Free to pee: analyzing the segregation of bathrooms by gender

Signifying Nothing: A toast to Twitter: consuming ourselves and others

A few weeks ago my roommate and I invented a new drinking game. He would read out a headline from Twitter, and I had to guess the source of the tweet. The idea was that I’d drink when I was wrong, and he’d drink when I was right. In the end, we just drank whenever we felt like it, and cracked ourselves up imitating the tones of NPR, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and The Onion.
As we kept playing, it seemed like we were on to something. Each news source had its own stylistic trademarks, and it was possible to pick up on these subtle differences. In this game, media outlets no longer said anything important but merely became caricatures. Recognizing the distinctions between BuzzFeed, Gawker and The New Yorker was funny because it was so easy. It quickly became hilariously and painfully obvious that these publications aren’t broadcasting news—they are broadcasting a voice.
The Internet seems like a Great Equalizer. On Twitter, every tweet suffers the same limitations and appears in the same place. All you need to open an account is an email address—after that, it’s up to your own merit or desperation to get as many followers as you can. But how do you stand out from the crowd? When you’re scrolling through Twitter, Lena Dunham, LeBron James, and your older sister may all be competing for your attention. To be heard in a Twitter feed’s cacophony of information, a profile needs its own sound.
This isn’t limited to the news publications that my roommate and I ridiculed. Everyone’s Twitter handle is competing for favorites, for retweets—and ultimately, for recognition. Tweets are constantly moving, so there is only a little time to make a lasting impression.The best way to do this is to be funny. I’ve impulsively favorited countless tweets just because they made me laugh. Because Twitter thrives off humor, its natural mode of communication is irony. What other medium could juxtapose The White House, Lil B and Disney and produce a homogenous stream of information?
Every Twitter profile is producer, consumer and product, all rolled into one. Where else can an individual person have a two-way conversation with Toyota or Quaker Oats? And here’s where it really gets weird—does a company’s Twitter represent the entire business, certain employees, or the product itself? In embracing this hodgepodge of consumer roles, one might think that Twitter can’t be anything other than ironic. But what happens when we take it seriously?
Entire revolutions have sprung out of online social networks, and yet mainstream American culture treats them as little more than a comedic stage. Most “serious” moments on social media seem trite and offensive. (“Share this picture 1000 times to save a terminally-ill child.”) Irony and wit are competition—we point out the contradictions all around us, attempting to get as many laughs as we can.
The ironic nature of Twitter suggests that Twitter itself is absurd—a waste of time. So why do we play along? Do we just want the opportunity to prove we’re better than other people? Is self-objectification irresistible? Do we want others to acknowledge our value by consuming us? Because we idolize our objects of consumption, we want to turn ourselves into those objects of admiration and worship. We try to make our tweets funny so everyone stays on Twitter to justify our presence on the medium, and our delusions of importance. But how can we sustain this illusion when the mode of communication revolves around Twitter’s unimportance?
I recently heard a professor ask if careers in journalism would soon die. I’m not sure what this question was meant to suggest, but today journalism seems more alive than ever. I’ve never been able to follow so many different news outlets at once, or read so many different opinions. Online platforms give everyone the tools to create and disseminate information. But, with so many sources, how can I believe anything that I read?
I can go on Twitter and write the same thing as the New York Times and the only thing separating our tweets is that little blue and white check mark next to “The New York Times.” This check is a subtle reminder that, no matter what we tweet, we’re all still part of the same system—which someone, somewhere, controls. After all, as long as we continue to tweet, however ironic we may be, Twitter Inc.’s profits are nothing to laugh at.

