall back on privilege or special cunning to find an appropriate spot. Those with reasons to fear official authorities have special motive to avoid anything that might be seen as confrontation or stepping out of place. And Starbucks does not, in fact, saturate U.S. cities, being absent from many deprived neighborhoods altogether. Lack of access affects homeless people most directly (and they are not welcome at Starbucks), not only because they routinely confront the humiliation of soiling themselves but also because without a place to wash up, their smell or surface dirt marks them off as offensive.

On a much more massive scale, hundreds of millions of people in poor countries of the world lack even rudimentary toilet access (in either public or private facilities). In India, the proportion of the population that defecates in the open is about half, according to WHOUNICEF statistics.⁵ This produces bacteriological and parasitic infections as human waste mixes into the public environment and in water sources. Where such services are available only in a few places and at certain times of day, people alter their lives in strong ways to deal with the mayhem that going out might otherwise entail. Schoolgirls in India, for example (as well as women workers) say that they go the whole day without “elimination,” rather than face the danger, embarrassment, or dirt of the communal facility.⁶ They report they “have a system” in which they restrict their intake to affect what they eliminate. The anxieties of basic bodily needs impact the ability to gain an education or livelihood. For many people in the world, when they do find a place to go, it is out in the open or in a ditch that runs with untreated sewage, creating a massive public health problem for those downstream—in some sense, for the majority of people on earth. Speaking of the most crucial of the defilements, Rose George put it deftly when she observed in her trenchant book The Big Necessity that “the irony of defecation is that it is a solitary business yet its repercussions are plural and public.”⁷ A nongovernmental organization called the World Toilet Organization (WTO), based in Singapore, indeed does all it can to foster interest and spread information about the need for and best approaches to dealing with the toilet. Within India, a most remarkable organization, Sulabh International, operates a far-flung system of projects to enhance construction of facilities, to educate, and to press public officials to remediate. Highly aware of the interdependence of modes of excreta with social justice, it has as one of its goals to “remove the practice of untouchability and social discrimination and to restore human rights and dignity of the persons who clean human excreta manually … and to bring them in the mainstream of society, so that they could live at par with other castes, which was the dream of Mahatma Gandhi.”⁸

Whatever the setting or scale of the problem, we have in the toilet an instrument and institution that both reflects how people and societies operate and also reinforces the existing pattern. Precisely because the toilet operates somewhat in hiding, those who plan, manage, and control its use often act on their own, without a public to which they must provide detailed and explicit accounts of what they are doing. The toilet thus operates irresponsibly. Compared to other artifacts, arrangements, and patterns of usage, it thus resists change—however unjust, damaging, or inefficient things may be. The mechanisms of the flush, the imperatives of access, or the pleasures and punishments of elimination do not arise in annual corporate reports (not even of plumbing companies), much less in a U.S. presidential campaign. The UN General Assembly did declare the year 2008 the International Year of Sanitation, but the publicity and action such a declaration was meant to raise around the world fell far short of the mark. Major world leaders, before or since, do not meet to solve the problems or make them—life-and-death matters for poor countries—the basis of major speeches. So Americans and people in other rich countries do not have such unpleasantness on their radar. And even in this book, centered as it is on the United States and similar societies, problems of basic sanitation do not much arise. But some of the issues, such as silence and gender, do overlap for both rich and poor places. Perhaps taking them up in a less desperate context—it can be a hope—will facilitate the larger discourse.

Gender Runs through It

In rich places or poor, and more than anywhere else in public life, toilets inscribe and reinforce gender difference. The markings are for “Men” or “Women.” There is not just difference but also hierarchy, given that women must wait in their separate lines, whereas men usually do not have to wait at all. This “great binary,” much less the inequality with which it is often associated, is neither natural nor inevitable. The contributors to this book raise alternative possibilities, both as cultural reformulations and as architectural alternatives.

The toilet allows us to ask what precisely it might mean to provide equality, an issue that becomes complex if it is granted that groups include individuals who are different in essential ways. Men and women do have different biological characteristics, and those imply different types and degrees of spatial need. Besides different body “plumbing” that affects, in particular, the discharge of urine, women menstruate. This creates more visits, longer stays, and higher stakes for creating and managing a mess. Women need special trash receptacles for their “sanitary napkins” and tampons. And there are cultural differences between men and women, including how they think about the toilet and what they take to be how they should behave in regard to it. There are also different types of clothing and different grooming practices to contend with—lipstick and long hair more commonly for women than for men. Maybe women socialize over the sinks in ways that men do not.

Are these also traits that should be acknowledged and designed into the equality metric by giving women, for example, more space than men? Or should women be encouraged to adhere more closely to men’s practices? If we pressure women to change their ways, such as spending less time primping or maybe even peeing standing up, wouldn’t that alleviate the problem? Maybe the solution rests in a new appliance, combined with new habits. Various devices exist that a woman places over her vulva to direct the bladder’s contents into a container that can then be emptied into a sink, toilet, or urinal.⁹ Under names such as She-Pee, they have existed for generations. Another solution is a female urinal that, placed lower on the wall than men’s and with the use of the hand to help direct the flow, enables women to urinate in a semistanding position. Finally, women could pee in a crouched position, as is common in Africa, which would probably encourage wearing skirts or sarongs without underpants.

