I’ve been formulating an essay for a long time now about how American bathroom design - At least men’s rooms, as I’m a man - Is proto-fascist homoerotic cultural enforcement, how it relates to the butt-slapping genital pranks of cis sports locker rooms or the blackmail-generating hazing of fraternal societies, and the extremely suspect fact that in our individualized and privatized society stripped bare of spaces for intimate social interaction, the one place that we are in fact forced to interact on an intimate and revealing level is also the one spot that is supposed to be the most private and individual. I also want to explore how it possibly relates to circumcision, in that both things seem to be the society asserting the ownership of one’s gender in a coercive fashion, as if to lock the individual into their role in the society and remind them of that fact every time they’d seek to be alone with themselves.

American bathrooms are an insane psychological knot.