Fed-up Hamburg residents have covered streets with a paint that splashes urine back up at the perpetrator. They’ve got the right idea
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When, in 1917,
Marcel Duchamp
submitted a lowly urinal to an exhibition organised by the American Society of Independent Artists, he was making a statement about what can and cannot be considered art. Now, in Hamburg almost 100 years later, an altogether more pragmatic form of piss-artistry is taking place.
Residents of the party district of St Pauli have become so sick of their streets, underpasses and alleyways being used as public toilets, that they have
coated them with a hydrophobic paint. Urinate on these surfaces at your peril, drunkards: the paint sends it splashing right back onto you.
Perhaps this will seem like an extreme reaction. We already live in a fairly sanitised world, so where’s the harm in the odd drunken slash? The problem is, as I’m sure anyone who has delicately tiptoed their way through the urban wilderness in the early hours of a Saturday morning will agree, hundreds of men have had the same idea, and the streets are running with piss.
Because it is men, isn’t it? Let’s be honest. Although my female friends and I went through a phase of weeing in the street during our university drinking days, it was always through sheer, desperate necessity, at 3am, rather than the more male attitude; a “here’s as good as anywhere” laziness. For us, it was almost always between two parked cars, and with a friend there to act as a kind of modesty screen. If you were said friend, you’d stand there, with your coat held open like a kind of flasher-come-superhero, shielding your partner in crime’s exposed arse from the shiny glare of the streetlamp, and passersby.
There’s a kind of defiance in just how “unladylike” it is for a woman to squat in the gutter and urinate in public, but I could never quite cultivate it. Once, outside a bush on the Champs de Mars in high summer, a friend loudly performed All That Jazz from Chicago, complete with high kicks, to distract French revellers from the fact that I was weeing inside it.
Of course, France is a good place to look to when you’re talking about public urination. When I lived in Paris 10 years ago, I was amazed how often I would see a guy – often a smart-looking one in a business suit – nonchalantly skip to one side of the pavement, whip his dong out, and urinate. All in broad daylight. It struck me as a kind of repellent freedom.
As someone who stands waiting in the ladies wondering, of my fellow women, just what on earth it is they are doing in there (it’s rarely cocaine, at least not in Debenhams), I’ll admit that at times I have felt a blistering envy of men, with their liberation from the toilet queue. It’s so quick, and easy. But still they insist on the al fresco option.
My dad, when he would sit downstairs right into the small hours, reading, drinking his A’bunadh, smoking thin roll-ups outside the back door, would often nip down to the bottom of the garden for a slash. My grandfather, too. That was their man time, when they did man things, including pissing in the wilderness (or near a compost heap in Cheshire) as millions of men have done so before them. A vestigial ritual.
But I’ve romanticised about it all I can. Men: it’s time to stop with the urinating outside. You are not desperate toddlers; you are adults. The fact that we don’t all just lower our kecks and take a dump near the bins outside Londis is the mark of a civilised society. Pissing there is nearly as bad.
Even the French have those self-cleaning public loos now, and as a country we’re getting better, with outdoor urinals in city centres. Remember the 80s, and the 90s? Every stairwell, every urine-soaked phonebox. It was disgusting. Even now in London, I tire of negotiating the trails of piss on the pavement, which is why I applaud the Hamburgers for their ingenuity. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it represents a male colonisation of public space and that you’re all marking your territory like randy tomcats, but women live here too. And considering we’re still largely responsible for most of the childcare, we’ve already got our fair share of human waste to deal with.
As Mrs Lintott says in the History Boys: “History is women following behind with the bucket.” Not any more. Enough.
