Funny and documented, the series signed Julie Auzou for Arte Radio should survive this summer. Because, by questioning why and above all how we pee, she brings to light gender inequalities, our relationship to the body and to the world.

Episode 1 explores the so-called “discord gout”, the one that overflows – especially when you forgot to lower the bezel. By the way, why do men pee standing up when girls understood very early that, for them, “it was not the same” and that they could not do it here and there, nose in the wind and buttocks? on the air? And what do these challenges mean to whoever will piss the highest, the farthest, the hardest? What role do urinals play where, as one of the teenagers interviewed noted, “everyone checks their dick a little bit”?

Julie Auzou conducted the survey and interviewed Edith Maruéjouls, geographer and specialist in issues of equality, diversity and gender in public space and playgrounds. For her, it is clear that women are transparent “in terms of urban planning, public policies”. And this, while now flourishing the “uritrottoirs”, new pissotières in the shape of a mailbox inviting men to do so in the middle of the street and in the eyes of all.

source of pleasure

Episode 2 is about having to hold back. How come women wait six minutes and nineteen seconds and men wait eleven seconds in public restrooms? Here again, and taking on the role of Antigone, “the one who wants everything right away and who says no”, Julie Auzou questions us before dragging us – minor ears and prudish refrain – towards the last episode and perhaps to be the most successful: “piss

Because if pee can be a source of anxiety, stress and discrimination, it can be a source of pleasure. Thus, in homosexual history, urinals have played a major role: they are a privileged place of enjoyment and disobedience. As the photographer Marc Martin, author of the Cups, reminds us. Public toilets – private affairs (Agua, 2019), Baron de Charlus, in Marcel Proust’s Research, dragged on for hours in the pissotoires – or tières. Jean Genet, for his part, spoke of those who were called “the soupeurs” since they liked to put bread in the urinals and then, it is said, delight in this golden nectar.

“It’s no small matter!” “, dares a woman who claims here the pleasure that urination causes her. Deviant, perverse, pathological sexuality, will say the police of conformism. Julie Auzou preferred to pay tribute to those who are prevented and who love.