bathroom graffiti: inverted dominance

I was in yet another public men's room today and saw something I have seen hundreds and hundreds of times in my life: homophobic and racist bathroom graffiti. I am not sure if this occurs in women's public restrooms, but I have been told it does not. The only public men's restrooms that have not had some form of nasty graffiti on the walls of the stalls or scratched into the hand dryer were either new, or you could see that the graffiti had been painted over. It is that common. So for the first time I asked myself "What does this mean?"

The obvious answer is that there is some adolescent jerk who thinks that asserting dominance over another with racial and homophobic epithets in a bathroom wall is somehow "cool" as if he is getting away with being "bad." It might be that just the act of doing something that mom and dad would disapprove of is all there is going on here. Many of us read these things, shake our heads, and move on. But there are much deeper currents to these kinds of things that tell us about our society. For instance, why is it always a perverse kind of homosexual graffiti that is sexually explicit, loaded with coarse language, and anti-Semitic, racist, and other defamatory language?

What we find in bathroom graffiti are social artefacts that represent an inverse relationship to the dominant culture. Here is a sampling of today's bathroom graffiti which you can see a bit of in the picture above:

• Kay Kay Kay is Gay Gay Gay (an anarchy symbol was in the middle)
• If you are Gay and want your cock sucked call xxx-xxxx
• Just a gay fag

This tells us something about not only what is dominant in the society, but also what it subverted and even considered deviant by that dominant society. First, homosexuality is usually portrayed in very deviant and perverse sexual language. This is not the type of language that would normally be considered acceptable in the dominant language of the society, but is nonetheless not an uncommon sentiment. In this way it is a form of propaganda. In this sense the propaganda is there to de-legitimate homosexual behavior as something perverse and deviant in this sense as a sexuality rooted in almost savage anonymous sexual exchanges devoid of any deeper kind of relationship.

Second, the aggressiveness behind this kind of graffiti is a way for dominant patterns of behavior acting under a shared understanding of male masculinity to again de-legitimate homosexuality as a form of deviance that could possibly undermine and damage that image of masculinity. This is usually a white, Protestant, urban, upper class male who has done well in sports and has little problem attracting women. It's the same image sold in military, beer, male fragrance, and shaving commercials. The image of women in advertising is only there to serve this dominant pattern of masculinity as a way to support it. This includes advertising for women in a lot of cases. In this way the homosexual or "effeminate" male is as denigrating and more so as a "strong" or "independent" woman who does not need to serve a male to appear or feel "whole."

Third, the racist language also serves the image of the dominant white male. As with native Americans who were characterized as "savages" by Europeans, a kind of derogatory labeling found among corporate and religious missionaries in South America and Africa among other places. It is the "angry black man" that still carries this kind of de-legitimation and devaluing forward as the dominant white male culture continues to subvert in new adaptations to the spread of multi-culturalism and pluralism. Women are considered "weak" or "emotional" in this same regard.

Bathroom graffiti tells you a lot about social norms that lie beneath the dominant public discourse, but are persistent indicators of often deep social inequalities and how dominant parts of society attempt to re-assert dominance. The result is a kind of bully propaganda that literally seeks to assign less value to groups that are not dominant or seem to pose a threat to dominance. Homophobia and racism are part of my society. How about yours?

Related posts:

1. language: the weapon of the information age
2. carney culture and the grotesque
3. unsafe: the american default?
4. enough of the neo-con poison