Ladies and Gents

Philadelphia : Temple University Press , 2009 . Yes, someone actually wrote a book about public toilets and gender. Hard to believe, but true. Even harder to believe is that within this collection of essays, the reader can find pertinent and useful information. The book is divided into two sections, one on “Potty Politics” and another on “Toilet Art” that comprise the sixteen chapters within. This book gets off to a great start with a Foreword from Judith Plaskow, a renowned Yale-trained feminist scholar. Plaskow calls the book “cutting edge” as it ventures into the “forbidden” territory of toilets and gender. I am not entirely convinced this is cutting edge work but I will say it is on the edge of something. A feminist scholar myself, I see the relevance of chapters like Claudia Mitchell's “Geographies of Danger” (62) that highlight the abuse in African school bathrooms, where girls fear rape and boys fear beatings, and Jami Anderson's piece on “Bodily Privacy, Toilets and Sex Discrimination” (90), discussing abuses by male officers in female prisons. While coeditor Barbara Penner's chapter on “(Re) Designing the ‘Unmentionable’ ” (141) did give me an insight into things like the FEMMETM pissoire, I was still not convinced why public toilets need to be the subject of any book. Bushra Rehman's chapter (189) was a rich cultural window into the world of Pakistani bathroom traditions; for instance, medicines are not traditionally kept in bathrooms in Pakistan as they are here in the United States. Upon reading Rehman's rendition of her mother's disgust at “Amreekan” medicine-keeping habits, I, too, found myself somewhat disoriented at the obvious ridiculousness of keeping anything that is meant to go in one's mouth in a room where excrement is spent. I enjoyed Francis Pheasant-Kelly's chapter on the cinematic context of men's death and derision within the bathroom, of course Lila Crane (played by Vera Miles) from Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) may beg to differ. After a shoddy early attempt at connecting Judaism and the toilet, Nathan Abrams manages to say something significant in terms of how toilets have been used in anti-Semitic efforts, particularly during the Holocaust, where intolerable bathroom conditions were one of many despicable acts by Nazi's as part of the systematic humiliation and degradation of the Jewish people (220). However, these few saving graces do not negate the fact that Ladies and Gents is a scattered attempt to draw conclusions about the use and abuse of public toilets in connection to gender. For the same price of this book, I would rather buy lunch. The book is what I call the ultimate “peanut butter cup” of scholarship—when original contributions to knowledge have become so saturated, doctoral students begin looking for ways to analyze the importance of things like peanut butter cups. Or in the case of this anthology, toilets. With respect to the formidable Olga Gershenson, and the few chapters of relevance mentioned in this review, I am afraid that the reader will find little value in this study of public toilets. Perhaps peanut butter cups might have been more worthwhile? At least peanut butter cups fulfill a definite purpose in society, which is more than I can say for Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender

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