It’s 9pm. You got home after a tiring day. You just had dinner. Maybe you had to make it for yourself, maybe you microwaved a ready-to-eat meal, or perhaps a loved one has made you a hearty meal. But it’s 9pm, you are tired… And now you have to do the dishes –whether that means cleaning and drying all plates and casseroles by hand or putting them on a dishwashing machine. It doesn’t matter if you live alone, with flatmates, or with family, this situation is common enough to be familiar for the majority of people. Next day, you have to do it again. And then again, and then again. But we need to do it: our houses have to be clean enough to live comfortably, clean enough to avoid disease. Our house, as our body, needs to be kept on a certain level of cleanliness. Shelves need to be dusted, the WC needs to be clean, the kitchen needs to be orderly, the floor needs to be wiped. Whatever happens in the house, quickly shows outside the house too, affecting our exterior image. For example, we need to do laundry, we need to feed ourselves, care for our shoes, care for our sleep. The cleanliness of the house often, though not always, is heavily correlated with the cleanliness of the body. Our bodies and our houses are inextricably linked: the house is an extension of the body, and in a purely philosophical sense, perhaps the body is an extension of the household or home. There is a heavily emotional and psychological factor. Home is not necessarily a physical place, it is something more than the house or flat where you live but a home often overlaps with a physical space that tends to be a house.

Morality, cleanliness and the house/body

In Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite (2019), there is a rich lady that complains that the family she has hired to do much of her home labor smells bad. And she is right because, you see, poverty has a smell: the smell of old shoes, of the sweat that sticks to the skin after long hours of work and commute, the humidity that can never be properly taken off the clothes, the smells of heavy food that get stuck everywhere due to lack of proper ventilation. These are slight signs that denote social class and respectability. Often, these signs, these “smells” are associated closely with homeless people (the dirtyness, for example), and they contribute, in a vicious circle, to the dehumanization of this collective. Having no house often marks the body in a specific way, but even people who have a roof over their heads are not immune to these “signs of poverty”.

A historical example: in Victorian England, cleanliness of the house was thought to be a sign of good values and straight morality. House decay could be seen as a sort of moral decay, a theme that is present even in gothic literature¹. I think this notion has not disappeared entirely.

However, I think the moral aspect of cleanliness as a sign of goodness has been translated more than ever to the body and the way we physically present ourselves rather than homes. People don’t know their neighbors now, house visits are perhaps less common, most people between twenty and thirty something don’t have a house to show off or link to their personal identity anyways. We live more anonymous lives in this sense, separated from our living space as a place of meaning. How could we? Most people my age I know are either living in rented rooms in flats that house anywhere between three and ten other people, or still live with family members. In the first case, why set a sense of home and therefore link your personal identity to a physical place that has you as nothing but a guest? How can you make a home in a place where your entire life has to fit in a single room? For those who still live with their families, home is either there, with them, or still to be found. Your house doesn’t matter, but you still have to look a certain way, smell a certain way, and for that, you still need to keep your living space clean.

A most ungrateful labor

House work is grueling, a set of tasks that, strictly speaking, don’t have an end, and whose goal is an ever elusive, increasingly higher, standard of cleanliness and tidiness: something out of a catalogue, or an influencer’s Instagram. It’s sisyphean: over and over again. One of my favorite memes shows a Greek vase of Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill and the rock reads “the fucking dishes again”.

Of all the parts of the house, my mother often says, the kitchen is the most ungrateful one. It’s the one that gets dirtiest the fastest -throughout the day you use dishes, utensils, you make coffee, you cook. Even if you live entirely off of takeout food, chances are your kitchen still isn’t pristine all the time. Of all the parts of the house, it’s the one that’s most used –dare I say more than the bathroom, which tends to stay cleaner for a bit longer anyways. The kitchen is something we need, something that we dirty, because we need to eat, and drink. And for that you need cooking, or at least heating food, or storing things in a fridge. Things need to be washed constantly and you also have to go out and buy things (or have them sent home). It really is labor the majority of people would avoid if they could, though I am aware that some people genuinely enjoy cleaning, and to be fair there is a sense of satisfaction that comes once you see the kitchen clean and tidy –though it only lasts until you need to cook again.

The kitchen perfectly exemplifies the concept of reproductive labor. After all, there is a reason why terribly reactionary men (who seem to have louder and louder voices every day) emphasize that a woman’s place is “in the kitchen”. Reproductive labor includes all the work we as humans need to keep living, to reproduce life in a wide sense that goes way beyond having children and caring for them. The concept of reproductive labor was created in contrast to the concept of productive labor, the work that we’re paid for, usually outside the house. Reproductive labor would be all of the things that you need to do outside of your “proper work” in order to be able to go to work – getting enough sleep, showering, feeding ourselves, etc. By nature, it includes domestic labor.

