Another year, another attempt at unisex restrooms

In Atlanta last year, the ASA attempted to provide unisex restrooms.  The only problem that I saw with this was that all of the unisex restrooms I saw had originally been women’s restrooms.  In Las Vegas, the ASA tried unisex restrooms again, as seen below:

Again, I appreciate the attempt at progressiveness, and I realize that this is sort of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, but I wonder if anybody actually treated these restrooms as unisex since they were right next to each other.  Did anybody use the restroom (or see somebody using the restroom) that was originally designated for the opposite sex?  If not, I wonder if people would have been more likely to treat the restrooms as unisex if the original signs had been covered.

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Cultural scripts fail me

Cultural scripts from movies, TV shows, and video games are often blamed for contributing to things like murders and school shootings.  When people do heroic things, though, I don’t remember seeing these behaviors linked to cultural scripts.  For example, in the recent spate of heroic celebrity behavior (Ew.com reports: “First Ryan Gosling broke up a street-fight. Then Kate Winslet rescued Richard Branson’s mother. Now, completing this week’s hat trick of celebrity heroism, Brad Pitt has reportedly saved an extra from being trampled on the set of World War Z.“) I haven’t seen anybody suggest that these behaviors are learned through watching movies (or being paid to act heroically in said movies).  Events that transpired over the summer, however, suggest that I have not picked up on these cultural scripts.

To give one example, I was leaving a store one summer afternoon when I heard a woman yell to stop a man who had stolen her purse out of her shopping cart as she put her purchases into her car.  The man, who was likely in his late teens or early twenties, ran past me on the other side of my car and across the parking lot.  Rather than chasing after him I stood watching him run and then started walking in his direction considering whether, if I started running, I would be able to catch him before he got to the road or wherever he was going.  Meanwhile, another man did chase after him until he got into an SUV with three other men that had been waiting in the parking lot.  Another man followed them, recording their license plate number and reporting it to the police.  Shortly afterward, a detective arrived at the scene of the crime and reported that they had been apprehended.  In sum, while I did not act heroically, several others did, resulting in a positive resolution to the situation.

This situation led me to wonder if I would act differently in a similar situation.  More than that, though, I wondered what I would have done if I had actually caught the perpetrator.  Tackling somebody in a parking lot does not sound like a good idea.  At any rate, I wonder if my failure to follow cultural scripts in one situation makes me less likely to follow cultural scripts in other situations.  Maybe I am less likely to act heroically but also less likely to act violently.  I also wonder if being trained as sociologists makes us more likely to recognize cultural scripts but less likely to follow them.

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A sign the fall semester is near

Last night, instead of dreaming about my impending trip to Vegas for ASA, I dreamed that it was the first day of class and many of the students were talking amongst themselves instead of paying attention to the details of the syllabus.  When I informed them that they were being disrespectful and that if they wanted to talk to each other they could do so outside of the classroom, most of them left.  I guess that’s one way to reduce class sizes.

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