We’re cleaning up, sorting out and sparking joy left, right and centre thanks to Marie Kondo. But what has the series revealed about gender norms and expectations within the household?
As a tidy person permanently partaking in a spring clean, I wish that I had been the one to get rich and famous from telling people to toss a bunch of stuff and reorganise the contents of their drawers. That being said, I do not wish to throw shade – Kondo has made cleaning up cool and that is iconic. Please thank your shirts, praise them, hold them, smell them, and donate them accordingly.
Shade however, must be thrown at the unfortunate revelation, or confirmation, that it’s still women who are either doing all/most of the tidying and cleaning, or who believe that they should be doing more. Episode after episode of the Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo where the couples are heterosexual, we are confronted with the woman’s guilt for not having taken better care of the home.
In many of the instances, the women are working the same hours as their husbands and are by no means “stay-at-home” wives/mothers. So why is the burden, or the expectation of keeping house still falling on the female counterpart in the relationship, and is it occurring subconsciously or with intention?
In the first episode, Rachel explains that doing laundry literally gives her anxiety and later we learn that her husband told her “cleaning is sexy”. While presented in the episode as a candid tidbit, the messaging behind this is concerning on a deeper level if we’re to consider how we view equality and gender roles in the home. To find cleaning sexy is not inherently an issue, but to juxtapose a woman’s anxiety at doing laundry with her husband’s sexualisation of it is at least worth raising an eyebrow at.
According to the ABS, 60% of employed men in 2016 did between zero and five hours of unpaid domestic work per week, while only one-third of employed women did less than five hours a week. This pattern was reflected across all hours of paid work, even among women working more than 49 hours per week – with tasks including housework, grocery shopping, gardening and repairs overwhelmingly being completed by women.
As a neat-freak, I have found myself in the habit of cleaning up after boyfriends on more than one occasion, to the point where the share of the housework has been so heavily weighted in my direction that I have also questioned my own feminism. Am I doing this because I’m female or because it’s a preference? Am I doing this because he refuses to or because he doesn’t care and I do? These questions plague my own approach to living in peace, harmony and equality, but the families and relationships conveyed to us in Kondo’s series show women who work full-time, hate cleaning and yet still feel that it’s their job to keep the home neat, tidy and clean. Uncool, 2019.
By all means enjoy watching Marie Kondo, get your home in order, get your life sorted, organise your drawers like never before. But do question what really sparks joy in your home – beautifully folded shirts, or the beautiful balance of gender equality? My hot tip: both!