Feminism and housework and hoarding and Flylady...

[solidgoldbrass]

I would love to get some feminist perspective on this because I am struggling at the moment. I have always been a housework avoider, always had a messy house, and I used to say that it was a good way of making sure any man i shagged never got any ideas about me being a little home-maker for him.
It's gradually dawned on me that I actually have a bit of a problem WRT hoarding, and I would like to sort it out, I know some MNers love Flylady but one look at the site made me queasy because it seems so very much 'Women! Embrace housework, it';s your destiny.'
Any thoughts anyone?

Yes, I have the guilt about wasting things. Trouble is, a lot of my stuff is of little or no use to anyone else: I have tried Freecyle (or at least the local variant) and Ebay and Amazon for books, success rate not all that great.

And what is driving me batshit at the moment is the binmen didn't empty the bloody bin on Friday so it is now brimming which isn't going to make a good impression tomorrow...

As you might guess from my username, I have some issue with this too

If your house is really bad you might want to look at the squalor survivors community. The folks there are interested in talking about how their homes got the way they did and how they feel, as well as clearing it up. I have never been brave enough to join and post, but have found it very helpful to read.

I used to read Flylady when she first began. It's interesting that is does seem quite anti-feminist, but she herself is a pretty strong character who has worked outside the home her whole adult life. In the early days she used to post messages quite often about encouraging the rest of your family to support you and then join you in clearing up, by not being martyred and passive aggressive about housework. Not sure whether she does that since the whole think became a bigger commercial concern.

On a more practical note, if the stuff you are getting rid of isn't wanted by anyone else, give yourself a free pass and throw it away. It can feel so liberating.

Why didn't the binmen empty the bin? Call the council on Monday and then go crazy

I have looked at the Flylady website and if I keep reading it, I will just have more stuff to clean up as there will be copious amounts of vomit on my shoes. Making time to pray is not really what I'm after. BUT, I had a look at that home app someone upthread recommended and that seems fairly inoffensive, so I will look at that and see if it helps.

This afternoon, I am going to sort out the bedroom . It looks a bit like Camden market in there. I can't promise to throw stuff away, but I will at least hang it up.

SGB here's your conscience-clearer: if you have tried to give it away and not managed it, you are allowed to throw it away.

You can get into a rigorous recycling routine when you've cleared out your house. Right now guilt about throwing things away is getting between you and living like you want to. So bin the guilt.

Do you have a friend with a car who would give you an afternoon of ferrying things to and from the tip? Or are you able to hire a skip for a week? Both of these are concrete, deadline-like events which would probably help you empty your house. Not driving does make it much harder, but there are workarounds.

I have got rid of unwanted crap by phoning a "Man With a Van" (this is the feminist section so I feel obliged to point out it could well have been a woman) who, for £10/20 will drive a load of unwanted stuff to the tip. I got the number from the local paper.

I've done some googling for you and this website looks good. It doesn't have all the smaltz that Flylady is so in love with.

As you're ok with recycling, I'd get a lift to the local tip (now known as recycling centres) next weekend. You may have some rubbish to take if they don't empty the bins again! Take a good look around. The good ones have so many specific collection bins for different materials (wood, metal, garden waste and areas for small appliances etc. Between that and your local supermarket collection area - usually bins for glass, plastic bags, clothes and shoes - you should be able to recycle loads of stuff. The stuff you find hard to get rid of, put onto ebay. If it doesn't sell, then give it to a charity shop/recycle it.

My best way of dealing with housework it is kind of fly-lady-esque. I write a list each week and stick it on the fridge. It has 3/4 smallish tasks on it (none over 2 hours) above and beyond normal cleaning. eg

Sort through top kitchen draw (repository of tat)
Take apart and clean fan
Clean inside of kitchen cupboards
Tidy/rearrange cupboard under stairs

The list looks at me reproachfully when I go to make a cup of tea. I pick something to do and spend 15 - 45 minutes on it. That might mean it's part done. At the end of the time I stop. I do some work on the list every day. When I finish a task I tick it off. It works for me. It's proved a lot more effective than my traditional strategy of doing iintense purges followed by extended periods of laziness.

