Boys, girls and bathroom graffiti

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. But unlike the women’s room social-minded idealism, the men’s room questions tend to be narrower in scope — surveys about favorite drugs, worst professors and most reviled public figures (Glenn Beck, Kanye).

But another prompt highlights the main difference between the men and women’s room — titled “Post Secret,” the prompt’s four answer slots are empty, suggesting that men aren’t as interested in whispering their secrets to bathroom walls as women are.

When men do confess — such as one did by writing, “I know my GF cheated with me and I’m still with her” — they don’t receive consolatory messages from anonymous hands.

“Yeah, my bad about that man,” reads the sole response.

The men’s restroom is practically the exact inverse of the women’s restroom. Where the latter is preoccupied with questions of life, love and the meaning of it all, the former features “find the hidden number” games, hostile insults and loads of sexual innuendos.

Male aggression is present even in a game turned violent. One graffitist invited others to add a sentence to a story he began with, “One day I woke up and walked to class…” The story continues in a different hand per line like so: “After doing three packets of boy … Then I killed a man. Just to see him die. I took off his skin and made a suit. I sold the suit to a homeless man. I THEN KILLED THE HOMELESS MAN.”

But as Green found in his study, graffiti in the men’s restroom are less likely to be written in response to previous notes. Instead of vying to enter a discourse with other people, men more often seek only to let their opinion be known, whether it is incendiary or something innocuous like “Toy Story 2 was OK…”

COMING OUT TO BATHROOM STALLS

Perhaps the most telling difference between the men and women’s Mason Hall restrooms is in the treatment of homosexuality.

Besides the occasional flare-up over gay marriage, lesbian sexuality is a common and matter-of-fact topic on the walls of the women’s restroom. Women write about problems with coming out, relationships with girlfriends and desire to have sex with women.

“I have been dating a girl for (four) months (and) I can’t tell anyone,” Wrote one woman. “They won’t love me the same. Depressed. Hate myself. HELP.”

But in the men’s restroom, where the overriding rule is to make fun of everything, it is unclear what comments are sincere and which are meant as anti-gay jokes. But since homosexual comments make up the majority of graffiti, it’s safe to say some serious social pressure must be behind the running “gag.”

Gay-related comments come in several varieties, running the gamut from usage of the words “gay” and “faggot” as insults to seemingly earnest solicitations for sex, with code names and phone numbers to facilitate hookups.

Some threads appear to be graffitists attacking others for homophobic comments. After someone wrote “I’m not” with an arrow to a description of a co-op as gay friendly, another man responded with “silently wants penis bad!”

Most of the messages contain explicit descriptions of sexual acts and requests for semen and big penises, but it is impossible to tell the intention of the writers. They could be openly gay men expressing their sexuality, straight men pretending to be gay as a joke or closeted gay men expressing the sexuality they long to claim in real life. Of course, they might not be any of the above, defying labels in their interest in male-male sexuality.

Take this question, “Anyone bi-curious?” and the single response, “Yes.” Then, there is a response from a man who wants to try having sex with another man before he marries his female fiancé.

But many studies of homosexual graffiti hold that non-gay men are the main authors of gay graffiti and their intent is to insult homosexuality. A study in the Journal of American Folklore in 1972, called “Social Analysis of Graffiti,” asserted that gay graffiti was the result of intolerance in a community, predicting that as homosexuality becomes more accepted, gay graffiti would decrease.

Another article published in the same journal in 1976, however, contested that claim, asserting that gay graffiti is more prevalent in communities where homosexuality is widely tolerated. The article, titled “Anonymous Expression: A Structural View of Graffiti,” focused on a comparison between restroom graffiti at a liberal university and that of a control group of other universities, high schools and other public spaces. The study found that 20 percent of graffiti at the liberal university was homosexual, compared to just 3 percent at moderate or conservative universities.

According to the study, the higher occurrence of homosexual graffiti and a lower tolerance in the community for anti-gay comments are correlated.

“(Statements) expressive of exactly those values and sentiments whose public expression is denied will be found on the toilet walls,” the article said.

Whatever the case with the Mason Hall men’s restroom, it’s clear that someone isn’t able to express their feelings on homosexuality (or homosexual feelings) in public to the same degree that the stall wall affords them.

ANONYMOUS MOB MENTALITY

Gender differences in graffiti style are clear, but the reasons for that disparity are not as simple as men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Green concluded that graffiti in sex-divided areas tends to be a manifestation of exaggerated gender stereotypes.

One of the theories Green draws on to argue this point is communication accommodation, which is the process of adapting one’s language style to match that of a group. In spaces that are gender homogenous, people conform to gender norms more than they would in mixed society.

