Exemplary scholarship and anthropology on a topic that is part of the life of everyone of the male sex — but that no one, outside of the toilet equipment and institutional building industries, thinks about. The urinal is a portal through which one can see a great deal of our changing values, society…even art.
link source: popmatters.com »
Page Excerpt
The public restroom does not, upon first glance, appear to offer especially fertile ground for cultural analysis. Indeed, it is a site of intensely private activity, to be experienced individually and generally a topic of mildly uncomfortable discourse in public settings. However, one artifact commonly associated with the public restroom, the urinal, has inspired a fairly eclectic mixture of social, cultural and historical analyses over the past 150 years. Many of these opportunities for investigation involve gender, as nearly all urinal models have been designed exclusively for males. However, the history of the urinal has intersected with quite a few areas beyond gender, including changes to architecture, artistic expression and the greening of America. In many ways, this object has served as a cultural prism reflecting more than just societal trends, engaging with collective fears, desires, attitudes and values specific to time and place.
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