The boys' room

People who have spent a lot of time around me know that I have a seemingly unnatural love of bathrooms. In specific, I love being in bathrooms. I love laying naked on their floors, sitting naked on their toilets, and gazing naked at their mirrors. I love eating breakfast in them. I love reading in them. I love listening to music in them.

This is not to even begin to describe all the things I like to do in the bathroom that other people (hopefully like to) do in the bathroom.

Some people are mystified by this behavior. Others can empathize completely with it. I have talked in depth with a few people about this matter, and most come to the same conclusion, however strongly: it's a gender thing.

Huzzah! A purely-gendered activity! That is to say, being and behaving in bathrooms is something that all people experience. Not only that, but it is double-tiered: public/gender-segregated restrooms offer a completely different experience from private/personal bathrooms, while the physical and social structures behind both are similar/equal/equitable across genders.

What I've come to suspect is that men tend to enjoy long, involved b-room visits more than women. For instance, as alluded to before, I enjoy getting naked and laying on the cool bathroom floor, or perhaps making a nest of a few towels and the bathmat. I love the acoustics of bathrooms. I love having the shower on as I camp out due to a) the white noise and b) the steam it produces. I love eating and reading magazines naked while surrounded by shower-created stimuli. All of these activities can be done by anybody, but I've found that men (/males?) tend to relate to these eccentricities better than women.

Why is this? I have a couple predictions.

First is that women and females, for the most part, spend more time and perform more functional tasks in the bathroom than men on a daily basis. Makeup and other beauty products take a while to put on. Showering takes longer, mostly due to more hair (which would also include many men) and shaving. And even if those gendered activities are taken out, there are still the anatomical differences that make going to the bathroom a more or less time-intensive task, as well as the fact that the various rituals of menstruation take place there.

As such, the overall difference may be one of perception. Women may find it bizarre that men spend long stretches of time in the bathroom doing nothing in particular, when in reality the total time may average out across genders. This doesn't necessarily explain the difference in experiences during that potentially-equal amount of time.

That is easily explained by a sociological concept I learned last semester: the difference between functional and expressive when examining gender. Functional tasks are ones that serve a purpose, such as working for a wage or preparing food. Expressive tasks involve emotions; invoking Maslow, expressive tasks are those that satisfy the higher needs in the hierarchy.

So, as one group of people performs a large number of functional tasks in a certain set and setting, they come to associate that location with functionality. The same holds true with expressive tasks. Since women/females spend more time, proportionally speaking, in the bathroom performing functional tasks, they come to associate not only any tasks that would take place within it with functionality, but the location itself as one devoted to functional goals.

Someone trained in the previous manner who observes another lounging around in the bathroom--using it as a place to relax and unwind and be naked--would likely find it as bizarre as going into the office to lay on the sofa in the lobby...or to fuck on the conference room table.

This begins to explore the issue, but I still have interviews to conduct to make sure I'm not headed down the wrong path. Maybe I'll come back to this...we'll see.