"Excuse me, where is the toilet?"

I'm in the process of retraining my brain: from now on, I'm going with "toilets" as my word of choice. Yes, much of this comes from being awash in a sea (a somewhat annoying sea when one is using lots of indices and databases) of changing terminology for public facilities over the course of the 20th century, but it is more than that. First, as I've already gone on about in other posts, I think we should label facilities not by who should use them (if they are truly public facilities) but by their function/equipment, which I think "toilet" represents. Second, it pokes at American's delicate sensibilities about elimination by referring to the space by the fixture into which we eliminate (okay, it works less well for urinal-only users... suggestions?). My thinking is that until we (that would be the collective, societal "we") can get past our studied silence about this topic (the fact that people need to pee, poop, change tampons, etc), we aren't going to do a better job about providing truly public facilities for the public good. So, from now on, when I "need to excuse myself" (as my mother taught me to say), I'm going to ask for the toilet.

Old words/phrases to do away with:
comfort stations
facilities
bathroom
restroom
"men"/"women" (or the many equivalents)
lavatories
water closet or WC
convenience stations
washrooms
T(ea) room

I always liked Gonzo...

Unique Public Restrooms

How is this for "privacy in public?" A Switzerland bathroom that uses one-way mirrored glass. What do you think... could you pee seeing the world walking past you? could you poop?

Signage

A bit more about what one can do in the space, not about who you are...

I'm Pro-Urinal

After two encounters in two days with grimy toilets seats left up in single occupancy, gender neutral public restrooms, I've finally got an answer to the question "would women use single occupancy toilets that had urinals?"



Yes. Er, at least I would. Okay, I would have before, but now I actively and enthusiastically endorse the idea.



With urinals, men who like to pee standing up will have an appropriate receptacle and neither men nor women who use the restroom will have to touch the seat to move it up or down.



Thinking about this, I now recall that many modern port-o-johns are designed in this way and probably just for this reason. Excellent. Let's move that idea inside.



As long as the restrooms are clearly marked by function -- and I'd prefer no reference to gender at all -- and they are designed to serve a wide range of people (this means ADA compatible and equipped with baby changing stations), I think women will get used to -- and even come to welcome -- the presence of urinals. Yes, there is the moment of hesitation when one who has been conditioned to view urinals as a marker of male space opens a bathroom door and sees one. I'm fairly sure that way back in the 1980s when courts first decreed that changing tables needed to be placed in men's restrooms as well as women's, there were a few men who had a moment's panic thinking they had entered the "wrong" room. But men got past it and women will too. Let's just make it so there are no "wrong rooms" and we can all relax.

Bathroom 'Integration'

Supervisor Feinstein Integrates Men's Restroom in San Francisco

The men's restroom in San Francisco's City Hal for male members of the S.F. County Board of Supervisors was liberated last month by Supervisor Dianne Feistein. After receiving no response to past complaints that she and Supervisor Dorothy Beoldingen were forced to use a ladies' restroom about 100 feet from the Board of Supervisors' chambers, Supervisor Feinstein entered an unmarked restroom a few feet from the chambers which has been reserved for men. "Its a liberated restroom now," she said. "We have equal rights there."1



I found this little tidbit on Feinstein in a giant stack of notes that I haven't been through in a couple of years. In light of the recent bathroom liberation movement by non-gender conforming activists, I am wondering if Feinstein's efforts led to a "unisex" bathroom or if her intent/the outcome was to produce a new "women's" bathroom.


There are many other cases of women since the 1970s demanding "women-only" restrooms in businesses and public buildings as they moved in greater numbers into jobs that had previously had few women.



But the legacy of sex discrimination is still fairly easy to see. At the Library of Congress, men's restrooms are located around the corner from the main reading room while women's rooms are only located on the floors above and below it. Pictured in this post is the looooong hallway between the stairs from the reading room and the women's restroom. When I interviewed at a certain second-tier state school in the south in the mid-1990s, men's bathrooms existed on each of the four floors of the building wing housing the History department, but there was only one women's room and it was a couple of floors up from the department. The female faculty were lobbying for "women's" restrooms on every floor...







