by Rose George
It takes a few visits, but I find her eventually, sitting in a cubbyhole provided for attendants. It is furnished with two armchairs, a TV and VCR, books, and tea-and coffee-making material. There is no shrine. It’s a cozy place, and Margaret looks comfortable in her straight-backed easy chair, but despite the lived-in look, she says she’s not here much. “I’m always jumping up and down,” she says. She’s always dealing with complaints, clients, cleaning. There is never a moment’s peace.
Margaret has been working as a toilet attendant for three years. She doesn’t like the job much—“You’ll not find anyone who does”—but she gets to raise money from her sink sales. (The soft toys and lemon curd are sold to generate funds for a cancer charity.) It’s a perk of the job, and it makes up for the fact that, as she discovered recently, the council pays street-sweepers more than toilet attendants. Margaret is insulted by this hierarchy. When did a street-sweeper have to do everything she does? “I’ve had to dress old ladies, take someone to hospital, look after children. This isn’t just cleaning: I’m a care worker who works in a toilet.”
There have always been people whose jobs consisted of cleaning up other people’s excreta. And because most societies have rules about what is clean and what is not, the people who have to deal with the unclean suffer the societal consequences of the time. However dismal Margaret’s working conditions, though, she is still better off than the cesspool cleaners of the fifteenth century, who supplemented their income by charging fees to lance the boils of tuberculosis sufferers. In 1895, when Paris authorities removed the gas stoves of the city’s famed Dames-Pipi (Pee Ladies) toilet attendants to save on heating bills, the good women were forced to go on strike until their stoves were returned (and only because the pipes were freezing over).
Margaret isn’t likely to resort to industrial action. Most people treat her with respect. They appreciate her, enough to buy her cakes and Christmas presents. But sometimes she doesn’t appreciate them. Margaret has the lament of the toilet cleaner: you can’t imagine how people behave. They do things they’d never do at home. In The Bathroom, Alexander Kira explains public convenience behavior by noting that people feel more negatively about public toilets than private, because of the stranger factor. Public restrooms fuel old primeval concerns about territoriality, which should be guarded, and strangers, who should be feared.
Kira lays out a spectrum of toilet tolerability. Most people are comfortable in a hotel bathroom because it offers the best pretense of being private. Workplace restrooms are the next best thing, because the people who use them are known, usually. And so on, through cinemas and shops and hotels, to the free-standing, filled-with-strangers public bathroom, which provides privacy from others and a total removal of responsibility. People do all sorts in public bathrooms because they can, especially when prudishness persuades planners to locate them out of sight, away from public thoroughfares, behind hedges and in far-off parking lots, where anything and anyone goes. Margaret sees all sorts in hers: Asian ladies in head scarves who sneak quick smokes in the cubicles and think she doesn’t notice. Gin and beer bottles rolling out from under the cubicle doors; women who let their children eat food in the toilet. Drug tools. Things you wouldn’t believe.
The removal of inhibition can be liberating as well as criminal. Recently, a Reuters reporter expressed frustration that American soldiers stationed in Iraq would tell him nothing until he went to the latrines. “You have to go out to the Port-o-Potties. For some reason, they talk there. You can read how they really feel—all the anti-Bush stuff, all the wanting to go home—in the writing on the shithouse walls.”
But generally, when local governments close facilities, they do so with the excuse that they are being used for drug-taking or sex. And sometimes it’s true. The restrooms in the small Yorkshire village where my parents now live were closed several years ago when they were found to be listed on a Web site of the best places for gay cruising. When the House of Lords debated the ins and outs of sex in public toilets, the debate was colorful and sustained. Baroness Walmsley of Sutton Coldfield, though proclaiming herself a libertarian, agreed that a specific clause was necessary to prevent people engaging in activity that might “frighten the horses.” Much aristocratic brainpower was expended on whether sex performed behind a closed cubicle door constituted a public or private activity. The peers made their point; the government backtracked; and the crime of having sex in a public convenience, even behind a closed cubicle door, was retained in Clause 71 of the Sexual Offenses Act of 2003. Transgressors can get six months in prison. In practice, hardly anyone does. It costs money to prosecute someone. It’s cheaper to close the place down.
