A cultural examination of the toilet

[gordonzola]

One of the most striking things about travel is experiencing new and exciting toilets. I'm not exactly a world traveler, so I'm sure there are many more thrills I will experience in the years to come, but I realized the way to tell a regular London restaurant from a posh one: the regular ones have toilet brushes.

When you think about it, it's a really both an issue of personal responsibility and a communal thing. Cleaning up one's own shit is one of the most basic rules of life but, since it is a public setting, it is guaranteed that you are cleaning up not for yourself but for the next person. Only as the fancy places do they employ someone of a lower class to clean up after their patrons.

I will say that this seems to be more necessary in the UK than in the US only because of the design of the toilet bowls which seem to have a higher porcelain:water ratio. Not as drastic as the "viewing stand" design common in Berlin, but more dramatic than ones I come across back home.

Urinal-wise, the pubs seems to still mostly enjoy the comradeship of men pissing together on a weeping wall of feebly dripping water. I think there's a Bukowski poem about this unity of men. I only mistakenly pissed on the step-up area once, There were no witnesses so I think that's pretty good.

Do you know that trough urinals are against health code for San Francisco county now(for new approvals, old ones are grandfathered in. Geez, now there's an image…)? The London communal pub urinals bring back memories of being a child and having to piss elbow to elbow with other, older males. Usually this was at the Oakland Coliseum (for the Warriors or the Seals) or Candlestick Park (for Giants or Niners games) and since all those teams were awful in my youth, the men would be staggeringly drunk and I'd need to fight for my place and watch out for splashback. The troughs were filled not only with smelly, dark yellow piss which collected through the game but also with cigarette butts, beer cups, and change. Once I dropped my oversized Golden State Warriors button in. I was very sad but luckily old enough to know not to go in after it.

On a serious note, the real major cultural difference I noted was the lack of accessibility being part of the culture. I understand that construction dating back 1000 years makes for some different issues than in our young cities but man, stairs everywhere! In the tube, in restaurants, and yes, for bathrooms. I would hate to be in a wheelchair and have to pee in London, seriously.

Comments

[dairryiere.livejournal.com]

http://www.urinal.net/

I ran across this site a while back and your post reminded me of it.
Enjoy.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

awesome.

[labrujah.livejournal.com]

I always wanted to make a photo book called "Toilets of the World."

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I would totally buy that.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Japanese "squat toilets," which are porcelain set into the floor and which you squat over either to pee or to shit take a certain amount of getting used to. And I imagine you know about the "noise princess" buttons in some Japanese ladies' rooms, which create white noise to cover any possible bathroom sounds that might otherwise emanate from the toilet area.

In Australia, alanbostick and I ran into a pub where upper half of the urinal wall was a one-way mirror, so that men could watch the hallway where the women were walking in to the restroom; apparently, this was the opposite of voyeuristic and left men feeling very exposed.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

hmmmm, I don't know if that mirror was really for peeing.

but haha on the white noise. that's not so bad an idea. there have been times where I felt that what I was hearing was non-consensual.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

1) squat toilets: i couldn't figure out how to not go on my clothes, so i held it. which way to squat ... what the hell. it wasn't worth the risk.

2) aside from the squats, the japanese toilets were SUPERIOR in my experience. noise princess (water sounds or music?), built-in bidet front and/or back, warmed toilet seats ... i had food poisoning in japan and it just made it a lot easier.

that was just way more info than gordon needed to know about me and my japanese toilet experiences. luckily, i have the appropriate icon.

[kynn.livejournal.com]

Visits to countries without the equivalent of the ADA show why that's like one of the best laws ever, and certainly one of the only good things George HW Bush ever did.

As far as urinals go, I have been amazed at how many of the flushless/waterless urinals I've seen since moving to Tucson. Those just weren't something in my experience while living in southern California.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

yeah, I can quibble at times with some of the regs around the ADA in some places, but those really are just quibbles. (my brother wanted to rent a 1500 sq. ft. non-food retail space and was told he needed not 1 but 2 ADA toilets installed if he wanted an operating permit, adding something like $30,000 to the cost. But that was related to the particular city. Almost anywhere else he could have gotten away with one unisex one.).

It's striking what a difference it's made in just over a decade.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

Monster and I had a disagreement in a London train station when she was convinced I was trying to make her use a trash can for a potty. In her defense, that was the most trash-can-looking toilet I've ever seen.

