The terrors of pleasure

Or, my conflicted relationship with tidying up

(With apologies to both Spalding Gray and Marie Kondo)

Somewhere in the middle of the show The Good Place — no real spoilers — a character points out that the modern world has become so impossibly complicated and interlinked that it’s very difficult to do literally anything that doesn’t have some negative effect, somewhere.

I don’t know if any moment in television has ever resonated with me so strongly. For years, I’ve felt myself overrun with anxiety when it comes to decisions, both big and small. Where to go to school, and whether to do so. What sort of job or career to have. How to eat ethically. What to do about recycling. How to be involved in anti-racism. Whether being married is inherently oppressive. Whether and how to write characters who don’t look like me. Essentially, if you can have white liberal guilt about it, I’ve had it.

And while I can laugh about it that way, and accept that of course there are people with far worse problems (there it is again…), it can also be shockingly debilitating. (Chidi Anagonye may not experience white liberal guilt by definition, but his analysis-paralysis on the show is a perfect example of how this kind of thing can be literally terminal.)

One I’ve been struggling with over the past couple years has to do with finding comfort, joy, even fulfillment in certain domestic roles and tasks.

Could I, a white lady of the world, find this sort of peace in mundane tasks? (Spoiler: absolutely fucking not)

Am I being anti-feminist?

The other day, my friend sent me a series of reels from this guy who teaches other guys how not to be so shitty about domestic and emotional labor in their heterosexual relationships. It’s great, and I’ve been reading a bunch of material about this lately. I think it’s vitally important that men take on more of the mental load in addition to the physical load of maintaining a household, a social circle, a life. And I feel very lucky that I have a partner who’s very aware of these things too, and works with me on them.

But another thing is that sometimes, I actually just really like cooking and cleaning.

I’ll never forget this line, although I realize I can’t quite recall which feminist author it comes from, and I fear it will be a paraphrase by necessity: I love to cook for people I love, she says, but I deeply resent it if it’s expected of me. There’s a tension, in essence, between a thing I like to do and a thing I’m socialized to do — particularly if it’s traditionally considered “women’s work,” like cleaning, cooking, childcare, household management, or social engineering.

These days, the idea of women’s work — that is, work that must be done continually because it is either cyclical or forever getting un-done or both — has taken on new dimensions. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was very important to both my family and to the rest of the adult society I was surrounded by for me not to be a “housewife,” even though technically, my mother and aunt, who were my two main influences, were. Images of “empowered women” never involved the power of the home, or mothering, or caring for family and friends. Instead they involved going out and doing what the men did. Preferably, at least in my upbringing, without a man attached.

A bizarre backlash to this ideology, as well as to the explosion of queer culture (yay!) and the mainstream acceptance of much of it, is tradwives and adjacent subcultures. Rightwing patriarchal horseshit aside, there’s something real here that people are responding to. It’s contained in current feminist thought as well: the idea that in order for women to be liberated, they can’t just have to do anything a man can do, but backwards and in heels. A true feminism is about choice and agency — including the choice to work in the home. The trouble is getting that work to be seen and respected as work, though it’s not paying work. And as long as it’s not seen as work, and continues to primarily be done by women, it has the potential to trap women in dependent relationships — and to make domestic labor expected, assumed, and invisible unless neglected.

(A side note)

(There are more and deeper layers of this to do with race, class, and other intersectional factors: who does domestic labor, for whom, for how much, and how do we treat those people. It’s too much to get into here, but I just want to acknowledge that the problem I’m speaking of goes even deeper than I can get into in the space of a Substack newsletter.)

But so I like cooking and cleaning, now what?

It’s not even as simple as that, though. Like that writer up top (Susan Bordo, maybe? Gah, I wish I could find that essay), I like to cook when I offer to cook. I enjoy feeding people I love. But as the female half of a presumed heterosexual couple, I can get into the trap of planning all our meals, and then starting to resent it (even though I’m generally the one making the assumption!).

With cleaning, the same sort of dynamic applies, although there’s another layer. At certain times, cleaning can just be…soothing. Especially compared to the mentally taxing work I do, it can even feel like rest, particularly in a world where actual rest is so hard to come by.

I especially enjoyed it last week, when I was in the house on my own for many days running. Putting dishes away, wiping the counters, tidying up — I almost felt that life-changing magic Marie Kondo talks about. I can feel how keeping my spaces clean makes space for me to enjoy them. Decluttering gives me literal breathing room, a sense of freshness and a clean slate. And while it’s easy to imagine enjoying being in a clean house, it’s less easy to imagine enjoying the process of getting it that way. And yet…there’s pleasure there.

It’s a complicated pleasure, though. Weirdly coopted by tradwives, traditionally associated with submissive femininity, seen as dirty work for “those other people” to be paid to do for us, and of course, not associated either with “getting ahead” nor with the commodified “self-care” we’re all supposed to be doing more of.

But when I can pay attention, and allow, and not think too much about all the terrible implications…then I can actually enjoy cleaning my kitchen, then enjoy having a clean kitchen, without thinking too hard about What That Says About Me.

The larger point, I guess, is that there’s not too much one can do that about these days. It feels like there’s less and less pleasure to go around, fewer things we can do as humans on this struggling, dying Earth without all of the consequences coming to haunt our dreams and waking hours alike. (Or at least mine.) Which is a damn shame in all kinds of ways, of course, and in fact even saying it’s a damn shame feels flippant, and there’s that guilt again.

But it is a shame. Because pleasure is one of the only capacities we have that is valuable for its own sake. In fact, in my experience, one of the major signs of healing from trauma is being able to identify, reach for and stay with things that feel good. Pleasure is literally how we know we’re alive — that, and pain, of course.

There’s probably a longer post in there somewhere about all that. For now: what are the pleasures you protect in your life?