The Privatization of The American Toilet

For one reason or another, eventually we all need to leave the comfort and the safety of our homes and venture out into the great, unwashed mass of humanity known as the public. Just being in public is bad enough as it is, and we all do whatever it is we can to make the most of the experience. But sometimes, when you least expect it, it happens: the deep, gurgling squelch of liquid panic fills your bowels. Fight or flight mode kicks in in an instant: your palms sweat, your heart races, and your eyes widen and dart around in all directions to take in a full field of vision in the hopes of finding relief.

And yet as each passing second counts down to calamity, there are seemingly never any toilets to be found, anywhere. Bathrooms seem to have been an oversight of the imagination in God’s creation of the greatest country to ever exist: The United States of America. We’ve hidden them all away, in the farthest reaches of the darkest corners of the dimmest shadows.

And why? Because of one simple reason: poop is embarrassing. There is no greater reminder of the folly of man than the existence of our own wretched excrement. Because no matter how evolved we think ourselves of being, biologically we’re little more than feral animals with scatological compulsions we will never be able to transcend. And while other animals may defecate freely, openly, almost proudly in nature, it’s the sign of a civilized species to do one's private business, well, privately. Is it then fitting or is it ironic, that the private rooms where we do our private business with our private parts have been so thoroughly privatized by capitalist endeavor?

Think about it: when you really need to find a bathroom, what do you look for? Typically, your safest option is the sanctuary that is the Great American Corporation. Across the land of spacious skies and amber waves of grain, the customary sign for “bathroom” is not the white silhouettes of a stick man and a stick woman (with her identifiably feminine skirt) we believe them to be. Those white, gender-conforming peoples are little more than red herrings. No, the real universal signs for “bathroom” in America have been gratuitously stamped into our collective unconscious from generations of psychic trauma due to economic warfare. The most recognizable iconography to have ever existed in all human history is undeniably the corporate logos of American fast food chains. Bright neon signage illuminates the sprawling American landscape of purple mountain majesties and fruited plains across every interstate highway rest stop. McDonald’s, Starbucks, Wendy’s, Arby’s, KFC, Taco Bell, Subway, Chipotle, Dunkin Donuts, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, all create a palinopsia of the eternal symbols of both the disposal of waste and the consumption of it.

The most recognizable of any of these logos as being the universal bathroom symbol is the two-tailed mermaid better-known as the Starbucks Siren. Starbucks has been unofficially crowned “America’s Toilet” by anyone who has had the runs after spending an employee’s entire hourly wage on a dirty paper cup of their burnt coffee. The company built its empire upon the business model of a “third place,” a public space that exists outside of the bounds of home and work. And there’s something distinctly dystopian about a large corporation making billions in profits each year by bastardizing the concept of collectivized, communal space and yet being so thoroughly anti-union. Howard Schultz? More like Howard Stalin.

This isn’t just baseless complaining by some bleeding heart radical; the public reliance on private toilets is a well studied phenomenon in the sphere of public health and safety, and one of the many ways our human nature is bought and sold right back to us.

“The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land/ I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed/ I woke up this morning with a frappucino in my hand”
-Nick Cave

The Shifting Landscape [sic]

The best indicator of the increasing dryness of America’s “bathroom desert” is how Starbucks has been shifting its business model from "communal" to "convenience," as they close multiple sitdown locations in favor of pick-up and drive-thru only windows. But that’s just the canary in the coal mine.

Within the past few years alone, how many bathrooms across this once great country now have locks with four digit codes that you must beg an employee to gain the esoteric knowledge of. How many restroom keys are shackled to embarrassingly large items “so they don’t get lost,” like some sort of Scarlet (in this case brown) Letter to publicly signify our shame to others. How many establishments only let you use their restroom "if you've purchased something," essentially holding your own shit hostage inside of you for the ransom of a $5 minimum on credit card purchases? The privatized bathroom system in the United States is meant to demean, demoralize, infantilize, humiliate, and discriminate against colon-having persons.

And what promised lands these business’ restrooms all are! Milk and honey splattered across the toilet seats, the walls, the floors, on occasion the ceilings. Narcotics found on diaper changing stations. Empty rolls of toilet paper rolling across the ground like tumbleweed. And unfortunately, public restrooms in the United States are currently not a viable alternative. When’s the last time you used the bathroom at a park, or a library? Were those any more of a Shangri-La?

As Mark Fisher points out in his seminal work Capitalist Realism, modern anti-capitalist “alternatives” only ever serve to reinforce capitalism, and do nothing to serve as legitimate antitheses to capitalist ideology. For this reason I believe actual “public” toilets in the United States to be a conspiratorial false flag; a way for the corrupt bureaucracy of  "small government" fascists to infiltrate government programs and render them ineffective as proof that they need to be dismantled. However, dismantling the public toilet system in the U.S. would be foolish, as they still serve some purpose to the working class as a warning of the dangers of what a communist takeover of the United States might look like.

“If you want a vision of the future Winston, imagine an ouroboros, shitting into its own mouth- forever.”
-George Orwell, 1984

What Is To Be Done?

