When teaching “The Politics of the Bathroom,” my students and I realized that nearly every social justice movement of the century has involved bathrooms.
Jim Crow laws and apartheid dictated separate bathrooms for whites and non-whites. Women’s liberation also fueled debate over bathrooms. Feminists coined the term “potty parity” to protest inequalities in the distribution of restroom facilities (restrooms for female senators were not provided in the U.S. Senate until 1992), while opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment argued that its passage would spell an end to separate bathrooms for men and women. Disability activists fought to make bathrooms accessible for individuals with physical handicaps.
Today, nothing is more symbolic of transgender politics in the U.S. than bathrooms. For a transgender individual, every trip to the bathroom is accompanied by anxiety and dread, so much so that many simply avoid public restrooms altogether, often risking their health. If transgender individuals cannot use public facilities, they cannot participate fully in public life. They cannot be regular consumers — or citizens.
Public bathrooms both reflect and construct sexual dimorphism, our sense that nature produces bodies of only two kinds. Those supporting “bathroom bills” — the legislation of separate bathroom facilities for men and women in public buildings — see sex as fixed and immutable. For supporters of transgender rights, the biology of sex is not so cut and dried: Genes, anatomy and hormones do not always line up neatly on one side or the other of an absolute divide. The concept of “gender” attempts to recognize that life can’t be defined in simple either/or terms; it’s a more complex, messier project.
Ultimately, public restrooms create social anxieties because they are spaces in which the public and private collide in the most intimate ways. While the need to eliminate unites us all, the design and distribution of bathrooms carve space according to social hierarchies of gender, race, class and ability, making the toilet a historic symbol of public debate
Rev. Rachel Kessler ’04 explores what “The Good Place,” a popular NBC sitcom about morality and the afterlife, can teach us about becoming better humans.
I started watching “The Good Place” when it first aired in 2016, and I had some initial reservations. The moral premise of the show — that human fate in the afterlife was determined by an objective calculation of morality points — seemed, from my perspective as a Christian priest, to lack grace.
That changed with Eleanor Shellstrop’s (Kristen Bell) shocking revelation at the end of the first season: “Holy motherforking shirtballs, we’re in the Bad Place!” As it turned out, not only were our main humans (Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason) actually in the Bad Place — all of humanity for the last 500 years had failed to attain entry to the titular Good Place.
That might seem like a depressing premise for a network sitcom, but I believe that assertion of humanity’s failure is the grace I longed for originally. Individualistic moral perfection is as undesirable as it is unobtainable. Through whatever permutations and reboots “The Good Place” has undergone, the recurring theme has been that humans improve only through their relationships with one another.
If there is a moral lesson to be learned from “The Good Place,” the show makes a compelling argument that pursuing individual perfection is a losing game. Instead, “good” comes from living fully into our relationships while loving and learning from one another.
If the “experiment” that began the show’s first season was a twist on Sartre’s classic line, “Hell is other people,” the show’s ultimate premise is the refutation. Or, to quote the great Jason Mendoza: “The Good Place was the friends we made along the way.”
The Rev. Rachel Kessler ’04 is the priest-in-charge of Harcourt Parish and Kenyon’s chaplain. She wishes she could sign up for Chidi’s philosophy lessons.