Sorting through what you have all together can help. If you have bits and pieces of string in different drawers around the house it's easy to justify it as useful. If you put them all in one drawer you can't ignore the fact that no-one needs that much string.

thanks for starting this thread! When I was a student I lived in a house with two men, a Greek and an Iranian, and we were all as bad as each other when it came to keeping the place tidy. BUt I noticed when the landlady (or whoever) would give me this weird vibe and I came to the realization that they regarded me as a slovenly slut for not keeping the house tidy. Not the blokes-- they were sort of let off.
It was a "welcome to the real world" experience.
Society expects women to be neat and tidy and I really really struggle with this to the point that I just DON'T.
I have a tip though: always pick friends who are messier than you, if that is possible, or failing that, at least as messy as you.
There's nothing worse than women who police other women's tidiness! We need to give each other a break

good thing about living in Japan is the cheapo restaurants on every street corner. Totally normal for families to eat out twice a week here, nothing fancy, just noodles or whatever.

To put a competely different spin on it - being organised, clutter free and tidy is liberating. itt frees me to do the things I want to do if my house is clean. tidy and uncluttered.
I have four kids and a biggish house. I can clean it top to bottom in half an hour.
I do flylady type thing, wipe round every time I use the loo, put stuff away straight away, always take something with me to put away.
I can't live in mess or clutter. I love the sociability of a lovely looking house in that people can and do drop by any time and are welcome.
Keeping a tidy house teaches your children good habits . My boys automatically remove shoes in anyone's house, they tidy ( sort of!) behind them and they understand that everyone chips in to keep a house tidy.

It's a hell of a lot easier to clean when you don't have to spend time clearing away stuff that shouldn't be there.

But SGB wanted a feminist perspective on this, and giving her tips on how to be tidy is not one!

It is nice to live in a tidy home.. but that's not an analysis

WOmen do police each other, and men police women, but nobody really polices men's tidiness in quite the same way

"A woman who is dirty is dirt" .
That is how Greer put it.

YOu can lose your kids, of course, if your house is not up to scratch. THat is what teh menz have decided is a good criteria for deciding whether or not a woman is allowed to raise her children or not, or whether she loves them enough or not.

Nobody stops to think that maybe her house isn't tidy because she's spending time with her children, picking them up when they cry, taking them out for the day etc. NOT SAYING tidy people don'T do those things, but I'm saying that nobody gives a shit whether women do those things. All they care about is whether or not her home is tidy. A tidy home is the bar for the "Good Mother" test. We all know this is true.

There are some feminists who say that women tidy tidy tidy to compensate for their lack of control in the real world. When yet another male-led multi-national is chopping down trees next to your home in order to build a new development-- in the place you loved taking your kids for picnics, and you know you can'T stop them, then you tidy tidy tidy instead. Women are extremely powerless in the grand scheme of things, and I wonder if keeping a home tidy is the one area women can feel in control.

If a woman doesn'T do this I don'T particularly think it's a mental problem. I think it's normal. But I would strongly suggest she ACT a bit-- act a bit more like the women in the Jiff commercials.. because society doesn't like women who step out of line.

This is the thing, for women, cleanliness/tidiness becomes a moral issue.

You would not lose your kids if your house was not up to scratch, though- the state of the house would have to be harmful for the child/ren for that to be justified. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that the focus is on whether or not it is harmful for a child to remain in such an environment.

I love that link, TheCrackFox. Very interesting.

And yyyyy to having messier friends I think we on this thread should start a coffee morning or something

Yes, cleaning and tidying is a feminist issue. If you're happy with the way you live that's fine. If the clutter is starting to get you down then do something about it.

And if it is such that you can't or won't have an at home social life because of it, then it's an issue, feminist or otherwise.

"But SGB wanted a feminist perspective on this, and giving her tips on how to be tidy is not one!"

I don't think it's easy to separate the two out, Sakura. It's a feminist issue, but it's a very personal one too.

