“If Donald Trump
dresses as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t use the little girls’
restroom.” So said Senator Ted Cruz of
the great Princeton class of 1992 shortly before throwing in the towel. There is a context, but you can skip it, as
it only makes things worse. As a
medievalist who tries not to read too many books written since the advent of
movable type I rarely find myself on the frontiers of contemporary thought, but
on this public bathroom stuff, I have been way out ahead of the curve for
years. An enlarged prostate is a stern
tutor of bathroom philosophy.
My party has a three-pronged
program concerning public bathrooms.
(1) There ought to be many more
of them [axiom], and they ought to be
salubrious [corollary]. (2) In
particular, there ought to be a crash program of public bathroom construction
in New York City with the aim of approximating the ratio of comfort to
pedestrian mile to be found in London, Paris, and other civilized cities. (3)
Any woman ought to have access to any public bathroom anywhere.
I hope that this third plank does
not lure me too close to the cutting edge of the culture wars or, for that
matter, of Mr. Cruz’s not quite rapier-like wit, which I find more to resemble
a fungo bat, actually. The need for
gender justice in this matter needs no progressive political theory for its
justification. It is a matter of anatomical
empiricism. Simply observe the queues
outside the ladies’ room at the Eighth Avenue end of Penn Station at rush hour,
or at the Metropolitan Opera entr’-acte. In my house both men and women use the same
bathroom, and I can remember that arrangement going back as far as the time of
my grandparents.
Of course when it comes to
elimination the distinction between public and private is of great
anthropological weight, and it is easier to eliminate it in a blog essay than
in general social practice. But doing
so, even on an accidental basis, can lead to anthropological insight.
This anecdote concerns a woman I
know intimately and who was many years ago my companion in attending a series
of Gauss Seminars. The Gauss Seminars in
Criticism are a prized cultural institution on our campus. Famous literary scholars, artists, and
thinkers in many fields come to town to deliver a series of seminars before an
invited blue-ribbon audience of their peers and votaries. The animated discussions following the talks
are meant to be as probing and brilliant as the talks themselves. They take their name from Christian Gauss
(1878-1951), a once famous Dean of the College, literary critic, and mentor of
such luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson.
The venue
for the Gauss Seminars has not been constant, but they usually command
something of architectural nobility. In
the year of which I speak—it might have been 1977—a mansion on Prospect Street,
home of a recently defunct all-male undergraduate dining club, had been bought
up by the University—and the Gauss was meeting there to hear the late great
anthropologist, Dame Mary Douglas. The
audience was properly august, and Douglas’s lectures highly stimulating.
The “break”
between formal talk and informal general discussion arrived, and my
aforementioned female companion left in search of a jakes. After a certain amount of wandering about
marble halls, she found one. It was
denominated “LADIES” on a scarcely visible, hand written three-by-five
card. She was not surprised to find in
it in addition to the stalls she sought a wall of stand-up urinals. This place had been, after all, a men’s club.
Sequestered in her stall, attending
to her business, she was alarmed to hear two loud, hearty, male voices burst
confidently into the bathroom and head in the direction of the urinals. Furthermore, the voices were unmistakably
those of two local, eminent, semi-public intellectuals well known to her,
Professor X (a philosopher with a distinctive and carefully preserved German
accent) and Professor Y, a patrician, prize-winning litterateur, one of the ornaments of our neighboring state
university. You would probably recognize
the names of these gentlemen; but they some time ago went to their eternal
rewards and deserve their peace.
The split second in which she might
have made known her presence came and went; she was forced to adopt Church
Mouse Mode. As these guys did their business they conversed
loudly. After a few damning remarks of
faint praise for Mary Douglas’s lecture, they began talking about their own
most recent books. Both had recently
published one, and to acclaim. But the
inadvertent eavesdropper could not help noting a certain edge to the ego-heavy
self-congratulation. Years earlier she
had studied Beowulf at Oxford. She remembered the scene in which Beowulf and
his nemesis Unferth indulge in a bibulous argument about Beowulf’s swimming
prowess as once revealed in a contest with somebody called Breca. That form of semi-ritualized competitive male
boasting or verbalized testosterone is known in Old English as gielping.
I think that the equally
expressive if somewhat more vulgar expression in our contemporary tongue is pissing contest.
th Avenue end of Penn Station at rush hour, or at the Metropolitan Opera entr’-acte. In my house both men and women use the same bathroom, and I can remember that arrangement going back as far as the time of my grandparents.
Of course when it comes to
elimination the distinction between public and private is of great
anthropological weight, and it is easier to eliminate it in a blog essay than
in general social practice. But doing
so, even on an accidental basis, can lead to unique anthropological insights.
This anecdote concerns a woman I
know intimately and who was many years ago my companion in attending a series
of Gauss Seminars. The Gauss Seminars in
Criticism are a prized cultural institution on our campus. Famous literary scholars, artists, and
thinkers in many fields come to town to deliver a series of seminars before an
invited blue-ribbon audience of their peers and votaries. The animated discussions following the talks
are meant to be as probing and brilliant as the talks themselves. They take their name from Christian Gauss
(1878-1951), a once famous Dean of the College, literary critic, and mentor of
such luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson.
The venue
for the Gauss Seminars has not been constant, but they usually command
something of architectural nobility. In
the year of which I speak—it might have been 1977—a mansion on Prospect Street,
home of a recently defunct all-male undergraduate dining club, had been bought
up by the University—and the Gauss was meeting there to hear the late great
anthropologist, Dame Mary Douglas. The
audience was properly august, and Douglas’s lectures highly stimulating.
The “break”
between formal talk and informal general discussion arrived, and my
aforementioned female companion left in search of a jakes. After a certain amount of wandering about
marble halls, she found one. It was
denominated “LADIES” on a scarcely visible, hand written three-by-five
card. She was not surprised to find in
it in addition to the stalls she sought a wall of stand-up urinals. This place had been, after all, a men’s club.
Sequestered in her stall, attending
to her business, she was alarmed to hear two loud, hearty, male voices burst
confidently into the bathroom and head in the direction of the urinals. Furthermore, the voices were unmistakably
those of two local, eminent, semi-public intellectuals well known to her,
Professor X (a philosopher with a distinctive and carefully preserved German
accent) and Professor Y, a patrician, prize-winning litterateur, one of the ornaments of our neighboring state
university. You would probably recognize
the names of these gentlemen; but they some time ago went to their eternal
rewards and deserve their peace.
The split second in which she might
have made known her presence came and went; she was forced to adopt Church
Mouse Mode. As these guys did their business they conversed
loudly. After a few damning remarks of
faint praise for Mary Gordon’s lecture, they began talking about their own most
recent books. Both had recently
published one, and to acclaim. But the
inadvertent eavesdropper could not help noting a certain edge to the ego-heavy
self-congratulation. Years earlier she
had studied Beowulf at Oxford. She remembered the scene in which Beowulf and
his nemesis Unferth indulge in a bibulous argument about Beowfulf’s swimming
prowess as once revealed in a deep-sea contest with somebody called Breca. That form of semi-ritualized competitive male
boasting or verbalized testosterone is known in Old English as gielping.
I think that the equally
expressive if somewhat more vulgar expression in our contemporary tongue is pissing contest.