That seems to have been the trend. Second wave feminists realized that the physical structure of offices and public places restricted women's presence in those places and consequently advocated for changes, such as the addition of restrooms. Almost all of the evidence that I have found so far indicates that the new additions were gender-specific spaces -- counter to the gender neutral policies these feminists otherwise advocated and exactly what is being challenged now.2





1 Capital Alert, vol 2 13(8 Sept 1972), 4; in Herstory I Update, Reel 2 [3]).
2 The one exception to this is a brief attempt on the part of Ti-Grace Atkinson at a NOW national board meeting in New York in May 1968 to de-gender bathrooms in the Biltmore Hotel. At least according to the minutes of that meeting, she never got any backing for this idea from other board members. National Organization for Women Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Unbinding the Gender Binary

A good part of the reason that I study public space is that I am fascinated by the 'house of cards' nature of it. Public space is ambiguous because the people there generally have no history with each other, their encounters are fleeting, and there are not the structuring power relationships of work, school, family, neighbors, etc. to maintain order and enforce consequences. Societies then try to create ways to ameliorate the anxiety of public space through etiquette, laws, and even the built environment that reinforce social order through social groupings. We feel better if we know where people fit and we rely heavily on appearances, mannerisms, location, and actions to figure this out. What are they wearing? What are they carrying? Where are they? How are they getting around? Which bathroom did they use?

The problem is, of course, that someone's appearance, mannerisms, and actions do not always tell you where they fit. Sometimes they actively contradict. What do people think when they see someone who presents as one gender but uses a public restroom designated for a different gender? And that right there is the problem with the way in which we have divided up and labeled public space in vain attempts to make public space a little more predictable and orderly.

I find it interesting that the early mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s focused so diligently on removing the physical signs of Jim Crow, but feminists have not done the same for the signs of gender segregation. To be fair, second wave feminists did very successfully challenge policies excluding women from bars and restaurants (and the signs the reinforced those policies), but they never tackled sex-segregated bathrooms.

And sex segregated bathrooms do matter. There are signs all over American public space that reinforce a gender binary: there are two genders, you must choose one and act accordingly, these two genders are different enough to merit this separation, and even though we have removed other types of similar divisions this one continues to stand. When a group of my colleagues read a draft of the article I've written on feminist challenges to women's exclusion from some public accommodations, one of them (someone who teaches African American history) looked at me and said, "but I don't get it, what is the problem, women are different from men, just look at how we have different bathrooms." Sex-segregated bathrooms reinforce the idea that men and women are inherently different and must be treated as such, that biology trumps socialization, that women have more in common with women and men have more in common with men, just by virtue of their bodies.

It has been the transgender, transsexual, intersexed, gender queer activists who have taken up the cause that cissexual women have not. Safety was originally stated as the reasoning for this: transgendered people were not safe using public restrooms that did not match their presentation (most frequently cited for trans men using the women's room) or their biology (perceived as most dangerous for trans women using the men's room). The issue seems to have evolved beyond the safety arguments in recent years, however, and the discussion is now much more focused on how build public accommodations that do not rest on a gender binary that is no longer so binary.

Bathrooms are a hot topic in many public buildings, especially on college campuses. I've seen it even make its way onto my small commuter campus where, at the behest of activists from the Ann Arbor campus, one single occupancy bathroom in the computing building has been changed from a "men's" room to a "unisex" bathroom -- with some rather problematic labelling and singage indicating its new function. What is "unisex" anyway? Wouldn't "omni-sex" be a better label? Or why focus on sex at all (that's easy, because we are trained from early on to match our own personal plumbing up with the plumbing of the bathroom we choose to use)? Why is the fact that this is a public bathroom indicated with the traditional visual representation of a man and a woman? Wouldn't a sign with a toilet on it be a better indication of the room's function? We could have two toilets to indicate that it could accommodate multiple people or one for the single-holers.

Panic!

