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putzteufel ideology
Jan. 13th, 2005 11:38 amJust before I have a cup of coffee, a few words about this flylady thing I've been posting about these last several days.
Last night I once again POLISHED MY SINK but for the first time, instead of the sense of mad elation I'd been having up to then, I felt sad doing it. There suddenly seemed to be something sad about according so much importance to the SINK. So I got to thinking.
When I first discovered the flylady thing, I thought, wow, great, and threw myself into it with my usual initial enthusiasm. I treated the whole thing with a whole lot of tongue in cheek. I called it the Stepford Club and myself the Stepford Bitch, and I compared my SHINY SINK to Orlando's SHINY YOU-KNOW-WHAT. (I'm not spelling this out here as there's no LJ-cut!) But having read a bit more deeply into the flylady site's pages, I'm starting to see its more sinister aspects. The problem is that the Flyladies do not have this tongue in cheek. They, in fact, have no irony about their housework at all. They actually do believe that housework will not only get your house decluttered but will also "bless your home" and "bless your family", even "bless the things you give away". It's as if women can't ever just clean up in order to get something clean, but that the whole domestic thing has to come attached to an entire ideology of domesticity. These women truly are the Stepford Wives!
The creepiest thing about the ideology of feminine domesticity (as exemplified by Flylady but by no means confined to them) is the sincerely-held belief (I repeat: sincerely held) that housework is about more than itself. And this is, of course, the work of all ideologies: the spreading of a veneer of value-added, of class and gender identity, of commodity fetishism and faux religion, over the bedrock of reality. So there seems to be a belief that by doing household chores you are contributing to the greater good.
Well, not even the greater good. It is actually a very selfish ideology as it is largely confined to the nuclear family. After all, tidying the house benefits mainly the people living in that house. And that will only ever be a maximum of, say, ten people, and on average probably three to four. It may also only be one single person but significantly, FlyLady doesn't pay much attention to women living on their own.
What I like, and what I am still determined to derive benefit from, is some of the straightforward hands-on advice: take 5 minutes! Take 15 minutes! Take "babysteps" (okay, corny name but sensible concept)! But an ideology comes attached to this which is spelled out on the actual website: if you do this, your "house will practically clean itself". This is nonsense, of course. Paying careful attention, one will see that all these minutes add up to an awful lot of minutes. (What initiated my sadness was the ominously named household Control Journal.) Now if you take household chores to be an end in themselves, then you don't care how much time you spend on it. But what if there were reminders of a more intellectual sort? Instead of 'Take 5 minutes to declutter the kids' clutter!', why not 'Take 5 minutes to learn 5 more Arabic verbs!' or 'Take 5 minutes to keep up with today's news!' or 'Take 5 minutes to finish excerpting that overdue library book on Ilya Repin!'
Okay, as things get more specific they get more tailor made, and perhaps I could somehow tailormake this system to serve my own needs (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
phineasjones suggested something along those lines in an earlier comment). But just thinking about these more 'thinking' alternatives, makes me realise how relentlessly absent the wider world is from FlyLady.
Fair enough, one might say. Why should a website about household cleaning include off-topic demands for self-education? I never expected the Closer Than Brothers yahoo group to furnish me with anything besides yummy dommy lotrips porn. But it does matter, I think, that so little attention is paid to anything else that might be important for women beyond dusting. There are cursory and rather dutiful-sounding nods to "payroll FlyBabies" (who have the misfortune of having to go and work) but there is no sense of the wider meaning of cleaning for women. There is a notion of 'dear husbands' and 'sweet darlings' that is not one step further from the 1950s feminine mystique, and a good few steps below Wilma Flintstone. It is sad to realise that in some ways very little seems to have been changed by the 1970s women's movement. And, scarily and sadly, pertains to quite a few women whom I know personally and others to whom I am related.
There is also absolutely no awareness (or acknowledgement of an awareness) of the psycho-baggage that comes with housecleaning for women. Jane Smiley did the best job I know of this when in her novel A Thousand Acres ( 1000_acre_spoiler_coming_up ) end_of_1000_acre_spoiler
This is not idle speculation. I know this in bones. I spent quite a few session of my therapy / counselling year before last discussing this very problem: how every time I do any housework, I felt my mother looking over my shoulder and how I couldn't even do any for fear of becoming a housewife like her. The counsellor asked me what made me feel worst about my house, and I said, it's all the stuff. This is, of course, what FlyLady is very effective at: getting you to get rid of stuff. So that website addresses a real need in me and a real cause for dismay. I want to get rid of the stuff; the stuff oppresses me psychically and practically. But I don't want the whole domestic ideology that goes with it!
I will definitely have to find some way of integrating this system of routines into my own idea of life. And while I used to shirk the cleaning by doing something else, I am now shirking doing marking and writing my conference paper by cleaning! So now I feel guilty about the cleaning where I used to feel guilty about not-cleaning! For the really determined, there is no barrier to the cycles of guilt the creative procrastinatrix can generate (assheldrake has, indeed, oft pointed out).
Anyway, now I'm shirking drinking my cup of coffee by posting into LJ. There is a pile of marking sitting on the dining room table, and every sink and basin in the house is currently SOAKING IN BLEACH in order to BE MORE THOUROUGHLY SHINED.