The nearest great city to London does things differently. The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, known for interesting initiatives like rentable bicycles and riverside beaches, gives public bathrooms the attention that is their due. In 2006, he made all automatic public toilets—les sanisettes—free of charge. Usage grew from 2.4 million to 8 million visits in three months. He recently attacked public urination by fining offenders 500 euros each. But fines and free toilets still didn’t work: during the rugby World Cup, the mayor was reportedly dismayed to see Parisians peeing against his town hall though there were sixty-two sanisettes nearby. His latest weapon is an “anti-pipi” wall, whose angles spray the urine stream back onto the offender.
Paris’s efforts are impressive—as are the volumes of animal excreta left on its streets—but to really learn about toilets, you have to head east. Clara Greed, a professor of planning and author of Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets, tells me she envies the Asians. They are properly thoughtful about public bathrooms. (At WTO events, it is common to find yourself surrounded by Singaporeans, Malaysians, and Hong Kong Chinese, who impress you with the size of their delegations and the seriousness of their intent.) Asians have come to understand that public necessities have a value that is both moral and monetary. It is ironic that one of the best examples of a well-funded and well-executed public bathroom program, one that would make British Toilet Association members sigh with envy, has happened in a country better known for toilet standards that are more execrable than exemplary.
It is raining in Beijing. Straight, hard, determined rain. I welcome the change. I’d been here five days before I saw the sun, though every day had been sunny behind the smog. Beijing is a city where the weather doesn’t seem to matter, like it has lost hope. Even this rain may be suspicious. It’s August 2006, two years away from an Olympics that the Chinese authorities are determined will be a showcase for the world. An English expat tells me that everyone suspects the authorities of seeding the skies to make rain, to wash away pollution. Officials denied it, but the rain had still arrived every night in July, at 10 P.M. exactly. Beijing’s rulers want to clean up the city for the Games and if rainshowers work, they’ll try it. They also want to clean up the city’s restrooms for the expected three million visitors. The cleanup plan—launched in 2005—had epic ambitions. Five thousand public bathrooms would be constructed or renovated. No one would be more than five minutes’ walking distance from a decent toilet. Any traveler to China, used to facilities that are few and filthy, might find these goals as unattainable as trying to tame the weather.
Top-down efforts to “civilize” China are not new. The New Life Movement of Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang leader defeated by Mao’s Communist Party, laid out 96 specific rules to improve Chinese virtues. Better-behaved Chinese, he believed, would herald a stronger, more competitive modern nation. The rules included no smoking, sneezing, spitting, or urinating in public. Eighty years on, China’s authorities are trying an equally daunting social program, only this time the targets are China’s people and its toilets. Civilizing campaigns launched over the past few years have been aimed at eradicating spitting, bad manners, rude taxi drivers, bad English, and flies. Sadly, this civilizing campaign will get rid of such Chinglish signs as “Deformed Man,” to indicate a handicapped toilet, and “Show mercy to
the slender grass” signs on Beijing’s parks. But it has introduced Chinese readers to the inimitable Guo Zhangqi, a farmer who travels every day to Beijing to stand in a public park offering $2.50 for five dead flies, and funds his goal of “a fly-free Olympics” out of his own pocket.
The construction and renovation of 747 of the 5,000 public restrooms was handed to the care of Mr. Pang of the Tourism Development Authority. His office is in a building that has a TV in the lobby showing a video of some of China’s lush scenery—green rivers, clear rushing waters, not a smokestack in sight. Mr. Pang is a middle-aged man in short sleeves who hands out goodies of Tourism Development Authority bags and literature, and shows us into a meeting room with plenty of windows through which to watch the teeming rain. Mr. Pang isn’t responsible for toilets anymore, which may be why he agreed to meet us. (When I tried halfheartedly to meet with someone in the Beijing sanitation department, I was instructed to contact the Propaganda Ministry. I didn’t.) The 747 bathrooms have been constructed and renovated, and the program is deemed to be completed.
