So at one point while I was recently driving partway across the continent I hit a restroom in a gas station and noticed that someone had scribbled something crude and vulgar on the wall of the stall. And the thought that hit me was… “Hey, didn’t this stuff used to be everywhere?” It dawned on me that this sort of thing, which used to be inevitable and abundant in public men’s rooms, now seems to be almost entirely absent from at least the ones I’ve been in.
Is this other people’s experience as well?
A few hypotheses came to mind to explain that change:
1) I live in Utah now, so the great majority of such places I’m likely to visit are in Utah. Utahns are, on the whole, less uncivilized than people in many other regions.
2) Social Media Explanation 1: Those who used to use bathroom stalls as advertising for their perverted shenanigans now have Tinder and Grinder and Democratic Underground.
3) Social Media Explanation 2: Those who used to use bathroom stalls as a way to post hoax phone numbers to torment friends, former friends, ex-girlfriends now have Facebook
4) Social media Explanation 3: Those who used to use bathroom stalls as a way to scribble down jokes now have the CNN comment sections.
5) Social Media Explanation 4: People just don’t carry around pens like they used to. Hard to text a message to a stall wall.
6) Society is less coarse and crude now than twenty years ago.
7) People who maintain public restrooms are more diligent at cleaning the places up.
I suspect a whole lot of my experience is down to #1. Perhaps if I went to less civilized regions like Chicago or California, I’d see scribblings galore. Explanation 6 is almost certainly laughably wrong but, hey, completeness. Explanation 7 seems not unreasonable.