What you said about what we said last week

Bathroom sex! Last week’s Young & Hungry column concerned that most clandestine yet impetuous form of intercourse, a topic that plenty of D.C. restaurant and bar owners were happy to discuss. Readers were quick to suggest a few more hotspots for restroom boot-knocking. Like Zaytinya, where “there’s a single bathroom at the end of the bar area with a huge oak door. You can’t hear a thing from the outside,” wrote commenter GoldCoastKid. “It also doubles as an excellent coke bathroom, too. That’s just what I’ve heard.”

And from Buzzfeed’s John Stanton on Twitter: “I once caught a dude having sex with a girl sitting bare-assed in the urine trough in the [Rock & Roll Hotel]’s men’s room.”

The local blog Stop Requested imagined what one might overhear when encountering an act of bathroom sex in some of the restaurants cited in the article. Two examples:

• The Palm: “Please try to keep it down. My campaign manager is RIGHT outside.”
• Teddy and the Bully Bar: “Speak softly and carry a big stick. Oh wow, you got the second one covered. OK, but still shush though—there’s a line outside for god’s sake!”

Reacting to our article, Jezebel declared bathroom sex “D.C.’s hottest trend.” Color us skeptical, but at least one commenter seemed to agree, kind of. “You know folks, the people in the rest of the country reading this will not be impressed, think it’s hip, and will be generally repulsed by the libertine nature of this article,” wrote Jarhead. “People think Washington is a cesspool of excess. This article only confirms that. The rest of the country is hurting, and increasingly, D.C. looks like Rome circa August 410. Behavior such as this does nothing to contravene that notion.”

On Twitter, Ahmad Zaghal reacted thusly: “Jarhead sounds like he needs some bathroom sex.”

Home Game

In last week’s Housing Complex column, Aaron Wiener reported on the District’s plans to empty the D.C. General shelter of homeless families by increasing funding for rapid rehousing, a program through which D.C. finds apartments for low-income residents and helps them with rent for a limited period of time. Reader Dumbfounded wasn’t swayed by the anecdote of one woman whose rental assistance is ending next month even though her contract job could also evaporate. “Newsflash, lady, adults are expected to pay rent in order to secure a place to live. Given that housing expenses consume about 35 to 50 percent of even middle-class income, you sound like an ingrate. I would expect nothing else from the city if I only had to contribute 30 percent of my income to rent. This program was designed to help you get a leg up on savings to better manage these costs in the future. What did you do with 70 percent of your income for more than a year? Whatever the city does will never be enough. No one is entitled to live in the District of Columbia.”

Reader Sean pushed back: “One of the points the article makes is that it’s becoming more expensive to live in the DMV. To say ‘find a place in the region you can afford’ does not take into consideration that such a place may not actually exist. People generally look for places to live that are close to where they work or where they are seeking employment. If [the woman in the anecdote] is going to struggle to pay rent that is LESS than $1,000, she’s basically priced out of almost everything except public housing (of which I’m sure there is a waiting list for). So if there IS some place in the region that [she] can afford, it’s probably out in the ‘sticks’ in Maryland or Virginia, and will be so far away to be infeasible because of a lack of proximity to the job or potential job.”