By R. Vecci
Times are changing, and the nineties are long behind us. Gigantic pants, sony walkmen, and sweater vests are all wonderful and iconic items but they belong, like your penis drawings, in your attic or basement storage areas. Oh I'm sure the scrawling of a gigantic phallic emblem took place more than once in the eighties, but it was the nineties that saw this trend rise to the forefront of American bathroom artistry. Across the nation, in public male restrooms everywhere, we were reminded constantly that weiners do exist and they come with a set of testicles. This image became embedded permanently into our minds, along with incorrectly drawn swastikas and telephone listings offering incredibly easy homosexual intercourse. It reached its peak roughly in 1998, when it was still somewhat hilarious, but lost its humor almost overnight, somewhere around the summer of 2001.
We're nearing the end of this decade, and drifting into a post-postmodern American aesthetic, signaled by the rise of technology and user-enabled information sharing. It's only fitting that our bathroom graffiti follow suit, reinventing itself carefully and symbolically. I know the penis is easy to draw and can be done with one line, without even lifting your sharpe off the wall, but it's a tired and exhausted graphic, beyond cliche and without any impact or former shock value. Therefore, it's necessary we draw some new things, like perhaps a pair of buttocks or maybe a human tongue (not as private or taboo but I'm just throwing things out there to start). Let's get creative, people. This is the future for god's sake.
