Bathroom Graffiti

—SHOW NOTES—

◘ A look at some student papers about the bathroom graffiti in various buildings on the Memorial University campus ◘

Sources

◘ Arluke, Arnold, Lanny Kutakoff, and Jack Levin. “Are the Times Changing? An Analysis of Gender Differences in Sexual Graffiti.” Sex Roles 16, nos. 1–2 (1987): 1–7. ◘ 

◘ Bartholome, Lynn, and Philip Snyder. “Is It Philosophy or Pornography? Graffiti at the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.” The Journal of American Culture 27, issue 1 (2004): 86–98. ◘ 

◘ Bruner, Edward M., and Jane Paige Kelso. “Gender Differences in Graffiti. A Semiotic Perspective.” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 3, issues 2–3, (1980): 239–52. ◘ 

◘ Callanan, Ted S. “Latrinalia: MUN Campus.” 1972. University essay, accession number 72-148. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/3512). ◘ 

◘ Frampton, Tony. “Graffiti on the Bathroom Walls.” 1991. University essay, accession number 91-446. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/4498). ◘ 

◘ Fraser, R. Glenn. “Graffiti: The Expressional Outlet.” 1980. University essay, accession number 80-186. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/3065). ◘ 

◘ Halley, Morgiana P. “Women’s Latrinalia: A Diachronic Overview.” 1986. University essay, accession number 87-009. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/1461). ◘

◘ Harris, Wesley. “Graffiti.” 1968. University essay, accession number 68-045. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/377). ◘ 

◘ Kinsey, Alfred C. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. W. B. Saunders, 1953. ◘

◘ Leong, Pamela. “American Graffiti: Deconstructing Gendered Communication Patterns in Bathroom Stalls.” Gender, Place & Culture 23, 3 (2016): 306–27. ◘

◘ MacNaughton, Janet. “Women’s Interactional Graffiti.” 1983. University essay, accession number 83-133. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/8188). ◘ 

◘ Murphy, Clara. “Definition of a Nymphomaniac: Graffiti from Thompson Student Centre, Memorial University.” 1988. Survey card, accession number 88-372. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/1853). ◘ 

◘ Smith, Brent. “Graffiti in the Male Bathrooms at Memorial University of Newfoundland.” 1991. University essay, accession number 91-403. MUNFLA, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (record: https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/4335). ◘ 

◘ Trahan, Adam. “Research and Theory on Latrinalia.” In Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross. Routledge, 2016. ◘ 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 50: “Bathroom Graffiti.”

There’s a great resource here at Memorial University in St. John’s called MUNFLA, the Folklore and Language Archive. They’ve got everything from serious scholarship about dictionaries to students’ papers about all sorts of things. The student papers come from courses where the prof has set an essay assignment about something related to language, and some of the actual papers are deposited at MUNFLA. Some are handwritten, and some use the newfangled typewriter. Spanning the period of mostly the 1980s, but also with some from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’90s as well, there are a lot of pretty well-written papers on various aspects of bathroom graffiti, with not only examples but also good conclusions about what this, as the scholars call it, latrinalia, says about society. And of course as I look back at it now at least forty years later, it’s interesting to see what has changed and what has not in the subject matter.

Before I get to the graffiti at Memorial University, I want to give a little background about what current researchers have to say about the topic in general. (And by the way you can find a list of all my sources, including the students’ papers, given in the show notes of this episode.) One scholar writes that the practice of writing graffiti is very old (it didn’t start in bathrooms) and goes back to over two thousand years ago. I also like one pretty succinct description: “Researchers are consistently impressed by two characteristics of these graffiti: an unusual number are in rhyme, and many are quite raunchy.” I haven’t really paid much attention to graffiti lately, but that description strikes me as pretty applicable even today.

Over the centuries, though, graffiti has gotten more—well, I hate to call it sophisticated, so let’s just say focused and varied in its content. One writer writes:

… the instant dissemination of news by mass media produced a populace that was far more informed and who possessed a greater awareness of current issues. Graffiti reflected all of these changes—wall inscriptions became more literate and more self-conscious. The bathroom stall was a perfect place to expound on social and political issues because there would be a captive audience who had nothing to do but read.

