The Big Necessity by Rose George

Author:Rose George
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781429935760
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Public bathrooms, and their absence, throw up big questions. For me, the questions started with the doors. In China, I asked a lot of people about why their toilets had none. I thought I was asking a question about habit and design, but without exception I was given answers that were about civility. A Communist Party official I met in Chengdu was offended by the question. “Those are the old-style toilets. We are civilized now.” Wang Ming Ying hadn’t thought about it before, but now she did, she kept her options open as to the reason, musing that “maybe it’s an indication of a lack of civility. Or because when we go to the bathroom we are all the same?” An expat in Beijing said, “All my colleagues leave the door open. It’s because they’re not bothered.” For the Chinese, civilization is not about privacy or enclosures. They have public bathrooms with no doors, but those civilized Westerners have hardly any public restrooms to put the doors in.

Those Chinese who are being publicly educated to adopt Western standards of civility might reasonably point to a certain rather bizarre bathroom-related scandal of 2007, when Senator Larry Craig of Idaho pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct with an undercover police officer in an airport toilet stall. The case generated plenty of media glee about homosexual pickup codes such as foot tapping. But I waited in vain for someone to explain the weirdest thing about the whole story: that Craig had been able to peer in at the cop on the toilet because many American public bathroom partitions have gaps in the doors large enough to see into. New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch was surprised when I asked him about it. He’d never thought about it, but now that I mentioned it, “I suppose it’s about control.” The need to control criminal activity overrides prudish values that were made obvious when the owners of the offending Craig airport bathroom announced they would install “chastity partitions,” with no irony. By conventional standards of civility, American public necessities are caught short.

Does that matter? Even in public-bathroom–deprived cities like London and New York, there are facilities available, even if they are in cafes or pubs, and even if they cost a muffin or a cake, even if they don’t have chastity partitions. But those who make a living caring about public bathroom provision think that toilets are a test of what living in a city means, of what civilization is. Concepts of civility and propriety are complex and changing—there are now surveillance cameras in some English pub bathrooms—and so is the public bathroom. It’s a work in progress along with the civilization it is supposed to represent, a truth immortalized in the excellent one-liner by Mohandas K. Gandhi when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization. He replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

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