ABSTRACT
The public men’s room, architecturally speaking, is rarely a room with a view—or rarely, at least, a room that affords a view outside itself. Like the closet, to which it is near allied, the men’s room tends to lack windows. The men’s room, that is, though clearly conceived as a technological response to the hygienic concerns associated with bodily necessities, constitutes a social technology in itself to necessitate a certain relation between the male subject and his body. But just as soliciting the subject can define the social project of the men’s room, so it also names the threat against which the solicited subject must be sheltered. However much the men’s room may prompt the performers within it to heed its own subjectifying call—the call it slyly assimilates to the irresistible call of nature itself—it allows for the possibility of error, for what the penal code calls soliciting for the purpose of committing unnatural acts.