( unwork_safe )
Last night I once again POLISHED MY SINK but for the first time, instead of the sense of mad elation I'd been having up to then, I felt sad doing it. There suddenly seemed to be something sad about according so much importance to the SINK. So I got to thinking.
When I first discovered the flylady thing, I thought, wow, great, and threw myself into it with my usual initial enthusiasm. I treated the whole thing with a whole lot of tongue in cheek. I called it the Stepford Club and myself the Stepford Bitch, and I compared my SHINY SINK to Orlando's SHINY YOU-KNOW-WHAT. (I'm not spelling this out here as there's no LJ-cut!) But having read a bit more deeply into the flylady site's pages, I'm starting to see its more sinister aspects. The problem is that the Flyladies do not have this tongue in cheek. They, in fact, have no irony about their housework at all. They actually do believe that housework will not only get your house decluttered but will also "bless your home" and "bless your family", even "bless the things you give away". It's as if women can't ever just clean up in order to get something clean, but that the whole domestic thing has to come attached to an entire ideology of domesticity. These women truly are the Stepford Wives!
The creepiest thing about the ideology of feminine domesticity (as exemplified by Flylady but by no means confined to them) is the sincerely-held belief (I repeat: sincerely held) that housework is about more than itself. And this is, of course, the work of all ideologies: the spreading of a veneer of value-added, of class and gender identity, of commodity fetishism and faux religion, over the bedrock of reality. So there seems to be a belief that by doing household chores you are contributing to the greater good.
Well, not even the greater good. It is actually a very selfish ideology as it is largely confined to the nuclear family. After all, tidying the house benefits mainly the people living in that house. And that will only ever be a maximum of, say, ten people, and on average probably three to four. It may also only be one single person but significantly, FlyLady doesn't pay much attention to women living on their own.
What I like, and what I am still determined to derive benefit from, is some of the straightforward hands-on advice: take 5 minutes! Take 15 minutes! Take "babysteps" (okay, corny name but sensible concept)! But an ideology comes attached to this which is spelled out on the actual website: if you do this, your "house will practically clean itself". This is nonsense, of course. Paying careful attention, one will see that all these minutes add up to an awful lot of minutes. (What initiated my sadness was the ominously named household Control Journal.) Now if you take household chores to be an end in themselves, then you don't care how much time you spend on it. But what if there were reminders of a more intellectual sort? Instead of 'Take 5 minutes to declutter the kids' clutter!', why not 'Take 5 minutes to learn 5 more Arabic verbs!' or 'Take 5 minutes to keep up with today's news!' or 'Take 5 minutes to finish excerpting that overdue library book on Ilya Repin!'
Okay, as things get more specific they get more tailor made, and perhaps I could somehow tailormake this system to serve my own needs (
phineasjones suggested something along those lines in an earlier comment). But just thinking about these more 'thinking' alternatives, makes me realise how relentlessly absent the wider world is from FlyLady.Fair enough, one might say. Why should a website about household cleaning include off-topic demands for self-education? I never expected the Closer Than Brothers yahoo group to furnish me with anything besides yummy dommy lotrips porn. But it does matter, I think, that so little attention is paid to anything else that might be important for women beyond dusting. There are cursory and rather dutiful-sounding nods to "payroll FlyBabies" (who have the misfortune of having to go and work) but there is no sense of the wider meaning of cleaning for women. There is a notion of 'dear husbands' and 'sweet darlings' that is not one step further from the 1950s feminine mystique, and a good few steps below Wilma Flintstone. It is sad to realise that in some ways very little seems to have been changed by the 1970s women's movement. And, scarily and sadly, pertains to quite a few women whom I know personally and others to whom I am related.
There is also absolutely no awareness (or acknowledgement of an awareness) of the psycho-baggage that comes with housecleaning for women. Jane Smiley did the best job I know of this when in her novel A Thousand Acres ( 1000_acre_spoiler_coming_up ) end_of_1000_acre_spoiler
This is not idle speculation. I know this in bones. I spent quite a few session of my therapy / counselling year before last discussing this very problem: how every time I do any housework, I felt my mother looking over my shoulder and how I couldn't even do any for fear of becoming a housewife like her. The counsellor asked me what made me feel worst about my house, and I said, it's all the stuff. This is, of course, what FlyLady is very effective at: getting you to get rid of stuff. So that website addresses a real need in me and a real cause for dismay. I want to get rid of the stuff; the stuff oppresses me psychically and practically. But I don't want the whole domestic ideology that goes with it!
I will definitely have to find some way of integrating this system of routines into my own idea of life. And while I used to shirk the cleaning by doing something else, I am now shirking doing marking and writing my conference paper by cleaning! So now I feel guilty about the cleaning where I used to feel guilty about not-cleaning! For the really determined, there is no barrier to the cycles of guilt the creative procrastinatrix can generate (as
sheldrake has, indeed, oft pointed out).Anyway, now I'm shirking drinking my cup of coffee by posting into LJ. There is a pile of marking sitting on the dining room table, and every sink and basin in the house is currently SOAKING IN BLEACH in order to BE MORE THOUROUGHLY SHINED.
( unwork_safe )