Researchers of latrinalia have also noticed that there are big differences between graffiti by women and graffiti by men. One says that there are two main differences:

The first is that women’s graffiti are more interactive and interpersonal; one will raise a question and others will provide a string of responses and serious replies … Men write about sexual conquests, prowess and frequency of performance … Women’s graffiti are more conventional and deal with relationships; men's are more individualistic and deal with isolated sex acts and organs.

Another researcher concludes similarly:

The graffiti in men’s bathroom stalls were more impersonal, vulgar, competitive, and aggressive. There were more sexually explicit graffiti, both textual and pictorial form, but also more humor, as well as more insults … In the women's bathroom stalls, philosophical graffiti dominated … Female graffiti were much more supportive and more relationship-oriented than male graffiti. This is in sharp contrast to graffiti in men’s bathrooms, which tend not to be supportive, with few exceptions.

One of the students quote’s Alfred Kinsey’s statistic that about 85% of male graffiti is sexual in nature, whereas less than 25% of female graffiti is.

So let’s have a look at the university student papers in the Folklore and Language Archive. Although, as one student writers, there is a “tremendous spectrum of topics,” it’s no surprise that the predominant topic is sex, but the amount of homophobic content is very striking. A lot of it refers to AIDS (remember, this was the 1980s) and it’s pretty virulent and harsh in many cases. Some examples:

·        All faggots should be terminated: kill, dismember, shoot, fry, cut off cock, cut off head

·        Homosexuals deserve Aids

·        Faggots should be slaughtered

·        Fuck you homos

·        Aids is not a disease it’s a cure

There is also a lot of what one student calls “tea-room trade,” that is, “graffiti which attempts to arrange a sexual contact with another bathroom user.” For example, “Meet in showers for gay encounter.” Another student reports that it’s in the stalls of the bathroom in the Education building that gay people meet to have sex. And by the way some of the graffiti is used for heterosexual comments and arrangements of this sort as well, for example:

·        $5 gets good head from Debbie L

·        Girl needed by young stud … leave appropriate name of bunny or call [number] with name

And there are other topics as well. For example, the never-ending animosity between the “townies” (students from St. John’s) and those from the smaller communities (“baymen”). One student calls it “the war of Baymen vs Townies.” An example: “Yes, but do townies know anything about sex anyway? They are all to interested in trying to look good. Yuppie Puppies!”

Another phenomenon that some of the students notice, just as scholars have, is the difference between men’s and women’s graffiti, as I’ve mentioned. Men write the primal sexual stuff, while women avail themselves of the bathroom walls to have conversations, to be more “interactional.” One female student writes:

Young women are exposed to conflicting sexual standards in our society, and … this leads to confusion … the graffiti seems to function to give women a forum to discuss their own attitudes and voice their confusion, without having to deal with face to face condemnation.

There is also a lot of humorous graffiti in the Memorial bathrooms, though humour is very subjective of course. One student complains in their paper that “there was a singular dearth of really clever comments.” One graffitist, presumably ironically, calls themself Shakespeare with the line “her eyes are asshole brown.” And another one thought just the rhyme was enough to make it poetry: “Listen here you cycling fuck / I hope you get hit by a transport truck.”

My favourite two passages from the papers I looked at, though, were grammatical and philosophical. One student wrote that “graffiti is also full of mistakes of grammar and spelling.” And another student, perhaps a little tired but still hopeful after having had to sit in bathroom stalls to complete their paper, wrote:

“In conclusion, I wish to make clear my eagerness for the day when women’s latrinalia will be dominated by repartee and witty quips rather than insinuations of insecurities and inadequacies. In short, Women should be obscene / And not absurd.”

And that’s all for this episode. Special thanks to Pauline and Kait at the archive for providing the materials and giving me such a comfortable place to research. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please give me a like on Apple or Spotify. And join me again next Saturday.