Aloha! from Hawaii!

You might say that our specialities at the Privy Counsel include, in no particular order, intellectual rigour, appreciation of mixer taps, and drinking each other under the table. Drinking together is undeniably difficult when you are spread out all over the world, but on the other hand, there is always someone, somewhere, who is awake when you urgently need to rant about the patriarchy and discuss the best methods of making mulled wine in the microwave.

We always aim to highlight and applaud the intelligence of our Friends and contributors at the Privy Counsel, but imagine our surprise when it turned out that Jonny hadn't realised that half the point of being a Counsel member is having drinking companions in different time zones. Still, we believe that that toothsome young stripling, under the wise tutelage of Shewee Fiend Friend and Tudor Friend, has now seen the light. As Tudor Friend so astutely remarked, "You guys are onto something really profound and brilliant. It's 3 a.m., I'm gonna go pour an amaretto."

We would like to illustrate the truly international nature of this intellectual bog blog by showing you Shewee Fiend Friend's toilet photos from Hawaii, where she attended a conference!

The house I'm staying in is 100 years old and has mostly original plumbing fixtures in the bathrooms

Im sitting in the worst paper
So boring
So that gives me time to send you toilet pictures!
[Friend]'s 100 year old house. Super old for Hawai'i
My bedroom:
Oh I didn't take a picture of that
Drat

It had an old school water basin and pitcher
That was cool
Whatever
The bathrooms all had old fixtures

I love the waste tap
The other bathroom was cooler

I love the old pipes. They're totally green
Anyway, not super special but mildly interesting
I also passed a bathroom on a random corner

Looks charming from the outside

This is the entryway
Where you start to get suspicious
Rightly so

Don't look too close
I think that toilet seat is the first one ever made
It was surprisingly clean despite being ancient and disgusting
But I liked the chained toilet paper

[pause, while Privy Counsellor rants about something trivial, self-induced and preventable]

So Japanese restaurant

Look at all that stuff

I used the mouth wash

What I didn't use was this

Space age toilet that will wash and dry my front or rear
Also accessible

This is of course, as regular readers are only too aware, not the first time that Shewee Fiend Friend has waxed lyrical on the subject of Japanese- and space toilets.

And self cleaning

It lit up inside for the self cleaning which began when I entered the room and after I flushed
I took pictures and showed the person I was with. He was slightly less excited than me but still excited

His bathroom also had lots of fun things but no bidet and no pads
He dared me to use the bidet
But I've never used one before and with my lack of coordination, at a restaurant is not the right place to try

[toilet discussion ends, to be replaced with 1) discussion about a Latin translation, and 2) rants about the patriarchy]

In case you're getting stressed about Christmas, here is a bonus picture of what we assume is a Hawaiian sunset, since we find it unlikely that Shewee Fiend Friend would be up in time to be gawking at the sunrise.

 Are you going about huffing and feeling that "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart"? In that case, you should definitely avoid our Facebook page, where we are encouraging yuletide cheer by doing a photo series called the 12 Days of Jonny. Here is a picture from that - though we say it ourselves - really rather spiffing Babe Parade!

Jonny with a bacon butty. In a toilet. Ding-dong!

 
The St Lucy celebration is done and dusted in Scandiwegia, and went well this year, too, thanks to all the women doing unpaid work getting all the stuff ready on time. Christmas, as everyone knows, is another occasion when women perform countless feats of emotional and physical labour, entirely without pay and often without receiving the smallest token of gratitude. Today's Festive Video is for all the women out there doing endless, thankless, unpaid labour.

Festive Video: Brandy Clark, Three Kids, No Husband

Related Reading

All posts featuring Jonny
All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend
All posts featuring Tudor Friend 
Shewee Fiend Friend's previous foray into Japanese and space toilets: To Boldly Go, Etc
All posts featuring Christmas

Lofty Airs

Shewee Fiend Friend sent us photos from an airport toilet, intriguingly omitting to tell us which airport. At first we were vastly curious, but then we thought, what does it matter? Let these toilets be anonymous! Let them represent a higher plane of being than the mere physical shell that encumbers our would-be-soaring souls. Let them epitomise the ur-toilet, the Platonic ideal of a Really Great Bog! Let them, with their cleanliness, disability-friendliness, mixer taps, and general high standard, be a beacon of hope to plumbing despairers the world over.

