North Carolina’s HB2, Oscar Pistorius, and the Sanctity of the Bathroom

Pistorius demonstrating how he ‘found’ his dead girlfriend in the bathroom, after he’d ‘mistakenly’ shot her four times.  This demonstration shows him with his prosthetic legs; his testimony maintained that he was without them at the time of the killing.  Whatever, the bathroom is relatively pristine.

I was lucky enough to have dear friends, now living thousands of miles away, visit over Easter weekend.  As one would expect, we stayed up until 4a.m. exchanging jokes, reminiscences, news, gossip . . . and opinions on everything from Peeps transformations to reality TV to writing strategies to what’s wrong with academia to what’s wrong with North Carolina.  In particular, the dishonorable and utterly stupid HB2, the ‘bathroom bill.’

During that part of our Irish whiskey-fueled ramblings, one friend brought up a recent article about the Oscar Pistorius case (2014).  Pistorius is the double amputee South African ‘blade runner’ Olympian convicted of killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.  In the middle of the night, he supposedly heard a noise in the bathroom which he thought might indicate a burglar or kidnapper; in fear of his life, he grabbed the gun he kept under the mattress and fired four shots into his en suite bathroom – evidently without first checking whether Steenkamp was still in bed next to him or that (gee, how unforeseen) she might have gotten up to use the toilet. 

Eventually, my friends and I fell asleep, and the connections between Pistorius and NCGA debacles remained fuzzily explored, other than what seemed the obvious but perhaps only arbitrary connection: the bathroom! 

Later, one of my friends gave me a link to the Pistorius article.  By Jacqueline Rose and published in the London Review of Books, it’s a fascinating, multi-directional, dense meditation that I highly recommend (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n22/jacqueline-rose/bantu-in-the-bathroom).  Rose examines the notorious case from many perspectives, including those associated with feminism, the physically challenged, race, South African history, and the cultural valences of ‘the bathroom.’ 

So how could this article not stimulate new (to me) ways of thinking about my state’s most current scandal, the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am passage of HB2?

For those who can afford them, private spa-like bathrooms are temples to the body beautiful and the body clean, complete with more mirrors than most sane people really want in a bathroom.

Upscale public bathrooms mimic private facilities and their contradictions: 
many privacy stalls but a whole damn lot of mirrors.

One.  Most of us incensed by this North Carolina’s HB2 believe that the unisex bathroom ‘issue’ is mainly a Trojan (but where are the Tampons?) horse to consolidate power in the hands of a reactionary state legislature that lurches forth in support of ALEC and Family Values interest groups.  Goals of the first include keeping municipalities from enacting anything that might be ‘anti-business’ (such as city-specific minimum wage requirements); goals of the second are God-knows-what-but-He-must-want-to-sustain-white-patriarchy.  The question remains: why unisex bathrooms as a battering ram?

Rose suggests some answers.  She predictably but usefully brings up Mary Douglas’s classic book, Purity and Danger (1966), which frames the bifurcated discourses surrounding bodily functions.  Outside/inside; pollution/purgation; clean/unclean.  Bathrooms are sites in which these oppositions are performed.  Western bathrooms in particular are purity shrines: gleaming tile, flushing toilets, high-pressure showers.  Bathrooms are where we cleanse ourselves of corporeal dirt. 

Bathrooms are also places where our bodies, with all their flaws and impurities, are potentially visible and vulnerable . . . we’re naked, or partially so, scrubbing or purging ourselves of the muck and smells that are part of being human. I don’t think most people in North Carolina are profoundly invested in the discomfort and real dangers that trans people may face in being compelled to use the biologically ‘right’ but experientially ‘wrong’ bathroom (even though we should be) – or even more, in the silly myth that without HB2 a bunch of cross-dressing male pedophiles will invade restrooms to have their nefarious will with eight-year-old girls. Instead, we’re invested in bathroom-exposure phobia.  Many of us, particularly those of us of a certain age, are uncomfortable with the idea of ANYONE walking in on us when we’re showering, bathing, or (worst) sitting on the toilet.

‘Cartoon’ explaining the bathroom dangers of the Equal Rights Amendment.  The horror!

Two.  Particularly if we are women.  Rose makes intricate connections between gender issues and Pistorius’s defense strategy.  Her insights made me think of bathroom politics in relation to gender politics in the U.S., politics that came to the fore in the ERA debates.  One of the anti-ERA public panic touchstones was the modesty-defying horror of ‘common toilets’ -- even though the ERA had nothing to say about unisex bathrooms. 

According to an article in Think Progress (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/11/06/3719688/how-the-religious-right-learned-to-use-bathrooms-as-a-weapon-against-justice/), “one anti-ERA advocate claimed that Montana’s state-level ERA forced a mining camp to implement unisex bathrooms, when in reality there weren’t even any women at that camp.”  Ultimately, though, the ERA failed not because of bathroom fears but because of broader fears about obliterating distinctions between the sexes (the presumption being that the ‘two sexes’ were absolute and definitive) and protectionist arguments such as sheltering women from the draft. 

A ‘spy-cam’ bathroom voyeur screen shot.  Eeeww . . . had to look through a bunch of ick 
to find one I wasn’t totally embarrassed posting.

I fear that one contributing element to unisex bathroom phobia and, ultimately, to HB2, is bathroom porn.  Totally eewww, but also a totally cockroach-life niche sexual fetish.  Men watching women (or children, or other men, or people of seemingly indeterminate gender) doing what people do in bathrooms, and getting a voyeuristic sexual kick out of it, is hardly a new phenomenon.  Often, it’s a conflicted one, as it’s never (to my limited knowledge, thank god) been socially acceptable. But oh yuck, is it pervasive on the internet! And oh yuck, are there available gadgets to facilitate this unsavory kink!  My point: that women and girls and men and boys and gays and trans people using bathrooms can be, and have been, sexualized.  And that men who find such ideas exciting can be ashamed that they do.  And that this small percentage of a small percentage may back bathroom protection bills, even if they themselves have never engaged in toilet peeping except in their moist daydreams.