Signifying Nothing: How the September 11 attacks killed American consumerism

9/11 was aesthetic. Some of my strongest childhood memories are of those burning towers. I grew up in Brooklyn, though did not see the destruction in person. Yet nobody could escape the images. They were plastered across television, in the paper, and magazines. Most Americans did not know anyone who was killed, but this event was about all of us.
Safety is the basis of American consumerism. That is why shootings in shopping malls, movie theaters, airports and wealthy neighborhoods always get more press than those in trailer parks, housing projects and industrial zones. We need to be safe to consume, but we also consume to be safe.
On vacations, we shop because we can. We have surpassed the dangers of savagery and can now enjoy civilized leisure time. And when we sense impending danger, we flock to supermarkets to stock up on the necessities, afraid they will not be available later.
Of course, the security that consumption lets us feel is an illusion. Nothing feels more real, more grounded than going out and purchasing an object, but what about buying an idea? Nike sells motivation; J. Crew sells style; Coke sells happiness. American productive fervor has passed.
On 9/11, al-Qaeda hit us where it hurt most—the World Trade Center. It was a building that represented “trade,” but dealt with numbers instead of objects. The attacks challenged our constructions and beliefs and signified a religious war. Only an unassailable sense of what is “right” can provoke war and drive nations to mutual destruction.
It is not a coincidence that we call consumer products “goods.” They have become religious icons, objects of worship that comfort us in the day-to-day. They are our “daily bread.”
The institutions that make up our culture seem silly and arbitrary, but they form our collective consciousness. A special sense of ease comes from walking around a CVS. It is a store full of objects I do not really need, the chain itself a brand that doesn’t represent class, culture or intellect. I should hate everything about it. However, chain pharmacies are religious temples. They are little havens of reliability that claim all the answers to our problems. CVS is my home.
After 9/11, without a clear enemy, we did not know how to respond. All we could do was entangle our deep and serious sympathy for the victims with the images of American nationhood.
My family first got cable after the attacks. Allegedly, it was because the main TV antenna in New York topped one of the towers, but maybe it was just an excuse to saturate ourselves with images. As a child I was obsessed with TV—nothing seemed more real than “Lizzy McGuire,” “Invader Zim” or “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.” I got immersed in the idealized lives of the characters from “Seinfeld” and “Friends.”
Parents always lament their children’s aversion to yards and sidewalks, outside games and real-word interactions. “When I was a kid,” they say, “you couldn’t pay us to stay indoors.” When my parents were kids, they only had the A-Bomb. If it was going to hit, they were all goners, so they might as well stay together. But with terrorism, death isn’t for everyone—only the fear. And when they were kids, there weren’t as many fantastic visual alternatives to the outside world.

Signifying Nothing

Free to pee: analyzing the segregation of bathrooms by gender

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jesse Ortiz

Columnist

April 24, 2014

The year is 2004; the place: the hallway outside the gym of Brooklyn’s Public School 321. There I wait with my fourth grade class, staring into space and dreading the approach of P.E. Suddenly, I feel a shove from my side and fall to the ground, disoriented. Regaining my faculties, I see I’m surrounded by scattered paper towels and peach linoleum—someone pushed me into the girl’s’ room. I regain my composure as fast as I can, stumble out of the forbidden area and notice several of my male classmates laughing at my misery. My cheeks shine bright red as the humiliation replays endlessly in my head. Why did it have to be me? Why did I have to suffer? What did I ever do to deserve being pushed into the girl’s bathroom?!

Why was I so embarrassed to spend that moment in a female restroom? It was, of course, where I didn’t belong. Boys are supposed to go to the boys’ room and girls to the girls’ room—I’d known that since before Pre-K. As a young kid, this rule felt as natural and normal as school itself, reinforced by teachers, Disney Channel shows, and Louis Sachar’s classic, “There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom.” Gender segregation carried on through middle school and high school, where hormone-crazed boys joked about what they would do for only a peek through the thin wall separating male and female locker rooms.

When I showed up to Maine Hall my first semester at Bowdoin, I didn’t think twice about the second floor having separate bathrooms for men and women. The boys’ room was a nice refuge —pleasant and bright for a mid-morning poop and a good place to meet bros for a quick pre-College House shotgun. In the bathroom, the guys on the floor could share weekday routines and shoot the shit after a hookup. We really got to know each other there. The bathroom brought us together, but we were only bonding with half of the floor, and in a way that reinforced the gender norms that shape mainstream college socialization.

This year I live in Reed House, with its co-ed bathrooms. After the many years of having to pee in a room separate from girls, I finally share a bathroom with women my age. How could Bowdoin possibly allow this? Wouldn’t all hell break loose? Well, okay, it was a little uncomfortable to poop in a stall next to a woman, but it’s a little uncomfortable to poop in a stall next to anyone. I quickly got used to the desegregated bathrooms, still enjoying college without the boy’s club that had been the men’s lavatory.

This got me thinking about my mortification in fourth grade. What exactly was so bad about going into the girls’ room? Perhaps gendered bathrooms prevent women from sexual harassment and assault. But anyone can harass anyone, so why make such a heteronormative assumption? As in the case of immature high schoolers, forbidding men from the girls’ room doesn’t prevent men from sexualizing women, but rather turns it into some erotic paradise, implicitly suggesting that some kind of orgy would break out if different genders peed near each other.

And, of course, what about those who don’t identify as male or female? Gendered bathrooms are nothing short of discrimination against trans and intersex people. A few months ago, several Wesleyan students demanded the bathroom reform on the basis that “gender-segregated bathrooms create uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situations for trans and gender-variant presenting people.” Many at Brown shared similar complaints, and activists at both schools removed or replaced bathroom signs to encourage gender neutrality.

While discrimination against trans students makes bathroom segregation a relevant social justice issue, gendering bathrooms reveals how we expect all men and women to act. Although we may initially feel uncomfortable with desegregation, we must wonder if this discomfort is “natural” or socially-conditioned. Why should we organize our society in a certain way merely out of habit, especially when that habit marginalizes and oppresses a group of people? Many people at Bowdoin would agree that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Should we not say the same about our bathrooms?

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