The worst construction-related tube nightmare when we were there last month is if you're walking to Bank from Monument to switch lines. That takes so long and is up and down so many broken escalators that you start to suspect that it is a joke.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I think they finished that construction by the time I got there since, while a long walk, it was escalator-enabled.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

The cleanest bar bathroom I've ever seen was at a venue in Oxford, where I attended a Selecter concert. After having consumed some vicious vindaloo for dinner, I found a toilet I could sit on without moistness or trepidation. Truly, a sign of a higher civilization.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

a clean bathroom at a venue....? now that's amazing. and because they are so hard to find I tend to avoid the vindaloo these days. I had one last time that was seriously the hottest thing I ever ate.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

There is almost no context in which I would mention this, since (despite the fact that I will talk about almost anything) I am slightly surprisingly embarrased by scatological topics, but since you brought it up, those low water-to-porcelain ratio toilets make me crrrrazy. Are they designed to remind us all of the unbearable realities of the human body? (Someone, maybe Harold Brodkey, was quoted as saying on his deathbed "Well, at least I'll never have to take another shit.") Or just encourage a sort of excretory discipline and focus? Anger!! Anger!! RRRARRR!! Fine now. I laughed, with some consternation, at the term "viewing stand" as they had those in Russia, too, when I went, and as far as I'm concerned it negates Chekhov, Prokofiev, and anything else good Russia offered the world. :)

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I had a Russian housemate once who insisted America was fucked up because doctors didn't ask, as a first question, "How is your poo?"

of course, she turned out to be insane.

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

The Phoenix on Valencia used to have a trough, but they replaced it recently, maybe because of the code thing?

In Belgium sometimes they have small men's and women's WC's, with a urinal out in a common area with the sinks. I'm not used to peeing with some random well-dressed woman standing nearby.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

you know, I've never been to the Phoenix in all these years. so sad I missed the trough.

[jwz.livejournal.com]

God, troughs are disgusting. Good riddance. I remember once, in the early 90s at On Broadway (or in elderly punk terms, "that place upstairs from Mabuhay") pissing in the trough at like 10pm and noticing that the drain was clogged, and thinking, "fuck, someone's going to have to reach in there." And then pissing again at around 2, and the trough was full to the brim, seriously about to overflow, and there was this... hot cloud coming off it. You could feel the heat radiating from this foot-deep frothy orange tub. Oh, man.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

now that's some punk rock right there!

the first punk show I ever went to was at the On Broadway. ah, memories.

[pomo-drunkard.livejournal.com]

I lived in Singapore for a summer, and...well...

In Singapore, toilets have this little shelf inside it that you shit onto. It is not submerged at all, and so the stench gets quite awful roughly three seconds after you start going to the bathroom (since it is 85 degrees and 80% humidity every day there), with no respite until you flush--which knocks the shit off the perch like it was a teeball, and flushes it away.

You'd think for such a prissy culture they'd come up with a better way of doing that.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

haha. that's what I meant by "viewing stand". It seems quite common outside the US

[aulaitcru.livejournal.com]

I have a book of modern British slang and the section about urinating, defecating and toilets is by far the largest section in it. The creativity of the British when talking about bodily elimination is truly beautiful (and hilarious).

[luckysaddle.livejournal.com]

If I had known you were on a toilet mission we could have taken you to see the magic weekend urinals that pop out of the pavements and the plastic ones that are one step up from peeing against a wall on one of the busiest streets in the city.

[rhiannonstone.livejournal.com]

...magic weekend urinals?

[loolica.livejournal.com]

Toilet brushes, in fact, the mere mention of toilet brushes, make me want to vomit. My father helpfully bought me one while my parents were visiting at Christmas (and I was away); my mother astutely observed that toilet brushes were pretty easy to find and if I wanted one I would probably have one, but he bought one anyway. I put it out in the back alley as soon as they left. *shudders*

This post really told me more about men's bathrooms than I care to know. I mean, I used to use the men's bathrooms in bars all the time, back in the day, but I was usually too drunk to care, or something.

[morty-baby.livejournal.com]

Out of curious nosidity, how do you clean your toilet? You'd think that putting your actual HAND into a toilet would be worse than a brush but what do I know? :)

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

The Badlands had a mens' room with a bathtub to pee into, in the same room as a couple of stalls. I'm pretty sure it didn't have a ladies' room, because I have a memory of going there with gay co-workers. One of them shooed the men at the tub out and stood guard while I used a stall.

(I'm mentioning that the person who stood guard was gay because it wasn't a case of straight people invading a gay bar and being shocked at their crude customs, it was a gay man who sympathized and was rolling his eyes at their lack of facilities.)

[sophistimicated.livejournal.com]

An acquaintance of mine has an apocryphal story about being trapped in a self-cleaning public toilet in Amsterdam - during the cleaning cycle.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

ewwwwww.

we have the self-cleaning ones here too. People often have those friend-of-a-friend stories and it's just so gross to think about.

[walktheplank.livejournal.com]

RE: the "viewing stand"

When I was living in the Czech Republic, we called them "platform shitters" and "gravity toilets." The tank was located directly overhead, and the force of the water rushing down was just... barely... enough to leave a big nasty smear on the surface of platform (or viewing stand).

This style of toilet has the added advantage of allowing the fecal material to pile up, mere inches below your bottom (flush frequently! flush often!).

(The fact that you had to pay in advance for no more than five sheets of military-grade sandpaper, I mean toilet paper, only added to the experience.)

[wolfknuckles.livejournal.com]

australian toilets tend to have lots and lots of water in a huge porcelain bowl. the water wastage is offset by the very common flush/half-flush buttons which i don't think i've ever seen in the US.

it is also quite common for australians to put a brick in the cistern to displace a certain amount of water, which is thereby saved by not being available to flush.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Some people do the brick trick in Canada too.

I've seen flush/half flush buttons in Scotland, I think.