On a relatively quiet street corner, deep in the depths of
the old part of the Indian city of
Hyderabad,
I pass a high wall, painted with, “URINATION PROHIBITED.”
I frown. I was used to seeing
gentlemen standing on the sides of roads or up against walls in the tell-tale
wide-legged stance. But this wall was different. There weren’t even the dark
red betel stains (a dark red chewing
tobacco popular in the country) on the wall. “What do you think that’s about?”
I ask my companion.
“It’s a graveyard,” she says.
That made sense. Indian Muslims
traditionally bury their dead, so their bodies may rise up later. Of course you
would not want such a sacred place being defiled by urine.
Defiled—interesting
choice of words, says I to myself. Why is urine
defiling? To many of us, public urination is disgusting. According
to Rozin and colleagues’
CAD
moral emotions hypothesis, offenses against the community breed contempt,
offenses against individual autonomy breeds anger, and offenses against
‘divinity’ (purity, sanctity) breed disgust. Public urination, then, is a very
literally an offense against divinity in the case of the graveyard wall.
Many people have very strong
reactions to public urination. In
India, a man was
allegedly killed
over the fact that he was urinating at a gas station.
Another article asks why
this is such a problem in
India,
and cites a lack of “civic sense” or a lack of public urinals as the cause.
This is bemoaned as an issue in
Western countries as well. In the US, you can be cited as a sex offender for
urinating in public or receive huge fines, in spite of the fact that for many
people, there are literally no other places to go. (Think taxi cab drivers in
New York—presuming you
could find a restroom and that someone would let you use it in a Starbucks or
such, where would you park?) Anxieties about public urination in late hours has
resulted in urinals in the
UK
that rise up out of the
ground in the late hours in order to accommodate drunk men.
I’m going to stop here and point
out that anxieties about public urination are entirely focused around men.
Women have been long conditioned to hold it for long hours rather than drop
trousers and squat in public spaces. There is also a significantly different
amount of bodily exposure involved in the two processes—guys just unzip and go,
women have to actually expose their entire genital area.
Let’s just flip this question
though—not so much why do people urinate publicly, but why do people have a
problem with it?
First off, the smell is not
pleasant—whether this is a biological predilection or more of the association
of, ‘ewwww someone peed here, that’s weird’, I’m not going to try to argue
right now. Second, there are those who argue that the acid damages statues and
cement. Third, it can leave stains which recall that someone pissed in public
(and dark stains are not necessarily very pretty).
As far as the act itself, people
are not comfortable with men’s genitalia being in public places. In great part,
in the
US,
this is closely related with our deep discomfort with our bodies—as animalistic
and natural, as ‘dirty’ (ie, getting rid of fluids and waste), and as sexual.
(On the human body, the parts of our body involved in sex and the parts
involved in elimination are close together, creating a deep discomfort with
both processes and their relations to each other.)
But I’m going to point out that
none of these are health issues. They are, for the most part, aesthetic issues,
caught up in our ideas of where urination can take place and what parts of the
body can be exposed where and who can expose them. (Body exposure is
notoriously culturally contingent—shoulders, for example, are scandalous in
India, whereas
stomachs, not so much. Here, more or less the opposite.) Urine is actually
quite benign, disease-wise. There are almost no diseases that can be
transmitted via urine.
So when we see a rise in concern
with public urination in other places, we have to ask, what shifted? What
changed about aesthetics or body beliefs or disgust or what-have-you? Because
public urination isn’t a health hazard, for the most part. So why do we have a
problem with it, and why is it emerging as a problem in other places? What can
this tell us about the spread of Western cultural values and anxieties?
This all said and done, I am going
to add that if a drunk guy pisses on my lawn on a Friday night, that doesn’t
mean I’m going to shrug it off as culturally relative.
I have the grass to think about,
after all.