Women are posting videos of their “realistic” homes and hashtagging them #hotmessmom or #nonaestheticmom, as a response to the dominant domestic ideal that fetishizes sterility and colorlessness. “What if you just didn’t clean that up?” asked The Cut last year, noting how expectations of cleanliness are stuck in the 1950s: racist, sexist, classist, and useful only when one person in every household can devote their lives exclusively to the labor of cleaning. When Julia Fox gave a TikTok tour of her apartment, people praised her for how “normal” and lived-in it was. Even Marie Kondo, she of the “life-changing magic of tidying up,” said she’s “kind of given up” on keeping a perfectly clean home.
Was it ever really about hygiene? Did the Christmas tree lady, for instance, truly believe that her unwashed plastic Christmas tree could make her sick? One would assume not. The vast majority of TikToks where a person takes you through their cleaning regimen go viral because they are either visually satisfying (the New York Times called them “narcotic pleasures”) or because the poster knows her cleaning practices are excessive enough that people will feel lacking in comparison and give it a hate-watch (or, ideally, a hate-share). One redditor satirized this genre of post, writing “Y’all wash your body with the same hands that you used to wash it with yesterday instead of chopping em off and growing a clean new pair? LMAOOO EW.”
Whether excessive attempts at germ riddance are even successful is debatable: Disinfectants also end up killing the “good,” non-disease-causing germs that help people digest food and build immunity, and can cause long-term risks like antibiotic resistance or exposure to harmful fumes. According to the “hygiene hypothesis,” oversanitized households can be a possible reason that allergies, asthma, IBS, and other autoimmune disorders have skyrocketed in wealthy, developed nations in recent decades.
But the American obsession with cleaning has never been about facts. It’s about feelings. What began as patriotic duty during the Civil War has curdled into a never-ending stream of unnecessary products advertised to us by weaponizing our insecurities. The pandemic only exacerbated the germaphobia baked into American culture: The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson coined the term “hygiene theater” to describe the ways in which people and businesses have prioritized less effective measures of preventing the spread of Covid, such as obsessively disinfecting surfaces or putting hand sanitizer at every table, at the expense of more effective ones, like proper ventilation, mask-wearing, and social distancing. “People are power scrubbing their way to a false sense of security,” he wrote. What makes us feel cleaner, in other words, doesn’t actually make us so.
We weren’t always surrounded by depictions of uber-clean gray homes, just as we weren’t always overwhelmed by images of faces and bodies “perfected” by injectables and plastic surgery. In her essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,” Raquel S. Benedict juxtaposes the aspirational, affluent home of 1980s cinema with the contemporary ideal:
"There are toys and magazines scattered around the floor. There are cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked since the recent move. Framed pictures rest against the wall; the parents haven’t gotten around to mounting them yet. The kitchen counters are cluttered and mealtimes are rambunctious and sloppy, as one expects in a house with three children. They’re building a pool in the backyard, but not for appearances: it’s a place for the kids to swim, for the parents to throw parties, and for the father to reacquaint himself with his love of diving."
It is a home where life happens, not a home where the evidence of life must be diligently erased. “Compare this to homes in films now: massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture,” she writes. “Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess.” This, she argues, is due to a shift in the way American culture has viewed both the body and the home: as assets whose value must appreciate at all costs.
It’s all the likely result of doing the majority of our socializing via a screen, where the image of something becomes more important than what it actually is, or does, or how it makes us feel. We were never meant to tour this many people’s sterile gray homes, or look at this many people’s waxed, deodorized bodies, or know exactly how many bottles of Shout someone buys at Target to keep it all sparkling. Doing so has warped our perception of what and whom cleanliness is for, and vastly overestimated how much any of it matters. Cleaning is already tedious enough — why make it even more so?
