The Dolmancé Memorial Lecture Series, 1: Psychogeography

Ah, happy days. To stand at a urinal, casually taking a look at the genitals of the man beside you. Catching his eye as he looks at yours. A brief flicker of the eyes back towards the cubicles as you feel lust surge physically through your loins, and see it rise in his. The quick step back into the cubicle, lock yourselves in, and satisfy your desires in a sticky, palpitating mess.

This self-assured determination to live the lusts of our imagination, to occupy all the spaces available to us, sets the moral fibres of local government mandarins a-twitching. (Of course, they're knee-deep in corruption and financial scandal, but they're also grubbily, complacently, heteronormative, hence the belief that their authority reaches within our underwear).

Embankment Garden public toilets in London have recently been completely rebuilt, seemingly with the sole intention of preventing casual sex. Gutted and refitted, they have re-opened with some obvious changes. Gone are the wall urinals. They have been replaced with half-stalls, the partitions of which are just wide enough to prevent you peering at the cock of the man beside you. Gone are the full-length toilet doors behind which two men could quite happily sneak for a quick fuck or whatever else came into their filthy minds. In their place are fitted saloon-doors which expose the knees of anyone sitting on a toilet bowl, and are clearly designed to reveal when more than one person is in the cubicle. In their desperation to police our morals, they won't even allow us to shit in dignity. (I am ruling out the idea that the council planned to encourage voyeurism of the knees of shitting men - a very specific form of gonuscopy - for sexual gratification).

I wonder what it cost the taxpayer, this prurience? For the councils pissing our money away up the (discreetly individualised section of) wall, this is clearly justified by dominating our sex-lives in the name of their morality. They want to keep you away from the dirty boys you really want to play with, they want to act as your mummy, and tuck you up with your hands safely outside the covers so you can't play with yourself. Get this - they're your genitals and it's your city. You owe it to yourself to have a fuck in a toilet every now and then. It's good for you.