I have been captured. It’s a body snatch. I have been swallowed whole by Instagram reels of people – usually known as “cleanfluencers” – cleaning their houses. This is unexpected.
If you were, as I was, a teenager in the 90s, cleaning and tidying was a pain and that’s that. If you were a neat and tidy person, you were a Stepford Wife freak. Added to this, my mum hates nagging and knew no other language to get me and my three sisters to do chores, so we didn’t. I left home aged 18 unaware that a bathroom needed to be cleaned. There’s all that water going through it, though. Doesn’t it, like, clean itself?
I never made my bed, or ironed anything, or cleaned the kitchen after dinner. I woke up to my dinner plates where I left them in the morning. I was grossed-out by it, but not grossed-out enough to change my ways. I think my husband was weirded out by what a slob I was, (he is competent and tidy), but married me anyway.
So having children was a shock! Because when you are a parent there are two truths: you live in the kitchen and the housework never ends. You can’t buy your way out of it. Trust me, I have tried. It doesn’t matter how much outside help you have, if you have a family there will be a never-ending supply of things to fold, tidy, sort, put away or wipe down.
And anyway, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to do housework or that I thought I was somehow too good for it, I just couldn’t find a way to not hate it, to not feel resentful and furious about the endlessness of it. What, unload the dishwasher – again? FML.
Then about five years ago arrived a major vibe shift in the form of twin goddesses of home organisation: Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch. I broadly ignored both as they seemed extreme and anyway, by the time I arrived at their accounts both were fully-fledged sensations, with millions of followers. Rather than relatable cleaning content, all I got were announcements about how excited they were to be launching books and brand partnerships. It was like arriving at a play just as the actors are taking their bows.
But Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch were like a couple of confetti canons going off and the newly-invented “cleanfluencers” started fluttering through Instagram and TikTok with their Scrub Daddies and Dyson handhelds. The two platforms are now vibrant with ordinary people cleaning their modest houses and even with cleaners cleaning other people’s houses. There are now “viral cleaning hacks” (such as cleaning your sofa with a pan lid covered by a damp cloth), propagated by some accounts, then quickly debunked by others. It’s a whole culture.
Sometimes cleaning videos have commentary but the best ones are silent. No annoying “really excited about” announcements for brand partnerships or bestselling books – (happy for you, but ultimately don’t care, sorry) – just very soothing edited videos of people doing laundry, reorganising cupboards and scrubbing their kitchens.
My favourite is Jack Callaghan (437k followers) who remains relatable despite huge popularity. He doesn’t ask me to be interested in his life or excited about anything, he just allows me to zone out while watching him wiping his kitchen surfaces or making his bed.
And I think it’s significant that Jack is, well, a Jack and not a Jill.
When I was a young woman, soaked in a particular kind of feminism doled out by the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ally McBeal and Sex And The City, I had a powerful sense that if you, as a woman, cared about housework then that is what you would end up doing for the rest of your life. You could either be good at your job, or good at housework: there was no compromise, no third way.
What I didn’t fully grasp was that I was going to end up doing housework for the rest of my life no matter what: whether I cared about it or not, whether I worked or not, whether my husband did his share or not.
While it is heartening and helpfully normalising to see other women clearing out their under-sink cupboards or folding fitted sheets, seeing men like Jack Callaghan doing these tasks releases me from a prison of old-fashioned feminist expectation and gives me permission to do this thing, too.
To be such a refusenik about it was like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Being angry and aghast at the relentless tidal wave of laundry and clutter wasn’t going to stop it coming at me. But it was too late. Cleaning, to me then, was what women did, not what men did. And the ultimate aspiration for the 90s teenage girl was to be like a man.
I no longer dread my cleaning and organising tasks. I’m even a bit annoyed with my husband for not being as attentive to detail as I am. Sure, he makes the bed – but he doesn’t pull the bottom sheet nice and taught like I do. Yes, he clears up after dinner – but he doesn’t put away all the sauces or wipe down every last surface.
Most of all, cleanfluencers like Jack Callaghan or Shannon, (155k followers), provide a reality check. When I see Jack Callaghan putting his linen in his washing machine yet again, or Shannon cleaning the cupboard under her sink, I understand, for the first time, that while I will spend the rest of my life doing housework, so will everyone else. It isn’t some hardship that has particularly befallen me.
And this is an important point. Decades of being told from all angles that there is nothing worse than domestic tasks begs the question: if I am not going to do this, who is? Housework is just a reality, like the ol’ death and taxes – there is no way around it, or through it, so you have to find some way to make your peace with it. And finally, aged 43, thanks to stupid Instagram reels, I have.