Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV B athrooms are a messy business. They are where we tend our animal bodies; they are where we enact a host of cultural beliefs. They offer privacy and structure sociality. We may stand, sit, or squat at their toilets, according to custom. Their bathing zone may be adjacent or not, designed to serve one or many. In a modern US context, they combine elimination with grooming, toilets with sinks and mirrors, conceptions of dirtiness with those of hygiene and beauty, dynamics of concealment with those of display. Such tensions are multiplied when it comes to public restrooms. Though addressing needs we all share, communal toilets have long served, ironically enough, to enforce a variety of social divisions (Barcan 2010). Notable among these today is the divide produced by compelling us to pee as either "ladies" or "gentlemen," a bifurcation particularly dense with political meanings and effects. 1 The demand for designated women's toilets originated in the late Victorian period as an equity issue. As urban sanitation improved, the building of public facilities for men prompted campaigns to provide like facilities for women. Advocates for "potty parity" argued that the lack of restrooms placed limits on women's ability to move freely through city streets. Their call for lavatories was a call for inclusion in the public sphere (Gershenson and Penner 2009, 4-5). At the same time, as Terry S. Kogan (2010) explains, the assumption that women required special, segregated facilities drew on notions of properly modest and domestic femininity, reinforcing the ideology of separate spheres. More than a century later, gendered restrooms remain fraught for similar reasons. Feminists today continue to demand greater parity while also interrogating the role of separate bathrooms in reproducing gender norms.Across dozens of educational and occupational sites, as women infiltrate previously all-male spaces, they are confronted by the absence of equal bathroom facilities. Women in the US Senate had no toilet of their own until 1992. Likewise in 2021, despite decades of legislation and updated building
