SO i wanna discuss “punk bathrooms as a way of keeping an implicit male space” today because it is a topic i have been thinking about a lot. this discussion is kind of like, gender-binary-y, but i assume it works the same for all female-bodied people without like, a go girl or other similar…
GO GIRL?!?!?!?! I’ve never heard of this. It’s awesome! Also, yes! The bathroom situation last night SUCKED so i’m glad you wrote this post. I was standing in the bathroom looking around being like…. uhmm? Then, I was considering using it anyway and just hoping that someone didn’t barge in whilst I was mid-toilet-hover when immediately after this thought, Brian walked right in through the unlocked door and I was like OK NEVERMIND.. so yeah, this is a thing that is not fun.
There really is no excuse to not have a lock on the bathroom door! As a person who lives in a punk house, the reason there is rarely toilet paper is not because it is an implied “male space”, it is because we are poor kids. Look at our kitchens, our rooms, our floors…they are fucking gross. I’ve actually made a huge point to try to keep the doors locking and TP available. I had a party once where someone took 8 ROLLS of toilet paper, threw them into my shower and pissed all over them, ruining them all. One of my favorite behaviors I have seen pop up lately has been bringing a roll of toilet paper and using that as your donation if you can’t afford to pay any cash. It helps everyone and I guarantee it will be softer than the sand paper we usually buy. :]
right, i figured a no-toilet paper problem is to some degree out of the hands of the people in the house (like, what are you gonna do if people steal all yr toilet paper? that is not your fault) and usually when there is none i assume this is the reason. i feel like there are ways around this—like keeping a supply in another room and replacing throughout the night so someone doesn’t just up and take it all (or pee on it all)—but this does not exactly sound like a big breakthrough so i’m sure you’ve thought of that before/do this.
BUT i mean, i gotta argue perpetual no toilet paper means it’s a space that’s more accommodating to dudes than girls, thus making it an implied male space. i don’t think that’s like, an intentional act to keep girls out or anything like that, but the space generally being more habitable to dudes can implicitly do that, even if it’s explicitly unintentional/something you’ve never really thought about. (and yeah, there are other reasons why there would be shitty bathrooms like you said, but the intentions/reasoning behind it don’t really change the outcome of the situation)
but anyway, the plush palace bathroom is the least gross of the few i was thinking of (because sometimes there is EVEN SOAP! and if there is not soap, there is soap in the kitchen which is RIGHT THERE! huge leap forward in the world of punk bathrooms)
i’ve never heard of the “toilet paper as donation” thing but that sounds like an important thing to encourage.
P-Fuzz, I applaud your efforts & also sympathize with you re: party-people using TP for destructive pranks. This happened at Spillage sometimes on purpose (throwing it into the ceiling fan) and by accident (oh I’m so drunk I just knocked this whole roll into the toilet hurr durr). TP donations are a great idea, too!
I think it’s important to note how Katy specifies the lack of TP as creating an implicit male space rather than an explicit act of “no girls allowed.” I brought up this discussion with Colby and his response was like, “well, that’s not a purposefully sexist act per se but it kind of shows that if there are more men running the house, it’s easier to ‘forget’ that women might have other bathroom needs.”
While I was living at Spillage, there were long stretches of time where I was the only female at that house, and there were some Serious Bathroom Issues which I eventually just gave up on and ended up peeing in a cup in my room during the last few months before I moved out. I was usually the only one who bought or acquired toilet paper even though, yes, we were all poor kids, but it seemed like I was often the only one considering the fact that some people who use the bathroom here might need toilet paper. If there was no TP or if the toilet seat was broken or the toilet wouldn’t flush, dudes have the convenience of just being like, “oh well, I can piss standing up/in the bathtub/outside, PROBLEM SOLVED” whereas for a lady such as myself this kind of minor inconvenience was instead a Dilemma and I ended up being solely responsible for finding a solution that would work for myself and any other female visitors, just because… no one else really had to think about non-male pissing requirements.
But also at least regarding my Spillage experience, I think some of this is partially related to the apathy I’ve encountered in so many punk houses. Even though I noticed that sloppiness in a communal living arrangement seemed to be more of a “dude thing,” it’s not totally exclusive to dudes; I lowered my living standards a lot during my three years in a punk house because it was so frustrating to try to give a shit but then be living in the midst of a chaotic situation 24/7. It becomes so easy to stifle the urge to care.
I would do “social experiments” sometimes to see how long it took for other roommates to take action on household issues. Like we once went three months with a non-flushing toilet until finally I freaked out and spent $2 at the hardware store for a replacement part and fixed it. Or we’d run out of toilet paper and people (myself included sometimes!) would just use coffee filters or pages from the Flagpole. Or I’d refuse to take out the trash sometimes and it would just pile up and spill onto the kitchen floor, or I wouldn’t wash the dishes so everyone would start eating off of cardboard. We lost the lock (and the doorknob?) on the bathroom door and rather than getting a new one, devised all kinds of ingenious ways to shut the door (elaborate pulley systems, pencils stuck into the doorjamb) and I eventually found the lock clogging the sink trap (WTF).
That’s the weird thing about communal spaces… that environment can be just as conducive to negativity and apathy (someone else will take care of it) as it can be to positivity and action (let’s all do this thing together!). Maybe moreso apathy, but that’s ‘cause I’m old and bitter.
Also Katy, I don’t mean to detract from your point by bringing Punk Rock Apathy into the discussion, but this happens when I relish the opportunity to ramble about my Spillage daze — the issues are kind of entangled to me. It’s still kind of relevant, though, because there is the Thing about the girl/housemom ending up shouldering the major responsibility of housekeeping and that stereotype happened a lot with me at Spillage to the point where I just decided to stubbornly embrace the strongmom image (as opposed to what I felt was “giving up” by embracing the filth) but it was definitely a THING where I would try to round up Cleaning Days and then later worry that I’m being perceived as a megabitch for wanting to have the dishes washed. I know this doesn’t happen at all punk house spaces but it happens often enough for me to notice,… but that’s kind of a whole ‘nother discussion entirely. P-Fuzz, by the way, Plush Palace was one of the cleanest punk houses I’ve seen! I never did use your bathroom, though. Post-traumatic.
