On "Foreigners Street" in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, an unusual public urinal has been installed. And taken at face value, it's clever industrial design: four stand-up urinals in one unit, each with a plastic shield about a foot-and-a-half tall that closes at waist height to protect the pee-er's private parts from prying eyes. In theory, using the toilet should be no more embarrassing than peeing on the side of a building or into a shrub. As long as the wang isn't immediately visible, the logic goes, what shame is there in peeing publicly?
Foreigners Street, as you might have guessed, features a row of Western-style bars and is popular with tourists; but the most use these tourists have given these strange new amenities is to laughingly take pictures of each other as they pretend to pee.
The problem is that the receptacle itself is so unusual that it attracts attention on its own. Most people, upon seeing a peeing man in normal circumstances, will avert their eyes. But combine a peeing man and an unusual apparatus, and people's interest is piqued. Instead of an act of impolite uncouthness, public peeing becomes one of outright exhibitionism.
We male PoopReporters are at the moment comparing their techniques by which they clear their nozzles; and some of us employ some pretty vigorous techniques. But how many of us would be willing to "squeeze {your} tallywhaker and thrust from back to front" or "run your finger along the 'root' of the penis, upward, applying pressure, to help exude the last little viscid drop" knowing that hundreds of wide-eyed tourists are evaluating, analyzing, and possibly planning on You-Tubing our techniques?
If this urinal was on, say, "Natives Street," or "Authentic Street," tourists might not have a problem using it, thinking that they're engaging in a delightful local custom. But on "Foreigners Street," full of "Western-style bars managed by foreigners," the urinal is viewed by tourists as the Chinese municipality's interpretation of standard Western bathroom accommodations. Such cultural misjudgment, tourists think, is cute. It's kitsch. It's something to take pictures of. And it's something subject not to Chinese bathroom norms but Western ones. And since no Westerner would pee in something like this at home, no Westerner will pee in one on a street designed to evoke all the comforts of home. And so these urinals go unused.
