Tag Archive for Privacy

The Urinal Game

The urinal game is a thought experiment designed to illustrate what territory and space mean in today’s modern world. Sure it involves a little bathroom humour, but if you bear with it, so to speak, you’ll be relieved. The goal of the game is to decide on which urinal is the most appropriate to use given the set of variables. In the game, there are six upright urinals to choose from, and they are ordered from the entry or doorway, to the end of the washroom. Urinal 1 is closest to the door and urinal 6 is closest to the end wall. The ideal urinal, of course, is the one that protects your privacy the most. Specifically it is the urinal that maximizes the amount of space between you, and the next person. The urinal game is not much different than what everyone does daily as we navigate crowded areas or chose seating in busy cafeterias.

1. All 6 urinals are empty. Which do you choose?

2. Now urinal 2 and urinal 4 are occupied. Which is the proper urinal?

3. Urinal 2, 4 and 6 are all occupied. Which is the proper urinal?

4. Urinal 1, 2, 5 and 6 are now all occupied.

Answers: 1) While urinal 1 and 6 are both acceptable answers the most correct answers is urinal 6 since it prevents anyone needing to pass in behind you while you urinate. Both urinal 1 and 6 are somewhat correct since the end wall prevents being flanked on either side. 2) Urinal 6 is the answer once again for similar reasons as in the first scenario. 3) This one is a catch since you are bound to be stuck next to at least one other guy. However, option 1 is the best since it affords at least some space between you and the others instead of being right up against another guy. 4) This answer is simple. You don’t use any of the urinals! Instead, you go to the mirror or pre-wash your hands, fix your hair, adjust your tie or suck up your pride and use a stall!

Some additional rules to this urinal game which are similar to the games we play in elevators include: Absolutely no touching permitted other then yourself. No talking or singing unless you are with close buddies or are heavily intoxicated, and even then, it should be kept to a minimum especially while urinating. Glances are a one time affair and are simply used to acknowledge the presence of others and nothing more.

Throw them a curve at the urinals! In rather bizarre experiment, researchers measured the time taken to micturate (to you and me, this means to pee) either with or without someone standing directly next to them. Not surprisingly, closer distances led to increases in micturation delay and a decrease in micturation persistence! With this ground breaking research we can conclude two things: 1) Peeing is harder to do around strangers because it prevents us from relaxing our external urethral sphincter and shortens peeing because it increases intravesical pressure once begun; and on a slightly more serious and applicable note 2) Stranger who invade our personal space increases our arousal and anxiety preventing us from getting relatively even unimportant things done. Imagine how space invasion affects more important tasks!

Space And Eye Contact

Eye contact avoidance tells others that we aren't interested in what's being sold.

Eye contact avoidance tells others that we aren’t interested in what’s being sold.

You can imagine that strangers walking about in public want to maintain a certain degree of separation between one another. This can and is achieved through eye contact. Reducing or preventing eye contact is a way to tell other people that they wish to maintain their space and privacy, and do not wish to communicate with others. Eye contact is a function of intimacy and has been referred to as part of the equilibrium state. That is, eye contact is one component that controls the degree of intimacy, the other is distance. By controlling one or the other, or both, we can control aspects of our equilibrium state, or intimacy, such as whether it will start at all, and how or when it should end. You can imagine that full intimacy can not happen at great distances although telephones and web technology attempt to do otherwise. Each fails miserably and does intimacy no justice.

As distance increases, intimacy decreases so you can imagine that strangers would feel freer to glare at others from say, across the road, but as they near the point at which they intersect they will drop or avert their eyes so as to eliminate intimacy. Therefore, that which gives permission for staring is distance and that which protects intimacy is eye contact. To have real intimacy both proximity and eye contact must be present. By this argument, city people aren’t rude at all, they are just doing what is normal, avoiding unwanted intimacy from strangers. Rural settings where there is a real possibility that you actually know the person on the street, or know a relative of the person is large, so intimacy is not only permitted by also safe. Eye contact in the city can send the wrong message to the wrong person inviting unwanted contact.

To illustrate this point imagine a women who is happily married but otherwise attractive to men. Upon entering a coffee shop, she turns the heads of men. When she notices that she is being watched, she averts her gaze and instead of making eye contact she ‘looks over the heads of others’ or possibly even looking down her nose at them by tilting her head backward showing disapproval. She sends a disinterested message, an “I’m taken.” If startled, she might inadvertently make eye contact with a stranger but she will instinctively drop her head and avert her gaze sideways, being careful to make no emotion facial expressions. In doing so, she avoids emitting the wrong message and therefore prevents unwanted solicitation. Men are often victims of assuming any eye contact is flirtatious, even if it happens by accident, thus women are generally careful of whom they look at directly. Some women learn this through a bad experience; others seem to know it instinctively. Men can test this out for themselves by trying to secure eye contact with women as they pass them on the street. Men are rarely able to secure eye contact from strangers and it’s usually not for a lack of trying.