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I suppose that somone is going to tell me about how I need to lighten up and have a good laugh at this.

Even though they allow for high-volume servicing and back-in-a-flash trips to the john, the point-and-shoot-a-stinky-deodorizer-cake oddity known as the men’s restroom urinal has been, for women, a constant enigma. But nothing will prepare you for the men’s room in the newly-designed Virgin Airways Clubhouse in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, terminal 4: Urinals shaped like a woman’s mouth, dolled up with red lipstick, wide open and ready for business.

In anything that we do there has to be a smile, and that’s the smile in this Clubhouse, said John Riordan, Vice President of Customer Services for Virgin Airways.

The urinals, called Kisses, were designed by Netherlands based company Bathroom Mania.

Kisses — the sexy urinal, makes a daily event a blushing experience! This is one target men will never miss!, said the Bathroom Mania team via e-mail from the Netherlands.

— Unwired Travel: Virgin Potty Talk [Yahoo! News]

(via feministe)

Yes, that is how very wealthy men get a smile in these post-feminist days: by pissing in women’s mouths.

I really wish that I could say this surprises me more than it actually does. It’s audaciously disgusting, yes, and it’s not every day you see something like this out in the open. But wealthy men on business trips are, after all, the chief patrons of many segments of the commodity trade in women’s bodies, from casual decisions to hold business meetings at Hooter’s or at strip clubs, to hotel pornography, to such wonderful institutions as sex tourism (read: child prostitution) in Thailand. There’s a whole seamy, creepy, half-hidden, and ultimately quite desparate and pathetic culture of overgrown fratboys in American business travel, and this just looks to me like a particularly gaudy piece of that sort of systematic sexualized woman-hatred.

(Pre-emptive clarification: I know that this is not true either of all men on business trips or of all frat boys. Some of my best friends were in frats/are in business management and don’t act like this, &c. I do think, nevertheless, that this sort of creepy culture is pretty clearly widespread in both of these worlds.)

The good news is that NOW and feminist bloggers got the word out on this, and Virgin has dropped the plans and issued an apology (the apology was astoundingly blithe and clueless, but we’ll set that to one side).

To return to where we started out: feminists are often accused of being uptight and having no sense of humor. I don’t know how people can read about WITCH zaps or read Dykes to Watch Out For and still believe this, but that’s a topic for another day. For right now, the main question on my mind is this: really, what sort of a person do you have to be to find pissing in a dolled-up woman’s mouth really, really funny? And why in the world would anyone want to be that sort of a person?

Further reading:

• Analysis from feministe, Echidne of the Snakes, Ms. Magazine, and Bitch

• GT 11/25/2001: What the fucking hell was he thinking? (on other things that just aren’t funny)