{"id":36809,"date":"2011-06-16T12:12:21","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T17:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=36809"},"modified":"2017-09-17T12:56:18","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T17:56:18","slug":"eyes-on-the-flies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/06\/16\/eyes-on-the-flies\/","title":{"rendered":"Eyes on the Flies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at\u00a0Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

People who design men\u2019s rooms seem to have the working assumption that men are sexist pigs.\u00a0 Those urinals that seem to mimic sex (in Lisa\u2019s pimp-my-urinal post here<\/a>) illustrate the sexist part \u2013 ideas that are important mostly outside the men\u2019s room.\u00a0 But inside the men\u2019s room, it\u2019s the pig half of the phrase that\u2019s important.\u00a0 Men can be slobs, especially at the urinal.<\/p>\n

At airports, for example, jet lagged travelers, men at least, tended to be, how shall we put it, careless? aimless?<\/p>\n

What to do?<\/p>\n

Americans tend to frame problems in moralistic terms. If something is wrong, drug use for example, punish the wrongdoers. \u00a0And if that doesn\u2019t work, make the penalties even harsher.\u00a0 Applied to the problem of spillage and splash in the men\u2019s room, we might expect to see signs warning: \u201cNo Spillage or Spraying.\u00a0 Penalty up to $500 fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Dutch have a more practical approach, more focused on solving a problem than on punishing evil.\u00a0 The Dutch also have a reputation for cleanliness.\u00a0 Years ago, when the men\u2019s rooms at the Amsterdam airport were looking and smelling like, well, like men\u2019s rooms, Schilpol<\/del> Schiphol, the company that runs the Amsterdam airport, looked into the problem. And the problem was\u00a0 that most men weren\u2019t looking.\u00a0 They simply didn\u2019t watch where they were going.\u00a0 So Schiphol\u00a0came up with a simple and non-punitive solution: a fly to draw the user’s attention.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Flickr creative commons Vincent Lau<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The idea was that men would aim for the fly – the stream would go from one fly to another (I\u2019m sure this pun doesn\u2019t work in Dutch) \u2013 and the men\u2019s room would stay cleaner.<\/p>\n

It worked.\u00a0 A study by\u00a0Schiphol’s\u00a0social science team found that fly urinals had an 80% reduction in spillage.\u00a0 Some years after that, JFK hired\u00a0Schiphol\u00a0to run the International Arrivals Building there.\u00a0 So now at JFK too, the urinals have the target flies.\u00a0 At the Newark airport, I saw urinals with a cartoon-like bee (a realistic bee might have might have triggered a counterproductive startle and flinch).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

More recently, urinal targets have gotten even more playful.\u00a0 For the Europeans, there\u2019s soccer.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Flickr creative commons John Cooper<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Good, clean fun.<\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at\u00a0Montclair SocioBlog. People who design men\u2019s rooms seem to have the working assumption that men are sexist pigs.\u00a0 Those urinals that seem to mimic sex (in Lisa\u2019s pimp-my-urinal post here) illustrate the sexist part \u2013 ideas that are important mostly outside the men\u2019s room.\u00a0 But inside the men\u2019s room, it\u2019s the pig half of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2056,15,252,1789,3920,108],"class_list":["post-36809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crimelaw","tag-culture","tag-healthmedicine","tag-nation-the-netherlands","tag-nation-united-states","tag-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36809"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71439,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36809\/revisions\/71439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}