Picture this: You’re sitting in a washroom stall with a sharpie in hand, your pants around your ankles, and your heart on your sleeve.
You have the distinct feeling you’re doing something wrong, but you ensure yourself there is absolutely no way you can get caught, and you know that after you do this, your message will remain beside the sexual solicitations, poetry quotes, artistic renderings of genitalia, and shocking confessions for all the world to see.
You are about to become part of a conversation.
More than “shithouse poetry”
Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes coined the term “latrinalia,” in reference to bathroom graffiti in his 1965 article Here I Sit: A Study of American Latrinalia.
“This is preferable, I think, to the closest thing to a folk term, ‘shithouse poetry,’ inasmuch as not all latrinalia is in poetic verse or form,” he wrote.
University artistry
Carleton, like any university, is a hotbed of latrinalia.
Whether it’s those inexplicable diva-cup ads written in sharpie, the Doctor Who themed stalls, the strange trend of lipstick marks on washrooms in the University Centre, or the occasional profane scribble about Stephen Harper, Carleton students certainly aren’t shy about expressing themselves through graffiti, especially on the washroom walls.
Nick Haslam, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne described the rampant latrinalia on university campuses as a “glorious tradition.”
“It’s just part of that flaring of creativity which you see in that part of life before people get old and boring,” he said.
Entrepeneur Jacob Anderson agreed.
“The student body with all that intellectual capacity just writes amazing stuff,” he said.
A love of latrinalia
For Anderson, this kind of communication holds a special fascination.
He said he is currently working with artists around the world to put together a crowd-funded book collection of latrinalia-inspired art pieces called Off the Stall.
He said the project idea came to him while he was inspecting graffiti he found in a truck stop.
He said he travelled across the U.S. visiting somewhere between 250 and 300 public washrooms, collecting tracings of the graffiti he found, in the hopes of putting together a book.
However, Anderson said no publishers were interested in just tracings so he decided to try combining latrinalia with art.
Now, he said, artists in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, the U.S., Canada, and even India are collaborating on this project, photographing graffiti in their respective countries and then building a visual art piece around it, overlaid with the original text.
They vary from crude to clever to poetic. One piece features the quote “they paint these walls to hide my pen but the shithouse poet strikes again.”
Another arguably more poetic one says “maybe the wolf is in love with the moon, and each month it cries for a love it will never touch.”
Gender differences on the stall
In his book Psychology in the Bathroom, Haslam details the earliest accounts of bathroom graffiti – from would-be Roman poets to eighteenth century bathhouses.
Early academic studies Haslam cites in his book include a 1935 collection of bathroom graffiti.
American folklorist, Alan Walker Reid, published the collection in Paris for fear of obscenity charges in the U.S., and included gender-focused latrinalia research by iconic sexology researcher Alfred Kinsey in the early 1950s.
Kinsey and his colleagues surveyed over 300 bathroom walls and found similar results.
Men made more inscriptions, and 86 per cent of the inscriptions were erotic, whereas only 25 per cent of women’s inscriptions were erotic.
Later studies Haslam cites found women’s latrinalia to be more confessional in nature, with women responding to each other’s comments and giving advice.
Men’s inscriptions were found to be more political and sexual in nature, to contain more derogatory language and less conversation.
Haslam said one view is that the gender distinctions are simply “direct revelations” of maleness and femaleness.
Because toilet stalls are private, they allow for honesty, and the differences in the inscriptions indicate a clear difference in male and female thought – more aggression and sex expressed by men, more confessions by women.
Gender conventions in separation
Haslam said he thinks there is some truth to this view, but the explanation is more complex. He said he thinks the gender differences in latrinalia have more to do with social conventions that influence men and women whether they realize it or not.
“Because toilet stalls are one of the few places in society that are gender segregated, the norms of gender just become more salient to people, and men and women live up to them,” he explained.
“As a woman going into a gender marked lavatory space, consequently you’ll play up to the stereotypes consciously or unconsciously. By that reasoning it’s not necessarily that people are revealing their true essential gender, it’s more that they’re performing it,” he said.
Flushing out political aggrievances
Haslam said the content, location, and quantity of latrinalia can indicate tensions within a society.
“The sort of things that are controversial in society bubble up and find expression in latrinalia,” he noted, using the example of latrinalia related to homosexuality, which he said varies across cultures depending on how taboo homosexuality is there.
Jeffrey Chen, an Australian artist working on Jacob Anderson’s Off the Stall project, said he’s seen this kind of tension firsthand while searching for graffiti to photograph.
Many inscriptions, he said, are about recently elected Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot.
Andersonmentioned an anecdote in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in which Orwell recalls the practice of writing the political slogan of ones preferred political party on the bathroom wall.
The original blogosphere?
Haslam said he sees a connection between the responses and discussions one might see on a bathroom wall with the kind of discourse found on online message threads. He pointed out online communication can offer the same kind of anonymity and thus inspire the same kinds of discussion and commentary.
Mark Ferem, photographer and creator of the book Bathroom Graffiti agreed.
“I would consider latrinalia the original blogosphere,” he said in an email.
“In 1928 American etymologist A.W. Reid compiled an in-depth account of bathroom graffiti at that time so perhaps you could consider that outhouse graffiti pre-dated the Twitter-verse.”
Being a part of the art
A common phrase scrawled on bathroom walls and spread around online is the declaration “Since writing on toilet walls is neither done for critical acclaim, nor financial rewards, it is the purest form of art.”
Anderson said he sees some truth in this statement.
“It’s not about getting your name out there. There is no financial reward for it,” he said.
“There’s a quote I found in the bathroom, ‘only the truth is revolutionary,’ and I think you might find the truth on the bathroom wall.”
The good, the bad, and the shitty
“But you’re also going to find a lot of shit,” he laughed.
“I don’t mean to knock bathroom grafitti I love it, but I search through the shit to find the gems. That’s my job.”
Anderson also said while in the end bathroom graffiti is vandalism and an annoyance for business owners, he still encourages its creation.
“People who find really good stuff should document it . . . but what’s more cool than documenting it is actually writing it,” he said.
Taking the artistic plunge?
While latrinalia holds a fascination for Haslam, Ferem, and Anderson, all three said they’d never actually written anything on a washroom wall.
Anderson said he couldn’t decide what to write or draw. Ferem called himself and observer, not a participant.
Haslam said he was “a bit too much of a goody-goody,” to make his own bathroom graffiti.
“I think partly because I just realized that I was no match for some of the virtuoso latrinalia writers of the past and also because ultimately someone has to clean it off.”
Ferem said he thinks while latrinalia is indeed vandalism, it’s also a sign of human creativity.
“One might ask is creation a form of destruction? Everything is not clean and neat as a civilized society imagines itself,” he said.
He added business owners have also come up with the idea of putting chalkboards in washrooms as a way of adapting.
Getting to the bottom of it all
Back in his 1965 article on latrinalia, Alan Dundes wrote “one must not forget it is humans who write on bathroom walls and humans who read these writings.”
Haslam expressed a similar opinion — bathroom vandalism offers a unique opportunity for communication and honesty.
“These things are written in private but they’re written for an audience so they’re a communication even though there’s only one person in the stall at the time. There’s a lack of censorship for that reason because it’s a private expression without anyone being able to tell who’s written it or drawn it. So there’s something pure and unmediated about it in that sense,” he said.
“There’s something about the proximity to a set of taboo body functions that just makes people more willing to talk about the sort of things they wouldn’t talk about in polite society,” he added. “It’s communication, it’s a strange kind of delayed communication.”
