A scrawl in the women’s restroom nearest the Fishbowl reads, “Why do people write on stalls?” In something like a nod to postmodern self-awareness, the line appears in several stalls in the same large black marker.

The ironic graffitist has a point — from the clutter of graffiti present in different places around campus, it’s clear that defacing campus with pens is a major pastime for University students. It would take a thorough survey of students to determine all the reasons why people put ink to wall, but salient themes in the graffiti itself suggest some common motives.

To shed some light on the University’s tangle of jotted thoughts, The Statement applied psychology studies of bathroom graffiti to two of the most used restrooms on campus, the men and women’s restrooms in Mason Hall near the Fishbowl. The comparison between the two rooms shows that the difference between men and women’s restroom habits definitely doesn’t end at standing up and sitting down.

From an informal survey of graffiti in each of the restrooms, the inherent differences between men and women are stark. The samples match the characterization of men and women’s graffiti in the study “Writing in the Stall: Gender and Graffiti,” by James A. Green from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

In the survey of a pair of restrooms in a library at the University of Otago, Green found that men were more likely to write opinions, insults and racist comments, and keep to the topics of politics and homosexuality. Women more often wrote about relationships and sex, religion and philosophy, and maintained a more positive, supportive tone with attempts to cool down heated exchanges.

Other than the debate of politics — which Green found to be a dominant topic in men’s graffiti but appears more often in the Mason Hall women’s restroom —the graffiti The Statement surveyed in the last week follows many of the same patterns.

PEEING ON VENUS, POOPING ON MARS

The Mason Hall women’s room is home to the “Go Blue Girly Confessions” stall, which The Statement first described in a 2007 story about the unofficial peer counseling system that had emerged through graffiti. While the stall’s title has been removed from the wall, the same brand of confessions and heartfelt responses flourish.

Requests for life advice are so common in the women’s restroom that one woman felt comfortable describing her boyfriend’s lousy handling of their one year anniversary for an entire paragraph before cutting it short to go to class with a promise to continue later.

“He has been good to me in most other respects,” she wrote. “To be continued… (have class)”

But one topic that doesn’t always foster a supportive discourse is religion, which has spurred a couple lengthy debates involving fervent believers and atheists, or alternatively, conservative Christians and gay-rights activists.

These debates usually begin after someone writes either a message about salvation through Jesus Christ or something akin to “There is no God.” But sometimes, contemporary social issues are thrown into the mix, which spawn an even larger and more tangled thread of responses.

The door of the “Go Blue Girly Confessions” stall is, ironically, now playing host to a vehement argument over religious prohibition of gay marriage. The result is sort of a “Who would Jesus let marry?” debate.

“Jesus is all about love, man,” reads one pro-gay marriage message. “If he lets old and sterile people into loving, sexual, but non-child producing relationships, I can’t imagine he would have a problem with gay marriage.”

Then a counter-response draws from the Bible to argue against gay marriage: “Does anyone remember what happened to Sodom (and) Gomorrah? It was destroyed.”

Aside from life advice and religious debate, many of the stalls in the women’s restroom feature open-ended questions like, “If you could change one thing about society, what would it be?”

Some of several responses were “trafficking in women (and) children” and “unborn children see the light of day.”

A similar trend in the men’s room is questions with a numbered list beneath them inducing others to fill in their answers.