I found this great article on bathroom wall writing.
Some quotes: “Well sung of Yore, a Bard of Wit/That some Folks read, but all Folks shit/But now the Case is alter’d quite/Since all who come to Boghouse write.” from 1731.
Going back earlier to Roman times: “If you aim at getting your name into verse, seek, I advise you, some sot of a poet from some dark den, who writes, with coarse charcoal and crumbling chalk, verses which people read as they ease themselves.”
3 categories of bathroom writing: Tourist graffiti (“John wuz here”), inner-city graffiti (like tagging and street art), and toilet graffiti (or “latrinalia” as it’s sometimes called in academic literature).
Differences in what men and women write on bathroom walls: Nicholas Matthews, a PhD candidate at Indiana University, was the lead author on a 2012 study that analyzed toilet graffiti in nine bars in a Midwestern town. He and his fellow researchers found that the most common type of graffiti was “presence-identifying” (just scrawling your name, for example), but men were identifying their presence more than women. Women, on the other hand, wrote more insults. Matthews explains this using evolutionary psychology, saying that boosting oneself up is a typical male mating strategy, whereas putting other women down is a classic female gambit.
Their is alot more in the article.
Anyways I’d like to ask,
What is the funniest or most interesting thing you have ever seen on a bathroom wall?
For me it was “They paint these walls to hide my pen but the shithouse poet, strikes again!”
“Here I sit,
asshole hurtin’
I just gave birth
to another Albertan”
Despite being an Albertan, I couldn’t help but lol. Have spent nearly 20 years trying to come up with a better one against people from BC, to no avail.
My fave, from a university restroom.
Seated on the toilet, I noticed something written along the very bottom of the (closed) stall door. Tiny little print, I had to lean WAY forward to read it.
“You are now shitting at a 63 degree angle.”
Or whatever the correct number would be, I don’t remember, was laughing too hard.
I worked in the advertising department of a newspaper, and at one point we moved to a different part of the building that had previously been occupied by one of the news departments. There wasn’t anything on the stall walls, but there were a few things written over the urinals (typical 4" ceramic tiles with grout). Most of them were non-sexual and non-scatological. Here are my favorites:
What a bunch of squares
Billboards for the narrow-minded (written vertically)
Grout Fishing in America