“In the single-sex context of the toilet, gendered norms are likely to prevail, as the language styles of those interacting are likely to be more similar than different,” Green wrote. “However, in the mixed-gender context, adaptation is likely to occur.”

But Green makes clear that conformity to gender norms doesn’t guarantee that the graffitists fit that same mold in their real lives. He quotes another study about social identity and de-individuation, which asserts that people are more likely to be influenced by group identity when “visual anonymity will further reduce perceived intragroup differences, thereby in increasing the salience of the group.” When nothing but gender is known of their audience, women graffitists resort to girl talk and men turn to locker room talk.

Green’s research on graffiti in mixed-gender spaces validates the communication adaptation, since he found that library study booths he sampled featured little of the hyper-stereotypical language that characterized the restrooms — instead, graffiti in the booths ran the middle of the road between the two extremes.

Graffiti in the study cubicles in the stacks of the Graduate Library coincide with Green’s findings in mixed-gender spaces. Gone are the lengthy feminine pleas and the most explicit of male sexual expression. More often, study cubicles were characterized by neutral topics like complaints about schoolwork and music taste.

Sometimes, particular themes take over individual Grad Library cubicles, so that one heater vent was dedicated to names and dates and another wall featured homage to musicians like Pearl Jam and Lupe Fiasco. When Green encountered this phenomenon in his study, he theorized that graffiti styles were “bred over time” through imitation.

Green applied this theory to single-gender spaces as well, explaining that the stalls he studied often featured a particular tone that dominated the discourse.

“An inflammatory graffito may then spawn further inflammatory graffiti,” he wrote. “Conversely, a more polite interactive tone may lead to further inscriptions in a similar style.”

THE DARK SIDE OF UNSIGNED THOUGHTS

Imitation might be part of the reason one stall in the Mason Hall men’s room features half a dozen swastikas and at least two instances of the n-word, but it doesn’t explain why the first man to pen the symbols of hate did so.

Several studies confirming gender differences in graffiti have asserted that inflammatory statements — such as gay bashing and racist slurs — are much more frequent in men’s restrooms than in women’s. In fact, some surveys have found that racism in women’s restrooms is almost nonexistent. This would be the case in the Mason Hall women’s restroom, where the only racial comments occurred in one stall. They were “I have yellow fever… and it’s fun,” “Mexican clown car… Think about it” and “I (heart) Mexicans.”

Racial comments in the men’s room weren’t common, but when they did appear, they were incendiary and outright racist. The stall with the swastikas contained most of the racial comments, but as the wall is covered with messages of all varieties, it was hard to make them out. But around one of the occurrences of the n-word, which someone tried to scratch out unsuccessfully, there seemed to be a racially charged exchange with attacks against black people, white people and Asians that may have been spurred by an initial comment.

Along with homosexual comments, the article “Anonymous Expression: A Structural View of Graffiti” studied the prevalence of racist graffiti in the restrooms of a liberal university. The study, conducted in 1976, found that 17 percent of restroom graffiti was racist at all universities surveyed, including the liberal campus.

The study hypothesized that as time passed and the tolerance of black students on campus became less of an issue, racist graffiti would decrease. Thirty years later, the Mason Hall men’s room suggests that campus still has bigots who are inclined to express their hate anonymously, but not as many as perhaps once before.

A more common theme in the men’s restroom is sexism, which appears not only in the predictable instances of objectification but also in messages expressing sheer misogyny and the desire to be violent against women.

Set up as a mathematic equation, one graffitist sought to prove that women equal evil, to which another responded that women equal pussy, and hence, equal good. The final word goes to another graffitist, though, who wrote: “Pussy has destroyed lives, killed men (and) brought nations down. Hell, I know at least (three) evil pussies.”

Following the format of other survey questions in the restroom, one graffitist asked for the “best date rape drugs and where to get them” — there is only one answer, “Money (Parents).” Another wants other men to continue a story he started, which involves cutting a woman’s throat out after violent sex.

“You finish the rest of the story,” the creep invited.

Fortunately, nobody took him up on it.

A COMMON DENOMINATOR

Of course, not all men are misogynists, just as not all male graffiti is crude, sexual and aggressive. Likewise, not all women feel the need to spill their hearts on a bathroom wall — and the ones who do aren’t necessarily gushing feelings and heartfelt advice all the time.

Gender difference in graffiti isn’t the key to unlocking the secret of the sexes, but it is a way to make a little more sense of the tangle of half-formed thoughts that clutter the gray stall walls on campus. Because when push comes to shove, we’re not different in one crucial way. We all go to those restrooms for the same reason — a reason that also appears as a common graffiti theme in both the men and women’s room.

In response to the question written in the women’s restroom, “Why do people write on stalls?” one graffitist responded: “Something to do when they take a dump. And it’s fun. And anonymous. Hell yeah.”