If our first thought was "Where the flying fuck is this, then?", our second thought was "That is like the level of niceness that the airport in Istanbul aspired, yet so dismally failed, to reach", and our third "Also it falls under the label 'Almost seeing people', which is one of our favourite labels". In short, we took this toilet to our hearts. 

The failure of the toilet seat to go all the way round tells us that this toilet is most likely located in the US, or at least in North America. The disability friendliness is rampant: there are bars to grip, and the flush mechanism looks easy to operate, not requiring mechanical strength.
It looks like the floor has been recently cleaned, which is of course a good thing, but rather reminds us, unfortunately, of the Horror of the British Workplace. Should this blog employ trigger warnings?
Luckily, the sign also reminds us of something happier: Australian Friend's report from the Pirate's Tavern in Melbourne.

Enjoy Almost Seeing Shewee Fiend Friend! Woof! Also, that is a motion-sensor tap! Hubba!

Now then, now then, what's all this? No coat hook from which to hang one's rucksack? In an airport? Perhaps this is not the ideal toilet after all.

We shall stay in the realm of the fabulous (in the original sense), making a metaphorical journey with Meandering Friend to the legendary Höga Kusten. Meandering Friend's message, which we received not long ago, read:

[The Privy Counsellor]!!! Jag har varit på toa (utedass) men utsikt över högakusten-bron idag

([The Privy Counsellor]!!! I have been to a toilet (outdoor privy) with a view of the Höga Kusten bridge today)

What a friendly, welcoming sight! This reminds us, naturally, of the Swiss toilet Dragon-Hunting Friend sent us pictures of many years ago!

This also reminds us of German Friend's Alpine delight

One questions the need for a Wunderbaum in this naturally forest-fresh environment, but since this is our favourite type of coat hook, we won't rant needlessly.

Hello! You can almost see Meandering Friend! What a delightful picture!

Cleaning facilities AND ventilation! Does the heart race just a little...?

What a marvellous view!

Meandering Friend's message continued:

God ventilation (se 2*vent-system), goda rengöringsmöjlighteter och övrig konventionell doftprevention

(Good ventilation (see 2-vent system), good cleaning facilities and other conventional smell prevention)

 Do you feel refreshed and invigorated? We certainly do!

Before we move on to the Festive Video, let us remind you that you - yes, you! - have the chance to win a signed photograph of Jonny. (In case you're struggling to remember, Jonny counts as a Privy Counsel Friend for administrative reasons, and we once wrote him a lonely hearts ad which, by the way, worked. (Well, we're assuming it did - it was a great ad.)) A signed! Photograph! Of Jonny! All you have to do is send in your best photos of toilet graffiti. Good luck!

Since Shewee Fiend Friend and Meandering Friend are both people with whom we are prone to end up discussing the gender wage gap (yesterday was (Un)equal pay day in the UK, by the way - women now work for free for the rest of the year), let's have a Festive Video about the considerable levels of HTFU that are required just to get through the day, if you happen to be a woman (a calamity affecting roughly 50 percent of the world's population).

Festive Video: Sister C, Faint of Heart
(Or listen to the audio version here)



Related Reading: 

Rosy-Fingered Dawn (But No Bloody Lock on the Door) in Istanbul

All posts featuring Almost Seeing People

All posts featuring airports

All posts featuring toilets in mountains:
Norwegian Wood
Alpine Escapism
Remembering to Breathe

A rather splendid post about the massive fucked-up-ness of being a woman:
If You Can Meet with Triumph and Disaster

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

All posts featuring Meandering Friend

All posts featuring Australian Friend

All posts featuring German Friend 

All posts featuring Intellectual Friend

All posts featuring Dragon-Hunting Friend

All posts featuring Jonny

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Sometimes, we miss the nineties. At such times we recline pensively on our chaise-longue, stare wistfully out the window at the brick wall opposite, and feel an inescapable nostalgia for bootcut jeans, fax machines, and a time when Nazis were still considered bad guys.

