Smelly, dirty, sleazy: public toilets have a bad reputation. But Belfast's World Toilet Summit wants that to change, writes Fionola Meredith
The very idea of the public toilet is marked by contradictions. It's a place in which we seek privacy for intimate bodily functions, yet it's also a shared social space, open to all. It can be a temporary haven, a place to check appearance, to recover composure, to have a private chat. But it can also be squalid, dirty, unsafe; somewhere to tread carefully, leave quickly.
And sometimes we're a little embarrassed about using it at all.
The taboo about toilets is familiar to Raymond Martin, self-styled "toilet supremo" and chief executive of the Northern Ireland Toilet Association. He is one of the organisers of the 2005 World Toilet Summit, which opens in Belfast on Monday.
"People in Ireland don't like to be seen leaving public toilets," he says. "In the industry we call toilet cubicles 'traps': people open the door and they're off!" Since his days as a single father struggling to find a men's toilet with baby-changing facilities, Martin has been passionate about improving "away from home" toilet provision. A man who evidently savours the comforts of an excellent public toilet like a fine wine, he's proud to have brought the 2005 Summit to Belfast.
"It's the first major conference devoted to toilet provision and standards ever held in the Western world." Held at the Waterfront Conference Centre, the summit will feature 30 speakers and over 370 delegates from the toilet industry, health and cleaning services, civic councils and academia, hailing from all over the world. Conference proceedings will include the prestigious Loo of the Year Award, a Toilet Tour of Belfast (to include the famous Art-Deco conveniences at Stormont) and the launch of the Bog Standard campaign for better school toilets in the North. And the word is that Belfast's first retractable "p-pod" or "urilift" will be unveiled during the conference.
This futuristic stainless steel urinal - which remains underground during the day, then slowly rises out of the ground at pub closing time - is heralded as an answer to the nuisance of public urination.
But the touchstone of the entire event will be the signing of the "Belfast Protocol".
"It's a document which will set out the hopes and aspirations for higher standards of 'away from home' toilet provision throughout the developed world and developing world - in schools, in hospitals and all other public places," says Richard Chisnell, director of the British and Irish Toilet Association. "Toilet provision 'away from home' has a comparatively low priority in the West, in spite of the excellent initiatives of our Victorian ancestors. If we wish to see toilet standards rise, in line with other aspects of our daily lives, we need to encourage every country throughout the world to support the concept of a global standard of provision - both in terms of numbers of toilets available for public use and the quality of facilities provided."
It seems that some Asian countries take the idea of excellent loos a lot more seriously. The widely used Japanese high-tech toilet includes a blow dryer, seat heating, massage options, water jet adjustments, automatic lid opening and an integrated bidet. Aware that many Japanese women prefer to mask the sound of bodily functions, manufacturers introduced the popular 'Otohime' or 'Sound Princess' in the 1980s. A device which produces the sound of constantly flushing water, it's now standard in most new female public toilets in Japan.
Of course, public toilets are among the very few openly gender-segregated spaces in contemporary culture. Mary Anne Case, a specialist in the study of gender regulation at the University of Chicago Law School, says, "When there are separate spaces that you can't enter, you never know how the other half lives, and you never will."
The sexual politics of the public convenience are also the focus of a forthcoming book called Toilet Papers: the Gendered Construction of Public Toilets. Editors Olga Gershenson (of the University of Massachusetts) and Barbara Penner (of University College London) say that "public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division.
As such, they provide a fertile ground for critical work interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design."
And while it's often assumed that women pay more attention to the niceties of hygiene during the public toilet experience, this is a myth that Raymond Martin is keen to debunk.
"I used to work as a night porter in a hotel, and I can definitely say that women's toilets are much dirtier than the men's. You go in at the end of the night and it's horrendous - tissues, lipsticks, stuff spilt all over the floor."
Toilet ascetics like Martin and Chisnell want to see pristine doors and walls, free of scurrilous scrawls, on every public toilet in the land. But while most toilet graffiti is coarse, the standard of poetic or intellectual endeavour varies dramatically from place to place. Writing in the Spectator magazine when graffiti on the lavatory walls of the Bodleian Library in Oxford was being removed, Bijan Omrani protested, "Look closely, and you can see what has been washed away: furious arguments over Kierkegaard's concept of irony; the arrogance of the British; other verses and Oxford ditties lost for ever. Priceless literature and historical source material are disappearing every day."
While the news that Belfast is playing host to the 2005 World Toilet Summit has spawned many execrable jokes in the city, organisers and delegates are philosophical about the mockery, having heard it all before. They seem to take the view that theirs is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
For further information see www.2005worldtoiletsummit.com