She's Gotta Have It

Are you above and beyond domestic shame? Have you liberated yourself from the chains of obsessive house pride? I’ll bet that however chilled you may be in general, there’s someone in your life for whom you simply have to clean. Supposing that your husband’s ex-wife came to have lunch with him, chez vous, in your absence? Would you be sanguine about the state of your kitchen floor then? What if your mother-in-law was staying the weekend?

I know one woman who can prioritise playing the piano over wiping down her draining board or putting bleach down the loo. She and her family live in what I consider to be virtual squalor but she has time for everything that actually makes life worth living - music, reading, talking, walking. Every other female I know has the cleaning gene embedded - and emotionally,

it’s about so much more than practical comfort and hygiene. When I was ill in bed last year and came down to find my husband and children in the kitchen surrounded by utter disorder, I felt like bursting into tears. Why on earth is it that we feel we are fighting a one-woman battle against the forces of chaos and get mild palpitations at the thought of the Barbies and the Lego languishing in the same box? US author Laura Kipnis’s The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability takes the view that we’re paranoid about filth because, anthropologically, we’re regarded as the ‘unclean’ sex. All that Happy Housewifery is an attempt to scrub out our innate dirtiness. Perhaps. All I can say is that, however grateful I am for my small army of Brazilian cleaners, it still feels like the female equivalent of paying for sex.
Laura Tennant