Ah, the nineties. Remember Lauryn Hill's That Thing? Remember Ace of Base? Remember Indiana Jones? We would hate to be the age we were during the nineties again, and are supremely grateful for our current level of comparative maturity and relative wisdom, but some nineties phenomena, like the widely held stance that Hitler was insane and that a murderous government propagating a gibberish racist doctrine was about as welcome as herpes, are prone to make us feel ever so slightly maudlin after the third gin and tonic.

Let us enjoy some nostalgia-inducing toilets. We recently went to visit the church in Norra Åsum, in the south of Sweden, for perfectly sane and normal reasons. While there we snuck into the very hygienic toilet, and also enjoyed a casual runestone propped up against the wall.

Norra Åsums kyrka. Image from Wikipedia.

This stone insists that the very muscular Bishop Absalon had the church built, probably in the 1190s. The 1190s were, we imagine, like the 1990s, a time when the people were united in their conviction that psychos in uniform were, at best, comical, and, at worst, a threat to public safety.
Image from geshcichteskandinavien.de

We don't know about you, but we find this wallpaper - probably from the '80s, don't you think? - comforting. The soap is Bliw, one of our favourites (it is so very soothing - and environmentally friendly!). The functional and friendly mixer tap is everything that Nazis are not.

Paper towels, the very reassuring '80s wallpaper, and a comforting boiler of some kind.

Even more reassuring: a first-aid kit! And a sturdy coat-hook that makes us feel very safe indeed.

Our correspondent on this occasion was wearing a leather jacket from the late nineties. Woof!

This medieval grave monument is found in the porch of the church, on your right as you exit the toilet. It depicts two dudes, which is unusual on this kind of monument. We are unable to find any information about this, but if any of our rampantly intelligent readers know anything about it, you are hugely welcome to inform us, especially if you have information pertaining to the very stylish and woof-inducing codpieces.
While aware that one should not apply modern notions of sexuality onto the past, we are nonetheless imagining these two dudes to be rampantly homosexual, in the process of growing Village People-style handlebar moustaches, and spending their spare time pressing flowers while wearing glitter tank tops, just because we imagine that this vision of non-normative masculinity would make Nazi gobshites uncomfortable.

Today's Festive Video makes us truly nostalgic. It is from a time when you could joke about Nazis because the assumption was that everyone agreed they were evil. How things change. Fuck it. We're off to drink some more gin and maybe nibble a madeleine cake or four.

Festive Video - Father Ted, Father Ted visits Father Fitzpatrick

Related Reading

Another post featuring medieval stuff and a first-aid kit in the same area:
 An Antiquated Update

Posts about Nazis:

Nothing Is Certain But Death, Taxes, and Knees

If You Are a Medievalist in Your Mid- to Late Thirties, and/or Want to Save the World, This Is for You 

Rampant Murderous Nazis Are Taking Over the World, But Here Is a Picture of Jonny In a Toilet, for Your Convenience and Comfort

Good Times, Good Friends, Good People

You know how you spend some days wishing you lived in the same country as your friends, so you could take diclofenac and eat cheesy popcorn together? The world got a lot darker last week, and it looks like it will continue getting darker for the foreseeable future. It feels more important than ever to stay close to, and drink alcohol with, those friends that light up the darkness with their wit and their kindness. Many of our friends live in a different country or even a different continent from us, which means that we spend a disproportionate amount of our time being sober, and hanging out on social media at odd times of the day, ranting about the patriarchy with equal parts belligerence and sleepy-eyed incoherence. It is a good thing that we have the internet, and the Privy Counsel, to keep us connected! As you all know, the Privy Counsel is an international community of intellectuals, giving counsel, advice and information on toilet-related topics. We also care deeply about human rights, and will continue bellowing about the equal value of all human beings, regardless of sex, colour, and sexuality. (Though we draw the line at hanging out with people who listen to Coldplay.)

