Filthy Matters
December 29, 2025 at 04:30PM“So you see, the elimination of bodily wastes, in an architectural space shared with others, has always been fraught.” In this essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Calvin Gimpelevich examines the global and personal history of public toilets, tracing their origins to the communal bench latrines of ancient Rome. As Gimpelevich takes us into modern times, he explores the politics of public bathrooms, and shows how these spaces reveal enduring social anxieties about bodies, privacy, and belonging.
Public life is open, social, revealed, as opposed to the private, which is hidden, withdrawn. The concept of a “public,” including the question of who belongs to it, is a political idea related to citizenship and the ability to move through and alter the world. The European and American public in the 19th century was a male sphere. Men (ideally) moved through the streets, while women stayed in the home. The men availed themselves of the semipublic facilities of pubs and clubs, in open urinals, and, soon enough, in public toilets built especially for them. By now, it was socially uncomfortable to shit next to a stranger on a forica-style bench, and so stalls were introduced. And it was unthinkable for men and women to share a privy, the sexes being separated in almost all aspects of life.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/29/history-public-bathrooms/
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