I dropped by campus yesterday to check in with my office and pick up some ILLed materials. To reward myself for this effort, I took along my skates so that I could spend an hour with my I-pod on the always-empty ice in the field house. Before lacing up, I stopped to pee and found this in the women's restroom:

It is on the wall, beside mirror and above the hand dryer. It is not a "fire alarm," it is not a simple "in case of emergency" alarm, either. Nope, it's a "panic" button. Hmmm.... What would cause one to hit this panic button? Certainly a fire. How about a plumbing emergency? Nah, probably not -- we usually just run away and pretend we didn't notice that toilet overflowing... What about a man... If you were a woman in that bathroom, standing at the sink and washing your hands perhaps, would you hit the panic button if a man walked into the restroom and stayed for longer than 2 seconds? Does it matter that this restroom is in a field house -- a traditionally and still heavily male space? And the historian in me wants to know when was this installed...

While I skated I also pondered what I hope all of you are pondering right now... Is there a panic button in the men's restroom of the field house? That is what you were thinking, right?

Well, I don't know. I considered marching up there with my camera in hand and checking it out. I also thought about trying to find a willing male to go in and check it out for me. But the field house is pretty deserted on a Tuesday in the middle of the day in the middle winter. That meant that it would be hard for me to find a helper and also meant that it was probably not the wisest choice for me to go in there on my own. Sure, my chances of getting caught were slim, but.... But what? But, as a woman in a men's room, I'd be out of place and therefore not entitled to the civil treatment I can expect when I am in a proper place for my identity (gender, race, age, etc.). Okay, so yeah, I chickened out but I'll go back. In the next two weeks I will have to go back to campus to return library material and I'll find out for you, I promise.

In the meantime, what do you think? Will I find a "panic" button in the men's public restroom?

What's wrong with this picture?

I've been reading some classic treatments of social behavior lately. On my lap this morning was Goffman's Behavior in Public Places (1963). The book (tho he persists in calling it a "report" for some reason) came out of his experiences observing patients in a California mental ward. Basically, watching all these people not following the conventions of society, convinced him that the rest of us actually do a pretty damn good job of following the "rules" of the societal game -- so much so that we don't even notice that we are doing it.



The only time the rules generally come to the surface, is when someone does something that breaks the rules -- and then they receive negative sanctions. In general, however, responses only go in that negative direction. In other words, we receive little direct positive response for doing the "right" thing, but people are free to call us out if we do the "wrong" thing.



Take this fine specimen spotted in an Ann Arbor coffee shop yesterday:

Yep, he is flossing his teeth. In public. And the price he had to pay for having the broken the rules was to be heckled, photographed, and blogged about by me. (Great, now I'm the enforcer of all things proper?!?!?)But what is it that he is really doing wrong? Well, part of the rules are that we are supposed to show up in public ready to play the game. Goffman refers to the combination of "controlled alertness" (behavior) and appropriate appearance as "interaction tonus." It is something that is supposed to be "on" all the time when in public, not something you put on when you get there or, as was the case with the flosser, you drop and readjust and then put back up while you are there.

Fortunately, there are spaces and props in public space that help us to maintain the fiction that our interaction tonus is our "natural" state. If we need to drop it temporarily or adjust it, we can retreat to the bathroom (a semi-public space with its own set of rules that allow for such activity) or hide behind a newspaper.

BTW, and this continues a conversation Steve Krause and I have had, I'm liking the Primo coffee shop in AA (on Liberty and Fifth). They have two walls of windows overlooking the street, it is warm (even if the fireplace is fake), and they serve their coffee in real and big ceramic mugs.

The only part that disappoints me is that they have single-occupancy (one-holers), gender segregated bathrooms. Riddle me that one, batman. I checked them out -- both bathrooms are the same. No gender specific equipment in either one. But labels matter, as evidenced by the man that showed up to use the restroom and found the men's locked. I had just checked the women's, knew it was empty (and the door was even open), and encouraged him to go on in (he had a sense of urgency about him...). He hesitated. I encouraged more. It took a promise that I would stand outside the door to get him in there. Now what was that all about? Was I there to protect him? Nah, there was a lock on the door. Nope, I was his "excuse" -- if he got strange looks coming out (as he might -- he was acting out of role by presenting as a man but coming out of a door marked "women" so others who were sticking to their appropriate roles would be playing by the rules to call him out -- just as I had done with the flosser), I was supposed to explain it away. As in, "it's okay, the other was full so I told him to go in there." And yes, that I am a woman is the largest part of what would have made that possible. If I'm a woman, and I gave him a pass to use the "women's" room, it must be "okay."

