Micro-Tyrants: The psychology of urinal stall gaps
Picture this, you’ve made it through the airport with time to spare, congratulations. TSA didn’t treat you as if you were a member of ISIS over your new pair of panda dunks, and for once, the line finally moved like it had somewhere to be. Naturally, in an effort to participate in the 21st-century “virtue” of self-care, you award yourself for being a responsible adult. You find the only 24-hour airport bar and instantly start popping bottles at 10:00 a.m. Five beers in, it’s time to break the seal.
You head to the bathroom, and like all airport bathrooms, it’s a tale of two cities. One is your high school prom, a humid, shoulder-to-shoulder gathering of grown men playing a cat and mouse game, pretending not to make eye contact. The other? North Dakota is nothing but an empty, quiet, peaceful, and untouched sanctuary, with the occasional overdose victim in a locked stall.
You choose the Nebraska bathroom. Of course you did, well, for one, you have common sense, and the other, as established before, you are a responsible adult.
You step up, unzip, the zipper gets stuck a little, so you have to zip it back and unzip it again fully. Just as you’re about to experience the small, ever-fleeting nicotine-buzz of solitude right before you’re about to be in the middle seat of the plane… another man walks in. Fine. Acceptable. This is a public space.
But then… he chooses the urinal directly next to you. No respect for the sacred gap… The 11th commandment that they don't tell you at Sunday School. Because the ability to break social rules, even the dumb ones, is built on a baseline of mutual comfort and consent, a social contract, e.g., when a restaurant says “No shoes, no shirt, no service.” The second you violate that, it stops being rebellion and becomes a quiet little selfish tyranny. In this case, it’s man’s God-ordained right to not stand two inches away from another man’s one-eyed trouser snake.
In primitive, stone age, flintstone level societies, this would’ve been considered an act of war, men used to kill over this stuff, but in our civilized society with our luxuries of streaming services and corporate slop bowls this is a blatant violation of unwritten law—Chapter 14, Section 4, Stipulation 3, “If there is an open urinal between two men, that urinal is not just a barrier between your junk and the next guy’s, it is a line that shall not be crossed……”
With no regard, he ignored it…
These were the principles I lived by for the eternity that was 18 years of my privileged upbringing.
But as they say, you either die young or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I regret to inform you that I have become exactly that… and this rant is to atone for my sins. A confession on a little Whoville-sized speck in an ocean of AI slop and cat videos, or even AI slop cat videos.
There’s a reason people break these tiny boundaries; they’ve stopped playing the game of trying. It’s always one of two people: old men, or men who look like they’ve given up arguing with life, no in between. Both are mentally checked out. Both are freed by no longer playing along with the rules of society. They ran their social contract through a shredder and live their lives in personal denial of its existence, while the world around them keeps moving.
Do they have the right to do it? In the same way as Raskolnikov’s “extraordinary man” theory, can I just unzip next to another man and decide the rules don’t apply to me?
Early in my Army career, during basic training, we had our second field exercise, an armed road march. We marched for so long that at a certain point, you could see people’s bladders expanding their bulletproof vests from the inside out. Three hours in, my good friend, Rob Price, just whipped it out on the road and strudded while striding.
Eventually, even the drill sergeants had to use the bathroom. Which meant all 40 of us trainees finally had the privilege to use the bathroom. We stopped at a small, unpopular, low-budget, national park-style bathroom. We had five minutes. Suddenly, that bathroom became Astroworld.
The frantically pacing and breathing was simultaneously muffled yet echoed in the fun-sized room, which could only be compared to the opening scene of Blade or Project X. The entire 20-square-foot space filled instantly with the methane of MREs consumed three hours prior, and the month-old MRE, which had been laid to rest in the open pit toilet seats.
Luckily, I found a corner next to a fellow trainee named Burson, the strongest person in our platoon, and an absolute mass monster.
I looked at him and boldly asked, “Cross streams???” He nods at me and pulls his junk out, letting the engines roar. I do the same. This is what I like to call my spiritual awakening of “Not having any fucks left to give.”
There is something so freeing in not caring about etiquette. However, this “freedom” is inherently parasitic. Parastitic freedom is might makes right. Might makes right is one of Tyrany’s laws of physics. By choosing Parasitic freedom, you are putting off others’ comfort for your personal pleasure. Sure, I would love to not have the constraint and just unzip next to any other smuck. But for whatever reason, most people have a problem with that… unless they’re a pervert… So no, just as it is not okay for Raskolnikov to kill Alyona Ivanovna because he decided that he was extraordinary and therefore believed he was the arbiter of life or death. And it is not okay to just whip out your David parts next to another person because you think your little man is just so extraordinary.
Selah.