Today is the 19th of November which, as all regular readers are aware, is World Toilet Day! Hurrah! It is surely no coincidence that the birthday of the person who suggested we start this blog, in order to get all the toilet whingeing out of our system and stop annoying our friends with it, falls on WORLD TOILET DAY? We think not! Happy birthday, Enlightened Friend! These past six years of delightful ranting would never have happened without you! It is actually also our own birthday - we turn six years, one month and one day today! Hurrah!


Also, we received a message from Shewee Fiend Friend this afternoon! That fierce feminist is presently in Canada, and writes thusly:

I was in a delightful bathroom today!

We went to a Cajun themed restaurant

Bon temps

Which locals pronounce 'bone tempts'

Because they are ignorant farmers who think 'French' is a strange illness

Anyway, we had awesome brunch

You know my feelings about brunch

Crayfish eggs Benedict

Mmmmmmmmm

Mmmmmmmmm

Mmmmmmmm

With a morning cocktail

Here's the bathroom

 Lousy blurry picture for the men's

Because who cares about them

We love almost seeing people!

Obviously there's mixer taps. It is a developed country

I love the mirrors everywhere

We once spent a very memorable evening - in the sense that we can't remember very much of it - with Shewee Fiend Friend in a pub with an awesome ceiling in Winchester.

 Awesome roof

Both stalls wheelchair accessible

I suppose the coat hook was so cool someone was inspired to tear it off and take it home

That's all I got for you

 Woof! Many thanks to Shewee Fiend Friend! Another friend, who we know through Shewee Fiend Friend, sent us this festive link to celebrate World Toilet Day! The link leads to a site that - how fabulous is this! - tells you how to review a toilet from a disability perspective! Said friend says:

It's world toilet day! We were sent an email at work about accessible loos! I thought of you...

As you know we care deeply about disability friendliness at the Privy Counsel, and not only because, in that vast and inhospitable desert of fucked-up toilets known as Britain, the disabled toilet is usually much cleaner and has a much better tap than the ordinary toilets. Certain members of the Privy Counsel suffer from a chronic RSI which has at times been so crippling that they have been unable to turn flush handles or taps, and we thus tend to note whether a toilet is disability friendly or not.

Before we break off to go ogle pictures of Justin Trudeau - so lithe! and so deliciously feminist! - let's have a festive video that reminds us of our friends! Hurrah!

Festive Video - Little Big Town, Good People

Related Reading
A pub in Winchester with a very creepy ceiling, where we went once with Shewee Fiend Friend: Hallowen Horror - Drunken Graffiti and Mindless Lurching in Winchester
All posts featuring Enlightened Friend
All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend
All posts featuring Canada

Shooting the Shit - Let Us Get Rid of Transgender Bathroom Bigotry

Editor's note, 1 January 2022

It happens that one, on obtaining new information, changes one's opinion on things. This has happened to us. Events that took place in 2016 and 2017 caused us to seek information on gender ideology, leading to a complete turnaround on the issue of toilets. We've expounded our views on this in several posts, for instance these ones:

"Let Them Eat Cake" - Could It Be Any More Obvious That a Man Designed These Toilets? 

Things That Are Better Than Elvis

Divide [the Toilets] and Conquer [One of a Multitude of Aspects of Women's Subjugation to Male Violence]

Stockholm Central Station: The Trauma Is So Great We Are Brought To Quoting Cicero

Still, below follows an account of our views in April 2016./

 

The conclusion one comes to after five and a half years of running an intellectual toilet blog is that it is persistently topical. Bathrooms figure frequently in the news at the moment, due to the irrational and bigoted efforts by various US legislators to enforce bathroom bills that discriminate against transgender people.

This fabulous picture came our way via Kick-Arse Suffragette Friend. Image from lgbt.gaybies.