Still, he’s happy to talk about them. They are something to be proud of, and they are essential to his job. “Tourism is a window industry. We want foreigners to have a pleasant experience. Toilets are so important: without them, tourists don’t come back.” The Tourism Development Authority decided to provide squatting designs and sitting ones, to be accommodating to all preferences. There are “third space” stalls, which families can use together. The construction was accompanied by public campaigns exhorting the Chinese to close the cubicle door, or to use less water, to behave more like civilized people. For a proud nation, it seems odd that the Chinese are choosing Western definitions of civilization to form their own. “In reality,” Norbert Elias wrote, “our terms ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ do not constitute an antithesis of the kind that exists between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’” Concepts of what civilization means are more slippery than that. Chinese newspapers may be urging their citizens to be better behaved—and they mean more like Westerners—but it cuts both ways. Westerners could learn some manners, too, though Mr. Pang is too polite to say so. Western habits of putting wads of toilet paper—and plenty of other things—down the toilet coincide unhappily with China’s smaller sewers, which clog easily. I ask Mr. Pang how he’s going to educate visitors to put toilet paper in a basket like the Chinese do, a practice that, according to Western concepts of civility, is dirty and unhygienic. “I don’t know,” he says. “We can’t follow them into the cubicle.” The Chinese can harness rainshowers and turn foul toilets into gleaming ones worthy of Olympic ideals, both considerable achievements. But they can’t dictate toilet behavior, any more than anyone can, any more than sparrows can be tamed or flies bought into extinction, $2.50 for five.
There is no secret to how the Chinese overhauled their public restrooms. There was money, it was made available, and bathrooms were built. A command economy and an authoritarian political system helped. In the world’s most famous democracy, things are handled very differently. In the United States, a country notable for its inability to provide acceptable levels of away-from-home bathrooms, the public’s reaction to a lack of a fundamental public service is generally, like, whatever. The American Restroom Association wasn’t formed until 2004 and has yet to make much impact. The Privy Council, a New York City–based toilet pressure group, hasn’t updated its Web site for years. Apart from that, there is nothing. Perhaps such meekness is due to urban-dwelling stoicism. During a blackout that was an indictment of an imperfect infrastructure, New Yorkers threw parties. Perhaps it’s due to language: a country that chooses “restroom” and “bathroom” to signify places that dispose of human excreta may not want to look beyond the language barrier.
Perhaps it’s because humans are adaptable. When there isn’t a bathroom, people manage, or they stay home. In 1966, Alexander Kira could crack the old joke about the difference between a camel and a lady: A camel can go all day without drinking, and a lady can drink all day without going. Self-restraint is the foundation of propriety, but this much restraint has serious health consequences. One organization that lobbies for older people’s rights refers to the “bladder leash,” which confines hundreds of thousands of elderly people to their homes because they are scared of not being able to find a toilet when they leave the house. (They call it a bladder leash because “bladder and colon leash” wouldn’t get any publicity.) Bladders can be shy as well as leashed. “Shy bladder syndrome,” as parusesis is usually called, affects one million Americans, according to the International Parusesis Society, and renders them incapable of urinating in public places. Incontinence, meanwhile, affects 25 million Americans, according to the National Association for Continence, but you’d never guess from their minimal public profile. Compare this to the Australians, not known for their sensitive nature, who in 2001 launched a national toilet map to help their incontinent and continent citizens find the country’s 13,000 public restrooms. Even the toilet-closing English of Westminster Council have now launched Satlav, a service that can send text messages to subscribers with the location of the nearest convenience.
Americans can get excited about bathrooms, but—unsurprisingly in a litigious country—only in the law courts. The biggest bathroom battle isn’t about the absence of a common decency, but about inequality. The “potty parity” movement is led by lawyer John Banzhaf, who made his reputation by promoting antismoking and founding the anti-tobacco lobby group Action against Smoking and Health (ASH). He objected to smoking because it damages other people. It is unfair. He came to potty parity for the same reason. Banzhaf seeks to better an age-old inequality of public restrooms: women always have to wait. There are always lines in restrooms because it takes longer for women to pee. Careful research has established that women take 90 seconds to urinate, while men take 45. Men who complain that women should hurry the hell up do not take into consideration the fact that women must undress and sit. They have cumbersome clothes. They have shopping bags, sometimes, and small children. Providing an equal number of restrooms for men and women, Banzhaf argues, doesn’t help, especially when square footage is taken into consideration: More urinals can be fitted into the same floor space.
