Toilet talk
Brendan O’Neill discovers that public lavatories are plastered with government propaganda, much of it telling us how disgusting we are Under the Blair terror, you can’t even take a piss in peace. The other day, standing at a urinal in a plush cinema in north London, I found myself staring at a notice on the wall in front of me. ‘Relax, go ahead and read’, it said. ‘No one knows you’re a wife-beater. You don’t look like someone who would hit a woman.’ The ad further advised that I should not flee the setting in which I had apparently been battering my partner, because ‘we will track you down’ and ‘punish you’. I was so angry I almost spilled. The old geezer standing next to me was reading the same threatening words above his urinal: he was 80 if he was a day and, bless him, was wearing a suit and tie (and probably a pocket watch) to the flicks. Why were we both being accused, in a public loo of all places, of being fist-swinging misogynists?
The ad is the handiwork of those increasingly PC PCs at the Metropolitan Police. It is designed to raise awareness about the cops’ zero tolerance of domestic violence and is (dis)gracing the walls of the gents in cinemas and pubs across the capital. The Met seems to have swallowed the old feminist idea that all men are one provocation away from turning into wildeyed maniacs. So instead of designing a traditional public information notice something like ‘If you know any wife-beaters, please give us a buzz’ — it has produced a poster that indiscriminately accus es all who read it of using violence against women. Its aim seems to be to spread a blanket suspicion about blokes in general and our alleged beastly habits, and what better place to stick such poisonous propaganda than above a urinal? The message is clear: ‘You are, by virtue of the fact that you have a penis to urinate with, potential scum.’ The police aren’t alone. The busybodies who make up the Blairite elite have joined the campaign. Whether they’re warning women of the dangers of getting drunk and randy, or men about drink-driving, gonorrhoea or testicular cancer, the safety officials, health apparatchiks and interfering bobbies are on a mission to colonise public conveniences. Their toilet propaganda betrays a pretty degraded view of the public, and for the rest of us it means that even during those most private of activities — when we relieve our bladder or empty our bowels — we are no longer free from the prying eyes of the state.
A friend of mine, who happened to be heavily pregnant at the time, was made to feel like a shameful harridan when she saw a poster by the Portman Group in a pub lavatory warning women that drinking while pregnant could seriously damage a foetus. She had only popped out for half a glass of wine but ended up feeling horribly guilty. A male friend said he saw the legend ‘DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE’ printed on a urinal — except that when he started to pee on it, the ‘R’ and ‘V’ disappeared from DRIVE so that it said ‘DON’T DRINK AND D I E’. I met a woman recently who told me she’d seen a poster in a loo warning (patronisingly, in her view) that ‘Drinking too much could make you vulnerable’, with a picture of an inebriated woman being gawked at by a dodgy bloke in an anorak. So if all men, including me and that 80year-old cinema-goer, are bastards, then all women are potential victims.
The Department of Health has stuck up anti-smoking posters in the WCs of university bars, superpubs, nightclubs and other venues frequented by the nation’s youth. The version put up in the ladies says, ‘If you smoke, you stink’, warning that smoking gives women ‘minging teeth’ and ‘cat’s bum mouth’. In the gents the DoH posters focus on — what else? — young men’s penises. ‘Does smoking make you hard? Not if it means you can’t get it up,’ they say, complete with a picture of a man’s legs with a limp cigarette where his penis should be. Another poster says: ‘Bad news: smoking causes impotence. More bad news: these ads are in the ladies, too.’ This is public information as malicious toilet gossip. The DoH also puts stickers directly on to urinals which say: ‘Think with your penis? Your penis thinks you should stop smoking.’ The Health Promotion Agency says it consciously uses ‘toilet humour’ to lecture people about safe sex. A toilet poster aimed at 18to 30-year-olds in Northern Ireland said: ‘Dick has a sore head’, warning of the dangers of syphilis — only the words ‘dick’ and ‘head’ are written in a very large type so that from a distance the poster looks as if it says ‘DICK HEAD’. Geddit? If you have unprotected sex, you’re a dickhead! The Family Planning Association has also used toilet humour. It put a graffiti-style poster in pub toilets warning women of the dangers of chlamydia. ‘All men are tossers: if only, then we wouldn’t have to worry about chlamydia’, it proclaimed in a red scrawl, as if it might have been scribbled by a graffiti artist with a social/sexual conscience. Another FPA toilet ad featured a picture of a young man’s crotch with the words, ‘Chlamydia now available in easy-to-open packets.’ Various official bodies and campaigning groups are queuing up to get their message across in the nation’s lavatories. It even has a name — ‘Convenience Advertising’ — and there are companies that specialise in it. Health Promotion Wales has discovered that when we visit a public toilet we spend an average of two minutes and 54 seconds in there, apparently making them the ideal place in which to communicate complex and sometimes embarrassing messages to the public. How desperate they are to connect! Vast numbers of people may not vote or care very much about what the authorities get up to, but if we can just grab their attention for those three minutes while they are sitting on the loo....
As public life dies, the powers that be are reduced to hanging out in public lavatories. For me, nothing better captures the New Labourish elite’s disdain for the public than their move into toilet propaganda. There was a time when public information was about, well, providing information to the public. Now much of it seems dedicated to telling us how disgusting we are. These posters show us as volatile, stupid, thoughtless and diseased; women are warned to be wary of men, men to be wary of the police, and all of us to be wary of drinking one too many. There could be no more suitable setting for such an expression of suspicion and loathing of the public than in a stinking loo.
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