"The factory restroom became a locus that raised serious social anxieties," says Terry Kogan, a contributor to the book Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. When sewage technology begat the rise of the public, multi-user restroom, this all came to a head.
These changes came at the onset of the Victorian era : Lawmakers, legislators, and the male workforce became inordinately concerned with privacy and modesty.
In the 1820s, many women began taking on textile jobs in the public realm, where they worked in close proximity to men, in a shared space. In the 19th century, women were frequently shamed for what men perceived to be a lack of bodily control. At the core of these ideas was a male-prescribed fear over the fragility of female physiques. This ideology was rooted in biological determinism: Women were considered to be mentally and physically weaker - prone to bouts of hysteria and unable to control their bodily functions. A "separate spheres" ideology emerged - the belief that public spaces were for men and private spaces were for women. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, men increasingly shifted out of the home and into factory jobs. They would share, without bias, an outdoor "privy": a single-use, free-for-all stall.īut beginning in the early 1800s, technological and cultural changes turned the simple act of going to the bathroom into serious business. Pre-19th century - before industrialization and the gender ideologies that came with it - men and women both worked out of the home. There was a time when every bathroom in America was gender-neutral. How fear created the gender-segregated bathroom
But he was also a victim of fear - in particular, the fear of sharing a deeply private architectural space: the bathroom.īut where did this fear come from, and why does it still exist today?įears over sharing bathrooms with those who are different from us have roots that extend back more than 150 years: Fear created the gender-segregated bathroom and the race-segregated bathroom - and today, fear continues to govern our uncertainty with transgender-friendly facilities. Younge was a victim of bigotry, of racial intolerance. (upper left), and the gas station at which he was murdered. Words erupted into an altercation - and moments later Younge lay dead in a pool of blood, a bullet lodged in the back of his skull. The station’s 68-year-old, white attendant flatly denied the black man’s bathroom request, and heated words were exchanged. A college student and civil rights activist, he had spent his day registering black voters in neighboring Macon County. pulled his bus into a Standard Oil gas station in Tuskegee, Alabama. Someone should go look for evidence of the arrest that Tucker Carlson mentions.Shortly before midnight on January 3, 1966, Samuel Younge Jr.
Read the full transcript (or watch the video clip) which is pretty disgusting, not just because Tucker Carlson, self-described as "the least anti-gay right-winger you'll ever meet", admits to beating up someone trolling for sex in a public bathroom - but because Dan Abrams and Joe Scarborough just laugh. hit him against the stall with his head, actually." When Abrams asked how Carlson responded to being "bothered," Carlson asserted, "I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the - you know, and grabbed him, and.
I've been bothered in men's rooms." Carlson continued, "I've been bothered in Georgetown Park," in Washington, D.C., "when I was in high school." On the August 28 edition of MSBNC Live, hosted by MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams, Tucker Carlson, host of MSNBC's Tucker, asserted, "Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. To be fair to Carlson, we haven't yet heard whether the "botherer" grabbed Tucker's crotch or just tapped his foot under the stall.īut Carlson's comment that he chose to beat up the trespasser "after the fact" in a vigilante action says much. Tucker Carlson brought this home in an interview he did yesterday in which he got "bothered" in a public restroom when he was a high school student and then got a buddy and went back to beat up the guy before he was arrested. Most engaged in this kind of sex would probably have preferred socially supported venues for relationship and sexual development - in the clubs, restaurants, public places galore that the heterosexual world has to walk together, to talk, to hug, to kiss, and to 'do it.'Īndrew Sullivan has much better dexterity with this subject than I do - but it is disgusting that while so many are now cringing at the thought of gay man having tearoom sex that they are at the same time so obsessive about trying to stop same sex marriage between committed individuals. I will avoid today discussion of the reasons why so many men chose to look for sex partners in public bathrooms, gyms, and the like over the last few decades.