Posted by Zoe the Wonder Dog at Friday, January 25, 2008
Labels: academia, bathrooms, etiquette, flossing, public space

5 comments:
biscodo said...
You should be careful with that "price he has to pay for having broken the rules" photojournalism business - you never know when someone might have some look-what-you-did-in-public photos of you. I'm just sayin', ya know?I wholeheartedly agree with you about Single Occupancy Gendered Toilet (SOGT) segregation though. I'm tempted to make a personal crusade over it. Somewhere in public architecture standards of practice, there might be a reason for SOGTs. It might just be a reason to sell different signage. It might be a "boys tolerate dirty bathrooms, so let them wallow in it". It might be that builders/architects expect that retailers/customers expect there to be SOGTs (the "I-thought-that-you-thought-that-I-thought" problem). I know there's a nugget of a reason in there somewhere, it just needs finding.As far as your encounter with the man going into a woman-designated SOGT, I say it's both a Territory and Permission thing. It's clearly marked territory. Like a No Trespassing or Employees Only sign, we are taught from a young age to drive between the lines, stop at the red light, listen to what the police officer tells you, and don't go where you're not allowed to. The REASONS aren't understood (if at all) until later in life. But for children to be able to operate in the world, they are taught to take certain rules/cues as axiomatic. One of those is that the room labeled "women" is for women, and the one labeled "men" is for men. I'm wondering if the genders were turned around and you were a man, the waiting pisser was a woman, and the open SOGT was labeled "men", what the waiting pisser would have done? And what would your reaction have been to their choice to go or wait? and why? Riddle you that one too. As for Permission - yes, once you have the notion of marked territory (not the fire hydrant version, the Employees Only version), then you are giving him permission. And that permission is social liability protection for him ("it's not my fault, she said I could"). And going a step further, because that space is marked, you and your gender "own" it. Only you (women) can be perceived to release control of it. Same is true for socially perceived men's spaces.As far as SOGT permutations of will-they-won't-they... Are you looking for an assistant in some urban social experimentation? I work for very reasonable rates.

January 25, 2008 12:36 PM
Zoe the Wonder Dog said...
Yes, yes, I'll have to mind my p's and q's tomorrow night at that social gathering, lest I end up as blog fodder (can that be shortened to "blodder"?)I'm up for the experimenting, but we need more folks. Wonder if we can set W up for stealth video taping... It's always better with video. I think we should enlist some of those tweener sprogs our friends have too -- kids that are obviously not adults but do look like they are old enough to "know better". We could get a whole passle of people who appear on the boundaries of categories we use to organize society (gender, obviously, but also class, ability, etc.) and test just how the rules get applied... [mental wheels turning furiously]Think I can get an article out of it? :)

January 25, 2008 12:55 PM
TeacherPatti said...
I like Primo, too!Speaking of breaking societal rules...I was at Hillers the other day, and the lady in front of me had a few items on the belt, and was fussing with her purse and wallet. I figured that she had loaded all of her groceries, so I put mine on the belt. A few seconds later, she was all, "Wait! Stop!" and then fussed at the cashier, demanding, "What are you going to do about this???""This" was the fact that she had unloaded a few items and then stopped, leaving the rest of her items in the basket. Therefore, after I unloaded mine, they traveled merrily down the belt, thus preventing her from putting the rest of her stuff up there.After the lady left, I commented to the cashier on how the lady had broken the social norm and had no business fussing. Sorry folks, but the "rules" say that you unload all and THEN worry about money. Why? I don't know, but that is the rule. And see what happens when you break it? My lovely Guernsey Farms milk bumps against her nasty-ass generic brand.

January 25, 2008 8:23 PM
Daye said...
I love primo too!!! Izzy's piano lesson that is where I get my chai latte fix!!

January 27, 2008 1:37 PM
Warren said...
The enforcer of all things proper.