About: Why Are Public Toilets So Dirty & Why Do Americans Insist On Calling Them Bath Rooms?

TOILETS–it’s not a bad word or a shameful thing to need.
If you have to answer the call of nature, otherwise known as emptying one’s bladder, you use a facility called a toilet; same thing for a bowel movement. If this is done away from home, say in a department store, or a restaurant, you need to use the t0ilets these places provide for us.
American culture, despite all the boundaries that have been blurred since the mid-2oth Century, is still squeamish when it comes to properly naming the place we use to deposit our personally executed waste material, the end-result of the digestive process. We say we go to the bathroom, because we are ashamed? This is crazy! You don’t (unless homeless, and @ the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch) take a bath when using a public toilet facility. You go to the toilet & use it for it’s intended purpose.
Why press & film & other media consider these natural functions dirty is perhaps part of the mass psychology that seems to have created an unwritten rule: In the United States of America, all public toilet facilities shall be made filthy by the users, and the users shall call them bath rooms. This is just plain silly, and needs to change. The word toilet is not offensive, and the need for toilets outside the home is self-evident. Clean & with out shame, our toilets should be. This means that men should lift the lid when urinating, instead of pissing all over it. This means that heavy users of toilet paper should flush often, to prevent the massive build-up that heavy use of toilet paper can cause, to end the plumbing overflows so frequently found in public toilets. It’s time to bring a clean attitude to these bodily functions & the places that were built to accommodate them.
2012/08/29
Categories: Public Toilets . Tags: cnit129, culture, language, public health, sanitation, shared space, toilet . Author: thomasoutt . Comments: 5 Comments