Durham, NC: 1940.  The sign on the isolated door reads: 'White Ladies Only.'  
One presumes that ‘Black Ladies’ was not a viable category.

Three.  More successful in this country was using bathroom anxiety as partial justification for Jim Crow culture and its multitudinous laws and prohibitions, regulations that have disconcerting similarities to South African apartheid strictures. Rose details the elaborate laws for separate facilities in apartheid South Africa, laws that included domestic toilet arrangements as well as public ones (many Black servants lived in rooms adjoining their white employers’ yards, so their bathrooms had to be certain distances from white living quarters).  Those of us in the United States (and certainly in North Carolina) remember, or have seen documentary evidence of, similar spatial segregation. Water fountains, bus seats, restaurant entrances, public schools (including separate textbooks that may be the same book but not the same physical book), movie theaters, waiting rooms, and, of course, bathrooms . . . 

Holding these laws and regulations together, in this country (and state) and in South Africa, were white fears of being harmed: by Black people who might be fed up with being treated like dirt (read slave rebellions and Civil Rights protests in the American South; ‘Bantu’ rebellions and freedom movements on the African continent); by Black people who somehow carried ‘contagion’ on their bodies like malevolent cooties; by Black people whose sheer proximity – especially when going about ordinary and universal human activities – challenged white mastery/superiority/power. 

Schematic of how Pistorius shot Steenkamp in the bathroom, according to the defense.  Everyone is vulnerable:  Steenkamp on the toilet, Pistorius, without his prosthetics, on the floor.

So when Pistorius heard a noise in his bathroom, that noise (his defense claimed) was automatically equated with an intruder.  Because of South African history and the perceived rise in post-Apartheid-era black-on-white burglaries, that would be imagined as a Black intruder, invading the place where the physically disadvantaged Pistorius (he slept without his prosthetics, understandably) would be at the greatest danger.  Just like little girls in a North Carolina unisex bathroom, moppets without the immediate ‘protection’ that the Blade Runner’s stashed-under-his-bed personal arsenal gave him.  Crime and violation are equated with whatever ‘Other’ is currently most culturally frightening, and stigmatized, and symptomatic of vanished ‘good old days.’

 Kudos to the White House.  Maybe in the future, ‘gender neutral’ will not be a necessary qualifier.

Four.  The least developed part of Rose’s complex argument has to do with physical disability, vulnerability, and (natch) bathrooms.  Her argument suggests that Pistorius not having flesh-and-bone legs put him in a ‘feminine’ position (disadvantaged, ‘lacking,’ vulnerable) – a position buttressed by reports of him ‘screaming like a girl’ as well as his teary breakdowns in court. 

Oddly, one of the arguments FOR unisex bathrooms is that they increase protections for the disabled and physically or mentally impaired. The ‘offending’ Charlotte ordinance would have made it less problematic for mothers to escort their wheelchair-bound sons, or for fathers to accompany their autistic daughters, or for adult children to help their infirm opposite-sex parents when these ‘disabled’ family members needed to use a public restroom.

That these broadly helpful outcomes have been ignored has may have something to do with the psychodynamics of the bathroom. This haven of purity ‘cures’ but also masks abjection, what the theorist Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror, 1982) identified as the revulsion we feel at encountering that which blurs the boundaries between self and other, between health and disease, between life and death, between human or and animal (or, I might add, machine).   Examples of the abject include a corpse, a suppurating wound, bodily waste, deformities, even visible disabilities and prostheses . . . and non-binary racial or gender performances and presentation. 

Binary concerns did not seem to be an issue in the Jim Crow era.  Bathroom segregation by ‘sex’ stopped at the doorstop of bathroom segregation by ‘race.’  Evidently, Black men and women using the same toilet facilities was A-OK to white male legislators.

Back to North Carolina’s HB2.  I suspect that this bill covertly appeals to some white males’ feelings of cultural impotence much more than to atavistic protect-our-defenseless-women sentiments.  For the (almost exclusively male) proponents of the bill, the threat is not trans women in women’s bathrooms; it’s the threat of trans men in men’s bathrooms.  (What does my penis mean if its most private-public exposure is confounded with the absence of, or surgically-created simulacrum of, this transcendental signifier?) The trepidations are of a piece with the fears that ‘gay marriage’ will have profoundly negative impacts on ‘straight marriage.’  Or that white people brushing up against Black people/straight people brushing up against gay people/gender-set-in-stone people brushing up against gender-fluid people/Christians brushing up against non-Christians will contaminate the ‘normatives.’

And, finally, back to Jacqueline Rose’s article.  Her interlacing of gender, race, violence, history, and bathrooms -- fantastically thought-provoking as it is -- did not mention what finally brought down South Africa’s apartheid regime: economics.  Yes, sanctions and strikes were built on moral objections, but they were kick-‘em-in-the-pocketbook international and domestic moves just the same. That’s what may be happening in North Carolina now.  A burgeoning group of businesses and organizations is registering displeasure at HB2 by scotching expansion, relocation, and event plans that would have benefited the state monetarily.  Concurrently, we formerly asleep-at-the-wheel citizens who allowed these myopic, bigoted fools to control North Carolina’s government may be stirring from our apathetic slumber. Let’s hope the wake-up call is more than a middle-of-the-night must-visit-the-bathroom twinge.