In Case You're Wondering What It Says . . .

[Randy W]

from the Sixth Tone

 

What Men’s Bathroom Graffiti Says About Chinese Masculinity

Public restrooms offer a canvas for young Chinese men to work through their sexual frustrations and anxieties.

 

 

The men’s bathroom offers a unique platform for discussions about sex and sexuality. In much of China, sex remains a taboo subject, especially for students, but shared bathrooms — which straddle the line between private and public space — offer men both the anonymity and a venue for pure expressions of masculinity. The dormitories at the university we studied generally house four students to a room, making the bathroom the only truly private, unsupervised space to which young Chinese university students have access. And as one of the very few venues where such language is tolerated, public bathrooms provide young men a rare outlet for these so-called vulgar or dirty sexual urges and their negative or repressed emotions.

It should come as no surprise that the way gender is portrayed on bathroom stall walls tends toward extreme exaggeration and fantasy. Men are depicted as being driven by a powerful sex drive and as overflowing with sexual prowess, whereas female bodies exist solely for the purposes of conquest and domination.

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Traditional, patriarchal stereotypes such as these give young Chinese men the confidence to use the walls of public bathrooms to disparage their female classmates both publicly and anonymously — shaming them for sexual promiscuity or accusing them of moonlighting as prostitutes. Of course, the real issue for men is less that these women are having sex, and more that they aren't having sex with them. As the Chinese saying goes, men expect “a housewife in the kitchen, a lady in the living room, and a prostitute in the bedroom” — and when women fail to meet that arbitrary standard, they become a target for mockery or slander.