• Marx won a competition between him, Smith, and Wendell Berry. What the basis for the votes was is unclear; I assume “general awesomeness”.
• At least one person has been horny in the Reg. Thanks to UChicago Hookups, this can now be appreciated by the world at large, including those unfamiliar with bookstacks.
• UChicago: where knowledge of the names of non-Latin alphabets is a prerequisite for understanding our racism. New t-shirt, anyone?
• The evolution of man: Homo Economics.
• An exploration of metrics for one’s life, including love (courtesy of “Rent”), AIDS (is that response really necessary?), or, just measure your penis.
• Someone mastered chemistry. Someone else remains in the dark.
• Love was secret, and necessary for action.
• A woman announced her pregnancy. In the bathroom. In Arabic.
• I wonder if they’re not teaching cursive in schools these days.
• A discussion of the joys of being young and alive spun off in various directions, including homophobia and an appreciation of Latin.
• “To Delmore Schwartz” was joined by numerous other bits of celebratory, religious, and absurdist verse.

Given the current media frenzy over UChicago Hookups (now eduHookups– they’re going to have a great time with that at Brown), it seems fitting to close this post with a beautiful combination of aspiration and horniness, from the 4th floor women’s bathroom in Cobb, courtesy of Sarah Holzhausen.* “I want to have sex with what I want to become.” Anyone seen a post looking for “my future self, or someone like future me?”

* Yes, I take submissions! E-mail quinn [at] crescatgraffiti [dot] com with photos of university graffiti and where you found it.

We’ve got some sort of battle scene between UChicago archers and Princeton wizards. Of course, the outcome of their petty battle hardly matters, since they’re about to be crushed by a reference to “Dr. Strangelove” (1959). (Personally, I wonder if it’s a successful reference if you have to say what it’s a reference to. Furthermore, if you’re going to be a know-it-all and include the release date of a film, you might want to make sure you get it right.)

While the B-level men’s room has traditionally had a striking number of vagina drawings, with a “severe lack of penis drawings“, currently the penis reigns supreme as the only genitalia represented in the stall. The penis is accompanied by the guardian angel of the stall, who has a goatee.

Some of the graffiti writers appear to be displeased with the latest turn of events:

Assholes,
Kindly refrain from “Cleansing” UChicago of its only bit of Charmin. (i.e. reg graffitti)

But not everyone sees this as a crisis:

They always crimp our style. But don’t be so Krauss. They’ve Freid so much space up to Fostor new puns!

If you find yourself missing the last round of intellectual wordplay, head on over to the B-level men’s bathroom graffiti page– I’ve got everything documented up through April 13, 2010.

What you don’t find in the bathrooms is a disproportionate amount of homophobia. Why make a special trip to the bathroom when you can freely insult LGBTQ students wherever you would normally write graffiti?

Looking through my graffiti corpus*, there are 14¹ unique pieces that either use anti-LGBTQ language or single out LGBTQ students (see the photo set). Out of about 1700 photos, that seems to be a trivial number. And in a sense, it is– from hieroglyphic sex graffiti to philosopher-name wordplay, fun over time and chemistry, University of Chicago students mostly write about other things.

Those 14 pieces, though, appear less trivial when compared with the graffiti directed towards other groups. Graffiti expressing racism (1)², antisemitism (4), and misogyny (4)³ combined total up to 9 pieces. (See the photo set.) Of those, the racist graffiti and three of the four antisemitic pieces are located in men’s bathrooms. In contrast, only two of the 14 LGBTQ-related pieces (14%) are in the bathroom– the rest are in public places.

Remarkably, graffiti that can be read as relating to LGBTQ students seems to be more likely to attract remarks in public than in the bathrooms. There are no comments next to the m4m ads in the bathroom, but juxtapose two names of the same gender in the Reg stacks, and additions of GAY, lesbos, or fags inevitably follow.

Three of the 14 pieces (21%) use the word “gay” as a generic derogatory term. It’s used in response to a drawing and quote, as a reason for not partying (“Why leave now? Let’s Party For the Rest of the Night. No, I’m gay“, and has been directed towards the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

Half of the graffiti (four pieces, plus the comments on two same-sex names, mentioned above) makes reference to homosexuality as an insult. Phrases like “Marshall(straight)” and “aileen(NOT HOMO)” make it difficult to read the “proof” for Travis = gay² as an example of “gay” as a generic insult. A recommendation to “do your work nonstop” during fall 2007 concludes “& this advice applies to homosexuals as well“– nothing explicitly negative, but one does not get the sense that LGBTQ students are being singled out positively. More direct is a piece in Latin: “tu es gay, ego > tu” (you are gay, I am better than you). Most recently, “gay/flamer” was used in response to a student’s objection about another student using the word “retarded”.