I think the crux of the matter is trying to identify why you want to tidy up/clean. If you are under pressure from others in your household, then they need to pitch in too. If you are under pressure from people outside (social services, MIL etc) then it becomes a much more practical matter of survival and you might just have to get on with it and figure out the sexual politics later. If you feel that you want to make a change for your own sake, then I don't see the problem with seeking advice and getting on with it, and although it might be interesting to examine where that impetus comes from (eg being raised with an expectation that women must be clean and tidy), navel gazing is not going to help the clutter get cleared.

I don't think it is to do with lack of control in the 'real' world in a broad sense. It's different for everyone because it's so tied up in your family dynamics, upbringing, social expectations in your culture etc. (and anyway, every woman I know would be out chaining herself to a tree in your hypothetical situation, not tidying her house :) And have you ever been to any community action meeting? In my bit of the world women outnumber men at all such events about 2:1)

I think Sakura is right that society expects women to keep the house cleans. If a couple live in a shit hole then the finger is pointed at the woman - indeed sympathy is extended towards the man for having such a slovenly wife.

However, SGB seems unhappy with the way her house is at the moment so I think it was fine to give her tips to help. If SGB was in a relationship the tips would apply to all the adults living in her house.

Yes, OK, there is a bit of a crisis at the moment ie landlord/landlady coming round for inspection, so I have been racing madly round but it is all bound up in this 'why should I have to have a tidy house? It's not immoral to not bother very much.' And there is also the fact that I have too much other shit to do in a desperate attempt to earn a living, as well as keeping DS fed, washed and loved. OK I probably haven't helped myself by having two small businesses run from home...

yep-i think Sakura is right aswell.
i come from a place where-well-you was a no good bad woman if youre home wasnt spotless.
even if the nets was a bit dirty you was called a "dirty cow"!
im wondering if this still stands today to a certain extent[its not something i take much notice of]?
SGB-i used to be a hoarder and i felt uncomfatable about throwing stuff away.one day i had to move[out of my home]and i couldnt pack my stuff[new baby/on my own/had a cs.so the only thing i could think of was-chuck it all away-so i did.anything that wasnt crucial went down the chute.
i managed to chuck away most of my stuff and it wasnt painful at all.ive never hoarded again.

I think Sakura is talking a lot of sense on this.

Not doing this work is a giant two fingers up to society's expectations of women. Trouble is, it's an extreme form of protest which does us harm - we just end up living in filth, nobody else steps in to pick up the slack and it will always be our fault. It affects our social lives and can have other, more serious, consequences.

At the other end of the scale are women who cannot cope with the tiniest amount of clutter or dirt in their homes (see e.g. bog brush threads). They're no happier than us filthy slatterns. I see a lot of parallels with our attitude to food. Starve or binge? Clean obsessively or hoard shite? I think it's just not a very healthy battleground.

Just as we need to develop a healthy, easygoing, enjoyable attitude to food, so we need to develop the same with our homes because we spend a lot of time there and more than anywhere else on the planet, we're supposed to feel comfortable there, so FlyLady's toothcurling strapline 'Finally Loving Yourself' sort of makes sense.

But ... fucking hell that site makes my shit itch!

Thing is, if you can get past all that, the routines do work. I'd love a less gendered site that could motivate me the same way. I'd be very interested to learn more about MET, MillyR, do you have any good links?

I clicked on that link and nearly puked! No NONONO! I cannot be doing with something that is not just going to insult my feminist principles by insisting that failure to clean means my clit and ovaries are malfunctioning, but is also going to force feed me Jeezus Juice!

I mean, thinking about it realistically, I have always had a bit of a problem with hoarding and untidiness. My mum manages to be both a hoarder and obsessively clean and tidy - I obviously only picked up half of the influence (can't say genes, am adopted).

Hoarding is the main problem, you can't clean up clutter.

I'm not sure if it relates directly, but this discussion has had me thinking about what Greer has to say about women and the need to carry bags of stuff about with us.
We fill bags, we fill cars, we fill boxes and bowls and cupboards and rooms.
Filling an emptiness.

I carry a bag of stuff because annoyingly, unlike men's clothes, women's clothes don't usually have pockets!

Women's clothes are generally very impractical, but that's a different thread.