Paying Homage to Crapper

Here's a man who has had a huge impact on our contemporary culture: Thomas Crapper, the best promoter of the flushing toilet.

I love the BBC for having this video in honor of the 100th anniversary of his death, last week.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8481283.stm

Hellish Hetero Club Toilets

If you know me you can guess the tirade I'm about to jump into. So, here's the abridged version.

Certain nightclubs, ones with widely presumed wealthy clientele looking for casual, often predatory sex and superficial thrills in the form of women cheaply displaying themselves for the male gaze, disgust me.

I don't often find myself in such situations, but every once in a while it happens. At one such club in South Kensington, Amika, I ran for refuge in the toilet to avoid being grabbed and oggled or ramming accidentally into one of the low tables decked out with overpriced alcohol in plastic lit up wells. And that's really where the feminist rant begins.

Women in the bathrooms, already caked in foundation were applying mascara to tarantula eyelashes, redoing their eye liner so that it looked like the paint along the side of a road. Collagen-inspired lips and industrial back-combed hair invaded the space, in stark contrast to the skin-tight leggings and sparkly sequined boob tubes that adorned their essentially bare bodies. This was not a happy place. Women did not converse with each other, or if they did it was on the topic of makeup and lotions. As if these are the only things women are capable of contemplating. Needless to say, there was an added discomfort in the form of a woman, noticeably not one of the clientele by her relatively conservative dress and lack of face paint, who was squeezing soap into the palms of these barbie dolls and handing them paper to dry off their lotioned limbs. This detail added a whole sense of discomfort for me.

Going to wash my hands, I noticed in the sink a little collection of rocks. As if to suggest that the sink was in fact some natural stream in which these women had come to bathe themselves. This suggestion of nature and natural imagery was just the most comical point in comparison to the worship of artifice that surrounded it along the mirrors. I don't think one woman was wearing a natural material. They were decked out in lycra, nylon, polyester, plastic, and who knows what else was in their war paint.

Who comes here and sees this as leisure? What does it mean that women are engaging in these rituals of reapplication in the bathroom, rather than in public. Do they think anyone out there looks and them and thinks they are naturally this way? I wonder what the men's bathroom looks like? Who's there to give them soap and towels? What lotions do they use? What do they talk about and think about?

And does anyone notice this strange collection of rocks in the sink?

Snow et al. Cooling Out Strategies

A cute cafe in Canterbury, Kent

In a paper that reads almost as freshly as something written in 2009, Snow et al. (1991) argue that women's interpersonal strategies to reject men's advances in single's bars follow the principle strategy of "cooling out." "Cooling out" had its beginnings in the lexicon of criminal fraud. A mark, having been conned was then interpersonally massaged by the con artist so as to compensate for any humiliation and loss of face resulting from being duped. Irving Goffman, an interactionist theorist whom I would like to say I know more about, suggests this term and therefore interpersonal strategy can also be applied to any social domain. Such as, for example, rejection strategies at single's bars. Reading through Snow's systematic description of avoidance tactics, deferent lines and defensive tactics, I was struck by how closely these align with my contemporary experience. I was not in singles bars in 1991. But these depictions did not seem so far off my own experience. Even more excitingly, they support some observations I made while observing the college social scene in the last 5 years.

Now for the connection with bathrooms. In an amazing collision between a few of my interests, I stumbled on a couple of paragraphs in this paper in which Snow et al. point to the bathroom as a critical locus for these social interactions at singles bars. The investigators note that the bathroom was a good place to get detailed accounts of cooling out strategies, especially if the interaction directly preceded the move to the bathroom. Duh. You go to the bathroom to lose some guy, and then you laugh at him with your friends while you reapply your makeup, all the while comforting yourself about the fact that his unattractiveness does not reflect on your own desirability. Right?

Furthermore, Snow et al., while noting the consistent flight to the bathroom as the most common form of a "duck out" cool out, also mentions Cahill et al. (1985) who suggest the sex-segregated nature of the bathroom reaffirms gender differences and encourages gender solidarity. This retreat into an all-female world is so interesting to me. Is it always true that the bathroom is a safe space? The bathroom has all sorts of contradictory connotations for me. It is a space for bodily narcissism, reapplication of war paint, gossiping, bitching, self-affirmation, social bonding, drug use, even illicit sex. It's such a rich and interesting and marvelous space to engage with. I wonder how this space functions differently in a unisex bathroom? Or in a gay club?

Maybe you're at Harvard, but don't throw yourself out of the window!

Harvard Museum of Natural History

Good Ol' Fashion Hospitality

On a brief trip to Boston, I rediscovered the idiosyncratic niceties of the American culture of service. It follows you into the toilet, complete with its jolly tone.



Bring your babies to the bar!




Browse social events while you wash your hands!

Mirror Ball Sushi

Floor to ceiling mirrors as well so you can look at yourself and the forever reflection of the mirror ball.




Maguro Sushi, Maida Vale.

Let's have a wild party in the bathroom.

Pret A Manger, Leicester Square

Cookie-cutter, just like the food.