COLUMN: A Moment's Privacy

By Tobin Barnes

            Americans tend to get a bit queasy when it comes to bodily functions. They try to distance themselves. It’s as if such matters are what other people do. We, on the other hand, like to maintain some deniability.

We’d just as soon not bring our animalistic needs to consciousness.

            So we go to “bathrooms” and “lavatories” as though we are solely concerned about cleanliness, and we go to “restrooms” as if we need someplace to relax and catch our breathes.

            Not only that, but we like those restrooms to be operating room antiseptic—as if they have been just cleaned, disinfected, and, hopefully, inspected, and we will be the first users since.

            The worst you can say about an American restaurant is not something degrading about its food, but that its restrooms are not spotless.

            On frequently traveled long-distance routes, we’ll plan our gas stops according to restrooms with which we’ve had pleasurable experiences and totally resist discounted gas prices at pig sties.

A plastic-made portable public urinal in the Netherlands. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

            But you’ll find no “restrooms” in Europe. No need for reassuring euphemisms there. Public facilities are clearly labeled as “Toilets.”

            First time I ran into “Toilets,” literally and figuratively, was London. I found the name a little jarring to my American sensibilities. “Well, that’s blatant,” I thought. The name ruled out any other reason for going into that facility. American ambiguity was quashed.

            Some years later, in France, I was disabused even more. Toilets there are a bit more open-air than American Puritanism might dictate. Oftentimes in France, and elsewhere in Europe, I would learn, using a toilet means that your goings on are perilously exposed to the public.

That’s particularly true in parks and at festivals where a toilet for men might be all-too-handy without any enclosure whatsoever. The things could just as well be trees, given the lack of anonymity, if it were not for the drainage and sanitation concerns.

Not that anyone ever paid much attention as far as I could tell, but they could have if they wanted—that’s my point.

But then, men in France stand to a pissoir. No euphemizing the act there.

Well, at least toilets in France are generally free.

Not so in Belgium and the Netherlands.

There you’ve got to pay to use the toilet. Usually, it’s anywhere from fifty cents to a buck in American money--a niggling, if not a piddling, amount, to be sure.

But charging for the privilege would be scandalous here in America—unconstitutional from the Founding Fathers point of view, right?

Nevertheless, this was the case everywhere in those two countries, even at that bastion of American convenience, McDonalds.

There, too, was an attendant—they were usually women, but sometimes men—expecting one of those piddling payments. (Some facilities were automated, but that seemed to be the exception.)

Actually, having an attendant on station was probably a good thing. That person could make sure the cleanliness of the toilets was up to snuff.

But sometimes their presence was a little too close for American comfort.

One time I was standing there “in situ,” going about my business, when I heard this sloshing sound behind me. I turned around and, lo and behold, there was the woman attendant I’d seen at the doorway collecting coins, but now mopping the floor directly, and I do mean “directly,” behind me.

Huh.

As I said at the beginning, we Americans tend to be a bit queasy about such things.