The Ring Around the Toilet is Not a Moral Failing
Welcome to Culture Study's Cleaning Week
Last week I published an interview — “That’s Not How a Stain Works” — that unsurprisingly disappointed many readers: not because of the content, but because they really wanted a piece about cleaning.
And you know what? I, too, love thinking about cleaning: I love solving (and offering advice) on various cleaning problems, but I also love thinking about the why of cleaning. Any conversation about cleanliness is also always a question of domestic labor, and how your family splits (or cannot split) that labor, and the connection between cleanliness and the performance of perfection.
So we’re going to try something novel here, and dedicate a whole week to the idea of cleanliness. Here’s how it’ll go:
Today: Revisiting a piece I wrote in 2019 about the mental gymnastics of cleaning your own house vs. paying someone a living wage to pay your house
Wednesday: A thread where we work through our own attitudes towards cleaning and the idea of cleanliness — and how they relate to the performance of class and race and gender
Thursday: A new essay thinking through my current understanding of “clean” and how we’ve figured out (read: are continually re-figuring out) the division of cleaning labor in my house. Garden Study Bonus: How you combat ideas of cleanliness/total order in your garden.
Friday: The fetishization of cleanliness is bullshit, but sometimes you just REALLY WANT TO CLEAN SOMETHING. For your own satisfaction and glory! Maybe you need to get rid of the massive rim of dust on your fan without spraying that dust everywhere (hi) or maybe you don’t want to detail your car but also feel like getting the grit out of the drive shaft will solve all your problems (also me). You need help, you need advice, you need assurance. This thread is your cleaning concierge, where you can ask for and offer advice to others.
Sunday (or maybe slightly later, stay tuned): An interview with
about the pitfalls of organization fetishization and battling over-consumption and stuff culture.**This series is for paid subscribers only.** The vast majority of writing here is available for free, twice a week, every week of the year. If this topic is of interest to you and you want to read and participate in what I know will be an expansive conversation about it, consider making the jump to a paid subscription:
And, as always, if you’re unemployed, on fixed income, a student, or a contingent worker — you can always email me (annehelenpetersen at gmail) and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions. I’m grateful to all of the paid subscribers who make this policy possible.
Now, onto the first entry in CLEANING WEEK:
Note: This was written in 2019, before Covid, but also before the publication of Angela Garbes’ Essential Labor, which has textured so much of my thinking about the way that bourgeois people outsource care labor (and domestic labor), most often to immigrant women of color. The end of this essay arrives at this question but doesn’t answer it: If you’re working too much to clean, are you working too much?