One possible solution that has taken root in much of Europe and would thus be decried by Americans as “socialist” are public pay toilets. Like most American complaints of socialism, the unwillingness to adapt such infrastructure is riddled with contradiction. It’s socialism, yet you must pay money to use them. And yet at the same time, the obliviously entitled American will scoff at the idea of paying to use a bathroom.

The toilets themselves only cost a coin or two, and the payment goes toward an attendant that makes sure the bathrooms are at all times clean and well stocked. But like all European social democratic reforms, these bathrooms are nothing more than a half-measure, albeit one that’s better than the current system we have. But it’s something most Americans would rather die than adopt. “Give me free bathrooms but ones owned by large multinational conglomerates or give me death,” they say.

So what’s to be done? Should we resign ourselves to accepting that the private bathroom system is the best we could ever hope to achieve? That our ambitions shouldn’t dare go beyond that? We should be so lucky to have the bathrooms we have! Why risk messing with the current system if there’s the chance we get something worse?

Negative Rights, Negative Lefts

One of the largest blights (among many) on the legacy of the Founding Fathers was in forgetting to include “Right to Basic Biological Functions” into the United States Constitution's "Bill of Rights." According to them in their infinite wisdom, human beings only have about 8 rights maximum; whatever they were too lazy to write down would be considered unenumerated and/or left up to the states. If we were well behaved, maybe they would add in a few more amendments later. For this reason I call the last two amendments in the Bill of Rights the “Wishful Thinking” amendments.

For people obsessed with the Lockian ideals of "life, liberty, and property (never to be confused with ‘the pursuit of happiness’)," this leaves a whole hell of a lot on the table. Does the right to "life" not require the needs to sustain life? What do they consider “life,” and what does that entail? As so-called "enlightened" animals of a social nature do we not require food, water, and the sanitary elimination of bodily waste?

Proponents of negative rights over positive ones would foolishly argue that the right to a bathroom would necessitate a compulsory "slavery" class of bathroom attendants, shackled to mops and buckets, forced to clean and plunge. Similar it must be to them that public defenders, guaranteed to us in the sixth amendment, must somehow be chattel to the state.

How advanced do these people wish our civilization to be, anyway? Do they wish of us to openly defecate in the streets, like we’re some underdeveloped nation state? Or is their solution to throw those who defecate openly due to our poorly allocated sanitation infrastructure into the incarceration system, a form of slavery they seem to condone? For what crime? The “crime” of basic biology and the societal misappropriation of necessary resources?

If the government will not intervene, I demand the right to shit in these political pedants’ private domiciles. They may claim some "non aggression principle" that disallows me from entering their property, but how exactly is that private property theirs? By their own admission as believers in so-called "natural rights" their home belongs to me now. I've marked my territory!

I Would Prefer Not To

The only reasonable solution to this quagmire I’ve laid forth is one popularized by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “I would prefer not to.” And it’s one that’s already taking root in much of what’s being called the “Post-Covid Era.” Similar to the phenomenon known as quiet quitting, I propose a new made up trend for media elites in their ivory towers to write vapid think pieces about: quiet shitting.

The ethos of quiet shitting is quite simple: instead of searching for alternatives where there are none to be found, we begin a mass movement (or in this case, blockage) toward entirely opting out of using the bathroom in public. We already inhabit a society that is addicted to the internet, that would rather work from home in solitude than ever step foot in an office again, that doesn’t go out as much, doesn’t see movies in theaters anymore, who would rather order Uber Eats than go out to a restaurant, would rather use a self-checkout as to not encounter a customer service worker, and would in fact rather skip the brick and mortar entirely and just order groceries online. The seeds of revolution have already been sown, but so far only in the realm of consumption, not excretion. We've learned how not to consume, now we must learn how to hold it. It'll be hard at first, and many will fail in rather embarrassing displays. These heroes will be hailed as martyrs in our movement for global human rights.

This is the natural conclusion of the lifecycle of capitalism as it relates to the public sphere. For far too long has every aspect of collective, communal space been so heavily commodified that it’s no wonder we’re seeing the once giant shopping malls that robbed the public of the town square are now mostly sitting as abandoned lots in today’s society. So too must bathrooms in the United States become a wasteland. Only then will they be reborn in fresh, potable baptismal waters.

The time has come to tell all these public bathrooms in private businesses that when it comes to using the bathroom, “I would prefer not to.” If cryptocurrency “bros” can “HODL” (hold on for dear life) to their useless “shitcoins,” so can you hold your shit until you get home. As the overstock of unused toilet paper and hand soap mount up in their store rooms, these companies won’t be able to help but take notice of the impact that this large-scale direct inaction has on their bottom lines. The millions they’ll be wasting on unused complimentary toilet items will send a message to the ownership class that we won’t put up with their shit anymore, so they can have neither ours nor our business. Until legitimate public restrooms in this country become a guaranteed and enshrined right we must do everything we can to clog up the economy.

Shitters of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shame.

“But tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always swirling, swirling, swirling towards freedom!”
-Bill Clinton