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The Wet History of Media in the Bathroom
How media technologies made themselves at home in one of the most private spaces of modern life.
As Alexander Kira notes in his classic study on bathroom design, activities including “smoking, eating, drinking, reading, watching television, listening to the radio, telephoning, playing, masturbating, and so forth” were treated as increasingly acceptable and normalized. These all-in-one designs remained far out of reach for the average buyer (and were significantly different from the cheap plastic rope or wall-mounted radios sold at Filene’s or Marshall Field’s department stores), but they represented an imagined future of fully technologized and mediatized bathrooms. Bathing itself could connote many things, including health (cleansing germs), self-care, or sensuality and sexuality, and indeed bathrooms possessed a long and storied history in relation to pornography, sex toys, and illicit scribblings on the walls of public stalls.
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