The politics of dirt

'Who cleans your house?' asked the Guardian last Saturday. A woman who lives there, a man who lives there, or a cleaner?

I had a friend once whose boyfriend's idea of cleaning the toilet was pissing through the Harpic block. Resorting to a Harpic block in the first place must have been a sign of desperation -- surely it's like having urinal cakes in your house? The same man would cut and butter bread and then leave the whole shebang -- bread, butter, buttery knife -- out on the side for his girlfriend to clear up after him. Which she did, presumably when she'd finished cleaning the toilet.

My own mother (who lives with a man who wouldn't know a bottle of bleach from a hole in the ground) bought me a dishwasher when I first moved in with my Significant Ex. If you're going to live with a man, dear, she said, you're going to need one of these. And she was pretty much right: while it is true that he did take his turn cleaning the bathroom, it is also true that the time elapsed between turns did come to stretch the boundaries of acceptable hygiene, and it is perhaps truest of all that as soon as I moved out he hired a cleaner.

To be fair, he did want to hire a cleaner *before* I moved out: I am no domestic goddess, and the place was pretty dirty. But I wasn't having any of it.

And I'm still not.

This seems to be an increasingly unfashionable line to take -- my higher income friends are happily paying people to come into their homes to clean the dirt off their floors, take their hair out of the plughole and get all the 'difficult stains' off the cooker.

On the surface of it, this would seem to be a sensible way to resolve domestic strife of both the cohabiting and housesharing variety, while at the same time clearing precious non-working hours for activities more pleasurable than wiping piss off the toilet bowl (and environs, if there are men in the house).

But it's not for me. I clean up my own shit, and I expect those who live with me to do the same. It's not that I enjoy it, because mostly I don't -- occasionally it is satisfying, when very premenstrual it is cathartic, but on the whole it is something I do when necessary in order not to feel like a slut.

And I find the thought of paying someone else to do it quite fundamentally wrong.

It's taken me ages to write this post, which is a usually an indication that it's an issue I am not clear about -- sometimes I only find clarity by doing the writing itself. But that's not the case here -- I am very clear about the issue, it's just hard to express why.

Barbara Ehrenreich's article covered some of it: the low pay, bad conditions (lack of paid holiday, sick pay etc) and zero prospects of the average cleaner, the discomfort of the employer : employee relationship in one's own home in an area that is essentially unskilled. Paying someone to do something you could easily do yourself is different from paying someone to carry out a specialised piece of maintenance or repair. It's saying 'my time is too valuable to waste it doing this'.

But there's something else as well, and I think I finally got it when I read the letters about the article in this week's Guardian. Someone wrote that she defended her insistence that the family clean the house together rather than hiring a cleaner with the argument that cleaning up after yourself is part of what it means to be fully human. I buy that.

joella