Especially from a male perspective, these may all seem appropriate requests to make of women. But if women are not taken to be the “other,” the special case, but instead we start from their perspective, things are seen differently. If we are to respect women as they now exist in the social milieu in which they indeed find themselves, then solutions require increasing provisions for them to use. To provide equality for individual men and individual women, unequal resources must be distributed to the two groups—a proper rationale for affirmative action of any sort.¹⁰ This brings us to a principle more generally relevant for dividing resources so that disadvantaged people share in life opportunities on an equitable basis. In practice, this pans out—in the toilet instance—to at least a two-to-one ratio favoring the size of the women’s restroom compared to the men’s, sometimes three to one. Women with elaborate hair styles, to take one mundane example, need more counter time than do women with simple cuts. The proper ratio cannot be universal because gendered cultural practices of dress and sociability do differ among subgroups within nations and certainly across the world. We need a calculus based on both habit and respect to come up with the right ratios. So we need to acknowledge not only gender difference but also cultural variations in those gender relations. As a more general matter, how tailor-made should facilities be—sacrificing low-cost efficiencies of standardization for treating each group of people in the manner that most befits their sensibilities and needs?

We could solve the problem, at least of unequal gender access, by ending separation, full stop. Such has been the argument that some gender-rights groups have put forward—including those representing persons whose identities simply do not follow the binary. Where do transgender people go? Or people whose biology renders them inter-sexed? But what does recognizing their solution then take away from others? What about men who already suffer from paruresis (“pee shy”), which they fear will be exacerbated by the presence of women in the vicinity? There are women who use the women’s room as a respite from male supervision, a place where “the girls” can let their hair down and exercise solidarity. Some women report that the ladies’ room is where they learned as girls how to do their hair, hold their bodies, use menstrual products, and adjust their clothes—with pals and relatives fussing around them in real time.¹¹

Bodies differ not just by gender (and its own variations) but also by age, circumstance, and accidents of fate—imposing various degrees of ability and disability made evident through the public toilet. We were all children once, a life stage of special needs, with respect not only to supervision and care but also to size and proportion—being able to climb onto the toilet seat, hold oneself on without falling in, and reach for the soap, faucet, or paper towels. Elderly people encounter a different battery of challenges, in part from the need to go often but also because frailty weakens the ability to manipulate equipment or improvise around broken or inadequate appliances. And some people just run into trouble along the life-course way, from either a ski accident, a car crash, or a debilitating ailment. Will there be grab bars for hoisting above the seat? For those who are blind, will towels and soap be in the usual spots that can be located precisely because of their standardization? People using wheelchairs need doors light enough to give way without causing the wheelchair to roll backward when the doors are pulled open—not the “high-quality” heavy doors that are found, perhaps ironically, in some deluxe circumstances.¹²

Governance

The personal is political, something that rings especially true in the present case. Much of governance is about sorting, such as where you have to live to vote or how old you must be. Age similarly determines who can drive a car, drink alcohol, or be in porn movies. There is also an array of appropriate locational juxtapositions: special privilege goes to proximity for mothers and babies, such as at border crossings and security gates (more so than for fathers). At the toilet, social pollution can occur with the wrong mixing—boys and girls at a certain age and, depending on cultural moment and context, rich and poor, white and black, business and coach. And the precise details come into play: men and women can be physically near (utterly adjacent, in fact), so long as there is sight separation, for example, by a thin wall between stalls marked for men and for women. Legislating, by physical arrangement or legal authority, arises from this need to enforce the specifics of who will be with whom, where and when.

The restroom thus becomes a tool for figuring out just how a society functions—what it values, how it separates people from one another, and the kinds of trade-offs that come to be made. As is often the case with rules meant for collectivities, some people are left out or feel themselves ignored by the classifications or classified according to criteria that are for them irrelevant or even noxious. Until the 2000 count, the U.S. Census form carried the implicit insistence that people come in races, with each person being one race or another. Mixed-race people were something other. The census now allows people to check off as many races as they wish, but the result still forces choices to be made among categories that some may regard as nonsense. So it is with the gendered restroom, and hence there are protests, sometimes organized, to reorganize the distinctions. Trans-gender people may protest, as now they sometimes do on university campuses, aiming for the “restroom revolution” to remove the problematic of where they belong.

Even among those who agree that public toilets are important and that there should be more of them, trade-offs must be made. It is easy to see why these allocations and affordances are taken to be everyone’s business, even those who almost never use a public rest...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Learning from the Loo
• Part I: Living in the Loo
• Part II: Who Gets to Go
• Part III: Building in the Future
• Notes
• About the Contributors
• Index