The pie chart, right, shows the relative distribution of the words used in LGBTQ-directed graffiti. Out of 22 instances (some pieces of graffiti have more than one), “gay” is used 36% of the time, followed by “fag” at 27%. The particular offensiveness of the latter term probably helps account for its use in both pieces of men’s room graffiti. The word was used by itself, without any apparent context from other nearby graffiti. In both cases, the word was neutralized to some extent by the insertion of a strategically placed “L” after the “F”. The two examples from the Reg stacks are somewhat different. One, mentioned above, was in response to two men’s names with a heart. This use was protested, but that response was subsequently trivialized with a “your mom” remark. The other example was captured during one of my earliest trips to take pictures in the stacks, and the original comment is cut off but clear from context. There was an ongoing discussion where insults were being thrown around, and one student wrote “Stop being a ball-sucking fag”. At some point, another student replied: “Tell him. I’m just working with what’s already on the table. And what makes “Asshole” more mature than “ball-sucking fag” anyways? I’d say that the later[sic] is a little more self-aware in this context, you ball-sucking fag.”

That said, even in the face of anti-LGBTQ tautologies (right), there are signs that sexuality is becoming a non-issue. In a Harper men’s room stall, someone wrote “Fags are Gay”, subsequently diffused somewhat when an “l” and “r” were added. But then there’s the follow-up comment: “Definitely so, but who cares dude?” It’s not ideal, but maybe it’s its own kind of progress.

* This corpus documents the walls in the Regenstein bookstacks weekly since September 2007, the A-level whiteboards daily for a few months in early 2008, the study carrels every quarter or so since last summer, the B-level men’s room from earlier this year, and the Harper and Reg bathrooms once in the last week.

¹ Not counting God, why am I gay? which may have been written sincerely rather than as an insult. I’m also not entirely sure what to make of “Joke’s on you– I’m gay” in response to “If men could get pregnant, would you do it?”. It doesn’t necessarily seem homophobic, so I’m not including it in the count.

² There’s also two pieces of graffiti, one from a Crerar men’s bathroom and another from the Reg stacks, that make positive comments about “Asian pussy” and “Black pussy“. Perhaps not racism, but not exactly in good taste.

³ I’m interpreting “misogyny” liberally here– I think at least the proof of women = problems falls more in the category of making a joke out of a phrase that exists in popular culture rather than an insult towards women.

As I’ve said before, I’m not really a fan of bathroom graffiti. I usually find it rather dull and predictable, it’s something of a cliche, and I prefer graffiti written where everyone can see it. That said, as this project has expanded from the graffiti in the Regenstein Library stacks to graffiti on university campuses more broadly, I can’t afford to ignore what’s going on in the bathrooms. (Note: all links and images are clickable to see a bigger version of the graffiti, and will open overlaid over the page to not disrupt reading.)

The amount of graffiti in the Harper bathrooms alone was overwhelming, and it’s going to take a number of blog posts to get into everything that’s going on there. But I’d like to start with a follow-up to an earlier blog post on politics. As noted previously, there isn’t much political graffiti around, other than a burst of activity in the run-up to the 2008 election. One of the exceptions noted was some anti-UN commentary in the B-level men’s room (in a stall best known for its philosopher-name wordplay.) At the time, I dismissed it as someone’s pet peeve, but after checking out some other bathrooms, it does look to me that the anti-UN graffiti is part of a larger trend of men discussing politics through graffiti in the bathroom– at least, to a greater extent than they discuss it through graffiti elsewhere.

Politics isn’t the only thing discussed to a greater extent in the bathrooms than elsewhere: antisemitism and racism are better represented in the bathrooms, there’s plenty of drawings of vaginas– whereas there are none in public places, there’s penis drawings galore, and there’s sex solicitations. At least in the Harper graffiti collection, homophobia was about par for the course compared to the non-bathroom graffiti. But all of these are the subject of their own discussions at a later date.

Election graffiti

These bathrooms clearly haven’t been painted over in a long while, and some of the graffiti looks like it dates back to the election. In addition to the “Vote Obama” sign (right), we have a potential write-in candidate asking you to vote for him, despite showing some disturbing ignorance of who the main candidates are: “Fuck Obama-n-Bush, u Should Vote For ME“.

Local politics

The “FUCK EL GOBIERNO” next to “Vote Obama” doesn’t name names, but Rod Blagojevich seems like a perfectly plausible target.

9/11

Seeing these pieces of graffiti surprised me, but it’s hard to know what to make of it without knowing when it was written. It’s from the bathroom on the mezzanine, which I hear they recently reopened to accommodate bathroom breaks from the new all-night study space in Harper. It’s entirely possible, as far as I know, that some or all of it could date from 2001.

Layered around a comment about the criminality of writing on the wall and a badly-written Om (ॐ) are the remarks DON’T BELIEVE THE 9/11 LEGEND!, BBC: 1 of 19 “hijackers” <–(stolen/fake IDs) still alive!. Mostly erased and mostly illegible is some comment about Cheney and 9/11 war games.

Democrats vs. Republicans

First, someone suggested that the Young Republicans be drafted. Then, someone changed it to Democrats. And then some name-calling broke out. “Dummycrats” was crossed out and replaced with “RetardedAsscrats”– which I have to assume is one Republican escalating another’s insult.

Rabble-rousing

There’s a long thread that begins with the prompt “Revolt Against the Modern World Someone has helpfully contextualized it by adding (i.e. capitalism, e.g.) The reply: “Have fun with that, dumbass. Why not “revolt against gravity” from the top of the Sears Tower while you’re at it?” The response to that is a shit-joke, but the following response is the much-modified “MODERNITY IS REVOLTageING“.