Banzhaf first took the case of Jean Ledwith King, who filed a complaint against the University of Michigan, which wanted to renovate an auditorium and install 22 men’s stalls and 30 for women. More recently, he filed a complaint with the Architect of the Capitol, claiming that “the failure of the House to provide [. . .] equivalent access for women constitutes illegal sex discrimination and violates the constitutional right of Equal Protection.” Also, apparently it makes them miss the vote. Banzhaf’s press release highlighted earlier research which found that male members of Congress have access to a washroom a few feet off the House floor. This includes “six stalls, four urinals, gilt mirrors, a shoeshine, ceiling fan, drinking fountain, and television.” The seventy female members of Congress, meanwhile, should they need the bathroom, would have to traverse a hall often filled with tourists, or be faced with “entering the minority leader’s office, navigating a corridor that winds past secretarial desks and punching in a keypad code to ensure restricted access.”
There are other routes to equality that don’t involve suing. Unisex restrooms are often touted as a solution to potty disparity. The unisex restroom that starred in the TV series Ally McBeal became as famous as its human stars. But unisex toilets are not popular. They make it harder to practice civil inattention, to pretend. Our feelings toward public bathrooms are already more negative than toward home ones, as Kira wrote. We don’t want to see fecal matter in the toilet bowl, which is too much information about another person, and we don’t want a warm seat, which is a sign that a stranger has left his/her body heat, and from a bare body, too. That, says Kira, “is more sharing than many people feel comfortable with.” Public facilities are only tolerable when users can pretend that they have “mineness.” “In a relatively spotless public bathro
om, with no one ‘passing wind’ or whatever, it is perfectly possible for us to pretend we are in a private situation—in a bathroom, or booth, that is ‘mine.’”
A unisex bathroom not only has the stranger problem of regular public toilets but contravenes the social codes of gender segregation that have prevailed forever, and that operate with more or less severity in most countries in the world. Even in rural China, where I turned up unannounced in a tiny village in the middle of mountains, by one of those rushing rivers from the Tourism Development Authority video, and questioned a thirteen-year-old girl called Chen Xie about her family latrine. She was charming and showed no alarm about strangers arriving to ask her about her toilet, until I asked her what happened when their latrine—which had no door, this being China—was occupied and someone else came to use it. “If it’s a woman,” she said, “they can come in.” And if it’s your father? She looked appalled. “No! That would be awful.” Then she led us back to the house and her grandfather offered a plate of watermelon, and though I’d just been told that the family fields were fertilized with the contents of the family latrine, I took the fruit. Watermelons have thick skins.
There is some innovation and invention in the public toilet field. Germans, for example, think urinals are flawed. Aiming a stream of urine at a toilet bowl sends a fine spray around the room (as does every toilet flushed without the lid closed). Spray becomes vapor, which leaves a chemical deposit on anything surrounding the urinal. It can also change the color of wallpaper. The Japanese toilet firm National dealt with this by putting a dot of light in the bowl to serve as a target, a concept developed after staff at Tokyo’s main airport noticed that putting stickers in the bowl improved men’s aim and kept their floors cleaner. The Germans, however, want men to sit instead. I discovered this curious cultural fact when a friend had a relationship with a German woman, who found his habit of standing to urinate as odd as he found her insistence that he sit down. She did not thankfully resort to the cheap technological answer to her problem, a ten-dollar German-made alarm that is attached to a toilet seat. When the seat is lifted, the transgressor is admonished that “stand-peeing is not allowed.” But the relationship didn’t last and my friend now stands unimpeded, and probably cherishes his copy of Klaus Schwerma’s interesting book, Standing Urinators: The Last Bastion of Masculinity?