Beach Slapped

Some thoughts about bathrooms

You can tell a lot about a school just by going into the bathrooms.

First and foremost is the age of the building, as urinals serve as a perfect cultural timeline. In the ‘50s, every bathroom just had a giant trough. The children of the baby boom, there were gazillions of them, so it made sense to treat them like cattle.

By the 1960s, everyone was getting uppity about rights, so urinals suddenly got huge, floor to neck, so nobody felt unequal. Naturally this got completely out of control in the 1970s, when many public bathrooms were built without urinals at all, so everybody could use any of them. (That, and the fact that in the ‘70s everyone seemed to dress like a slob and probably wouldn’t have been able to hit a urinal, anyway.)

For the complete article see the 02-13-2013 issue.

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