We have ranted a fair bit about how we are opposed to unisex toilets if they force one to share a sink with a barrage of bearded hipster dudes (and also if they force one to share a sink with a barrage of polyester-suited businessmen), due to a concern for women's safety.

However, the bigoted bathroom laws in the US have highlighted the fact that transgender people, as well as cis women, are at risk of suffering violence at the hands of men. For this reason we feel it is important to clarify our stance on gender-neutral bathrooms.

We are mentally cheering this bearded hipster dude on, waving balloons and blowing those festive rolled-up paper things that go "toot". Image from Transadvocate.

We are not the only ones to have pointed out that the biggest threat to women and children is not transgender people. Neither is it sharks, nor bears, nor deranged psycho killers armed with sharp implements. The biggest threat to women and children - and also to transgender people - is cis men. That is, normal dudes.

Transgender people are vulnerable to hate crimes and violence, and need to be protected from the bigotry of the uneducated. Let us, therefore, collectively embrace unisex toilets!

Unisex toilets, however, like any other toilets, need to be done right. There needs to be privacy and sturdy doors (instigators of flimsy cubicles will be put on our black list and branded as enemies of the people), and one needs the option to wash one's hands in seclusion. If bearded hipster dudes want to wash their hands together that's up to them, but we would rather not wash ours while being stared at by said bearded hipster dudes.

Here are some unisex toilets so cleverly designed that one doesn't even reflect upon the fact that they are unisex!

First up are the toilets in the shopping centre in Burlöv, outside Malmö. We don't spend a lot of time in shopping centres, whether in Burlöv or anywhere else, due to them being vile. However, we actually needed to buy something once, and consequently trekked to Burlöv. The staff were nice, and we suffered no unreasonable trauma. Moreover, the toilets were really cool!

The toilet sign! Quite friendly, isn't it? It has a binary gender approach which one could criticise if one were so inclined, but on the other hand it is enriched with Braille, and thus disability-friendly.
(To be honest, we have no idea how helpful this sign is, if at all, to a partially sighted person. Sometimes it is the thought that counts!)

How swish is this! Unfortunately we don't seem to have photographed the inside of these toilets,
but look how fancy the outside is!

Next, let us look at the toilets in the Orkanen building at Malmö University.

Here is a similar set-up to the one above - many doors, all with the binary toilet sign, and a disability toilet at the end.

We enjoyed this set-up hugely: a good mixer tap, plenty of soap, and paper towels.

Not one but TWO sturdy coat hooks!
At this point in the photography proceedings, we died a little from happiness.

The student union's toilet-based newsletter is called Skitviktigt.

The English-language version is called The Toilet Paper.

We have been to Malmö University many times, and have never even reflected on the fact that these toilets are unisex. Malmö University is rather prone to be crawling with bearded hipster dudes, but we have never felt threatened or uncomfortable here, and the toilets have always been clean and well maintained. Well done, Malmö University!

Let us finish with a festive video, to celebrate the arrival of the weekend! We went to see the Dixie Chicks the other day, and they were just as fabulous as you would expect. Let's have their supremely festive video about how to combat domestic violence. We are rather inclined to agree with the Dixie Chicks' statement that they "do not advocate premeditated murder, but love getting even".

Festive video - Dixie Chicks, Goodbye Earl

Related Reading

Previous posts featuring unisex toilets:

Love, Politics and the Revolution

Caitlin Moran Really Does Make Everything Better

Unisex Toilets - This Shit Gets Political

The Screaming Bloody Horror That Is Unisex Toilets, When Done Wrong

Hungover Ranting: Festschrift to Medievalist (With a Side-Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend

An article we liked in Slate:

Breitbart Proves What We Already Knew: Trans Women Are Not Bathroom Predators

An article we liked in the Huffington Post:

Not in the Name of My "Protection"

We love Michael Kaufman, of the White Ribbon Campaign.

A woman called Emily Waggoner has, rather fabulously, created a map showing the locations of toilets that are safe for transgender people

Postscript

Some of our best friends are bearded hipster dudes.