Bathroom fixtures went public in a big way right at the heyday of mechanized manufacturing. And when I say fixtures, I mean exactly that. Prefabrication became the norm for toilets, urinals, sinks, and cubicles at the end of the nineteenth century. Suddenly, bathroom components simply were. If users found they didn’t quite fit into bathrooms, it was the users who adapted, not the hardware. It wasn’t only that design variations weren’t much talked about or seen. The source material the industry worked from to create designs for everyday users was drawn from a small pool of data – in the US, from studies of military personnel – and little else. (It’s pretty laughable to imagine the physical measurements of young, fit military men being used to design a bathroom for my grandmother.)
Then along came Alexander Kira.
The Cornell University professor led a study from 1958 to 1965 to delve into how people actually used the bathroom. From faucets to farts, showers to the squat position, Kira wanted to scrap bathrooms – private and public – and rebuild them completely from the user’s perspective. He set himself no easy task – how does one change something no one’s willing to talk about? ‘While we can create new technologies to satisfy our demands,’ Kira wrote, ‘we can also ignore particular technologies and allow them to lie idle for years.’ He makes a good point: the toilet hasn’t changed its essential design since George Washington was commissioned as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.
Kira published his monumental study in book form. The Bathroom came out in 1966 (not to be confused with Barbara Penner’s Bathroom). In it, he didn’t just rejig existing design. He considered the psychology of bathroom use, took into account the young and the old, and didn’t assume men and women approached or used bathrooms in the same ways. He conducted research in a thousand US homes and in his lab at Cornell. Kira observed, measured, and photographed men and women performing bathroom activities. The Bathroom was a quantitative and qualitative jackpot. It concerned itself, for example, not only with the ideal dimensions for a bathtub in order for a woman to fit into it, but with how the bathtub could be sized and shaped to accommodate the different positions she might use for relaxing, to clean herself, and to enter and exit the bath.
Kira didn’t picture one bathroom for the young or able and a completely different one for the old or infirm. He saw the ideal bathroom as a versatile space – with uniform safety measures for any users who needed them because of age or temporary or permanent disability. He saw the bathroom as a space that should be easy to modify for changing bodies and changing needs – a bathroom for a lifetime.
The Bathroom is fascinating because of the way Kira both listened to what his subjects told him and, frankly, didn’t. On one hand, he suggested bathroom changes based on what study participants reported would work better, respecting their intuition. He wanted higher sinks that didn’t require hunching over for adults to use. He wanted them shamrock-shaped, so that the water would spread instead of splash, and with faucets that would spray in an arc for drinking. But he also came up with stuff that the people he studied likely never would have come up with, or which they probably would have laughed at. One of his suggestions was a conventional toilet with added foot pegs for modified squatting – picture little foot holders near the top of the bowl, toward the back; using them would situate your knees a little above belly-button-level as you sat on the toilet. Squat defecation is uncommon in the West, and it’s unlikely to have been the position any of Kira’s mostly middle-class US research subjects would have settled into to have a poo. But Kira’s research, and others’ since, shows that squatting both makes it easier to fully clear the bowels and decreases the likelihood of hemorrhoids, among other medical conditions. Kira pushed for modified squatting, even though it went against the cultural norm.
Why don’t we all squat to shit, anyway, if it’s so much better for us? In a word: culture. Just as we’ve had a hard time, historically, changing our understanding of who deserves space in public bathrooms and what it means to guarantee different user groups a seat, we also resist design changes. An example is the bidet, which more effectively cleans the perineal area than toilet paper (assuming people wash their hands well after using it; otherwise the hygiene benefit is wiped out). The bidet has never taken off in North America, even though we pride ourselves on over-thetop cleanliness. Japan-based toilet manufacturer Toto has been making the Toto Washlet, a combo toilet-bidet with a heated seat and oscillating spout, since the 1980s: Toto’s net sales in the 2016–17 fiscal were us$311 million. But less than 25 percent came from outside Japan. We in the West prefer, instead, to ineffectually scrape at the remnants of our last bowel movements with dry, rip-prone toilet paper. We use soap and water to clean every other part of our bodies, but not the dirtiest. (The market for flushable wipes has more than tripled in the past decade, but it’s at best a halfway measure, and one causing full-blown, fatbergian grief to urban sewer systems.)
For our bodies to meet the bathroom in different ways requires, perhaps, that our brains meet the bathroom in different ways first. While The Bathroom is something of a bible among those who study the cultural impact and meaning of toilets, Kira’s infinitely sensible modifications never really caught on with the masses. They were too far from what people were used to, and dealt with functions too far beyond the pale of bridge-game chitchat. We have preferred to let our bathroom technologies, in Kira’s words, ‘lie idle.’
The effects of standardization hit hardest when automation comes into play. Automated public toilets, or APTS, which dot many high-population centres, are the extreme example of a technological ‘fix’ to bathrooms. They were first installed in Paris in 1980, and later in the UK, the US, and around the world. In most models, users insert a coin or two to open the bathroom’s door. Once it shuts, a timer starts, at the end of which the door unlocks if the user isn’t already out. The timer means no one can stay in for too long. I was told by a San Francisco outreach worker that a homeless family in that city had tampered with the timer mechanism and taken up residence in one for several months, but in most APTS, the door opens in ten to fifteen minutes – long enough to use the washroom, but not enough time for a half-decent nap or any other, um, leisure activity. Once the door closes again, the devices have a wash cycle wherein the whole interior becomes like the inside of a dishwasher, sprayed and soaped and rinsed top to bottom once a user leaves (or, let’s hope once she leaves – horror stories abound about users being trapped in these selfcleaning toilets, but most of the reports I’ve read are about children who go in alone and can’t unlock the door; the fatalities are myth).
Less drastic automation has invaded everyday public bathrooms, too. Automated electric air dryers control the length of time people get to dry their hands – often too short and then, with another push of the button, too long. The motion-activated versions demand vigorous hand flapping to achieve the necessary drying time. The volume of air cannot be controlled, nor the temperature, though simple discount-store hair dryers have achieved this level of complexity. Soap comes pre-portioned, regardless of whether we need to lather our hands or faces, or clean an explosion of ketchup off a silk blouse. Water flows from taps at a predetermined volume, for a predetermined time, and at a predetermined temperature. Paper-towel dispensers decide the size of sheets we will need. Automated flushers are triggered by light, time, and movement. Irus Braverman writes incisively about all this automation hoo-ha in her essay ‘Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms’ in the collection Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. As Braverman describes it, automated flushers assume ‘a standard person with more or less standard needs engaged in an anticipated standard behavior. So it is a single individual (not with a helper or child, for example) making a single bowel movement (rather than a series) or making typical movements in a stall (not preparing for an injection, for example).’ I personally defy readers – especially women – to tell me they have never been the victim of an automated flusher. So an occasional sopping backside is the price we must pay for automation? But wait, what’s the benefit on our end? Better bathrooms, or so the argument goes, are less subject to some users’ anti-social behaviour, such as clogging and overfilling sinks or not flushing toilets. But aren’t these primarily benefits to the operators? Not the users?
Automated fixtures in public bathrooms may deter human users from messing around, but they are so narrowly controlling, they