As I mentioned earlier, I recently moved to Clemson in August and so I'm still familiarizing myself with Southern culture and Upstate culture in particular. While I was preparing to teach this course, I found something rather disconcerting in a blog post from a past student who presented a list of things that might need to be explained to someone new to Clemson: "What a boiled peanut is, why Tigers hate Gamecocks, don't ever order a milkshake at Mac's Drive In, and use your Maams and Sirs." I'm afraid to admit that I still do not know what a boiled peanut is, but the part that really stopped me in tracks--much more effectively than a Russian stop sign--was the prohibition against Mac's milkshakes. I suddenly broke out in a cold sweat because my family and I had recently eaten at Mac's Drive In. I remembered because we paid by check, which is unheard of in California. But had we ordered a milkshake? What was going to happen to us if we did? Did I need to see a doctor, STAT? I'm still not quite sure what exactly is wrong with Mac's milkshakes, but a couple months have passed and I feel relatively okay, so maybe I'm out of the woods.
The point is that cultural literacy can save your life, it can prevent a trip to the hospital, and it can help you to avoid significant embarrassment, which brings me to my main point about the dangers of water closets (If you're not sure what a water closet is, then you'll soon find out exactly what I mean).
The French psychologist Jacques Lacan likes to tell a story about restroom signs when speaking of his theories on semiology: "A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated across from each other in a compartment next to the outside window that provides a view of the station platform buildings going by as the train comes to a stop. 'Look,' says the brother, 'we're at Ladies!' 'Imbecile!' replies his sister, 'Don't you see we're at Gentlemen.'" This is a question of signs for Lacan, linguistic signs mainly, but visual signs cause the same problem. At the Carolina Ale House in Greenville, I took these photos of the restroom signs:
Pick-Ups for the men, I hope, because that's the one I used. Of course, there's no inherent characteristic of trucks or sportsters that makes them either feminine or masculine, which is the reason that the pictures include their corresponding gendered drivers. In this case, the signs must be read according to the culture in which they exist, but even this is pretty sketchy in this case (although I suppose there might be a law in S.C. that prohibits men from driving Mazda Miatas).
For those of you in France, things get even worse once you've actually made it through the correct door. Here is a list of the toilets I encountered while living in France and Italy:
1. low tank/center button
2. low tank/dual center button (I still haven't figured out what that second button is for.)
3. low tank/side lever
4. low tank/wall button
4. elevated tank/pull chain
5. elevated tank/side lever
6. elevated tank/wall button
7. ceramic hole with molded foot traction
8. automatic flushing with optional manual wall button
9. broken automatic flushing (the manual wall button also did not work, which I guess would place this one in the hole category)
10. In Florence, our hotel room had a toilet whose flush was so weak that management had added an auxiliary tank that sounded exactly like a 747 taking off from O'Hare.
11. low tank/rubik's cube lever (you have to complete at least two side in order to flush)
Once, in Palermo, I found a toilet that I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to flush, unsuccessfully I'm ashamed to say. I'm not sure if my cultural literacy skills were simply not developed enough or if the toilet was actually non-functional, but I sincerely hope that you'll have better luck during your water closet adventures throughout the coming months.
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