A woman’s work

Today, in most of the so-called modern societies you can externalize much of reproductive labor. After all, more people live alone and are single or share flats in which they have little contact and common life with their flatmates. But as you can imagine, it wasn’t always like this. Domestic labor, and more broadly, reproductive labor, have fallen on the shoulders of women. And while this isn’t necessarily true for every single society at every single point in history, it’s undeniable that the link between housework and women is strong enough that it lasts today. The importance of reproductive labor is presented, for example, in the question that serves as a title to Katherine Marçal’s book “Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?”. While I haven’t read the book yet, the argument it raises is that this type of invisible labor (for which I’ve borrowed the concept of “reproductive labor”, but has other concepts too), is excluded from economics but needs to be studied.

As a lover of history and literature, I think the question of who was cooking whose dinner is a crucial one. Einstein was a genius and his work has advanced our understanding of physics in incredible ways, but I am sure that he was able to do his work more peacefully because he didn’t need to worry about getting his dishes cleaned up. Even in wealthy households, taking care of domestic affairs, administering servants and so on was something handled by women. The example of Sophia Tolstaya, wife to Russian writer Lev Tolstoy and mother of his thirteen children, exemplifies another example of this because while she had to handle the domestic side of things, she also transcribed and edited her husband’s work. She wasn’t the only wife of a man of letters to do this kind of work, that has often gone unnoticed in history.

In sickness and in health?

Reproductive labor, of course, includes more than just taking care of the household as a physical place. It also includes taking care of children, the elderly, and the disabled. On top of that, there is the emotional labor (partially expressed in the concept of mental load) that caring for others implies². Caring for others is a crucial task and perhaps one of our most important characteristics as humans, but this task often falls disproportionately on women, even in professional contexts. Nurses and nursing home personnel are usually women, a phenomenon that also features heavily in childcare and even in psychology-related fields. As children, women are generally taught to be more caring, as shown by the toys that boys and girls play with. It’s still quite common for little girls to play with baby dolls.

When it comes to children, women are still generally the prime caretakers, and are more likely to leave their professional careers to stay at home, permanently or not, to take care of the children. In many places, this gap is beginning to reduce. I’d argue policies such as making maternity and paternity leaves be equally long probably helps and many men seem to be more conscious that their contribution is key. I once heard a woman say something along the lines of “I don’t want my partner to help with the child. He doesn’t need to help with the child, he needs to raise that child with me because it is also his child. He’s not helping me”. I think this is the sort of mentality that we need to shift towards. Your boyfriend doesn’t “help” with the house either, he just does his part as a person who shares a roof with you. All around me, I’ve observed far too many times women who received none, or very little, help from their male partners when the child was born, with all sorts of excuses. In the case of the elderly, too, I’ve seen many cases in which a woman will take over the relationship with the doctors, the nursing home, or the general care of her parents in law and not just her own elder relatives.

This imbalance is reflected even in the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of human life. I was shaken to the core when I read quite a few stories on the internet about how in oncology areas in hospitals it’s not uncommon to see women fighting cancer alone. Women are more often abandoned by their male partners when going through serious disease than the other way around³. The fact that sex and intimacy is sometimes treated by men as if it was also part of the domestic labor, the heavily gendered “marital debt”, obviously makes things a lot worse, but this is a topic for another day.

As Paris Paloma sings in her viral song Labor “You make me do too much labour / All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid / Nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant”

Reproductive labor and economy - who cleans up after who?

In Emi Yagi’s novel “Diary of a void”, the protagonist, a woman in her 30s, is so fed up by the fact that her male coworkers always expect her to prepare the coffee, then pick up all the mugs and clean the meeting room once they are done, that she tells them she can’t do it anymore because she is pregnant and the smell makes her sick. The thing is, she isn’t actually pregnant. This lie is at the center of the novel and appears in the first few pages. As it goes on, the protagonist discovers that her coworkers (and indeed everyone around her) seem to treat her a lot better because they think she is pregnant. Now let me ask you something, if you are a woman reading this, just how many times have you been simply expected to clean up after people? How many times has there been lunch, and you found yourself (maybe along with your mother) picking up all the dishes afterwards? How many times have you cleaned a room because no one else was doing it? This might happen in your professional life too. Busy people don’t usually clean after themselves in an office setting. At work, people generally expect other people to do the cleaning, not realizing just how much that implies. For example, you might leave a conference room and go on with your work day, thinking that it will be cleaned afterwards by the cleaning personnel. And you are right, but what if someone is to use the room immediately after you?

There is a sort of politics that dictates who cleans after who and in which circumstances. Usually, one way or another, this will fall on a woman –even if it’s just because women make up the majority of cleaning personnel too. There is a class divide here too. As I said, busy people generally don’t clean after themselves. Where I live, the majority of cleaning personnel are either very low educated local women or, even more often, immigrants. This coincides with the personnel I’ve seen in nursing homes. The majority are immigrant women from Latin America and Romania. So in a very wide sense, it’s not just women cleaning after men, it’s often immigrant women with low salaries who clean after everyone else.

Externalizing domestic labor

Going back to domestic labor in itself, nowadays it’s common to externalize some part of the reproductive labor, by buying takeout or having groceries delivered for example. Where I live, it’s becoming more common for people to hire domestic workers for a couple hours to do some basic chores, and I’ve even heard it’s something of a trend among people who share flats since it helps avoiding arguments. Still, widespread use of paid domestic cleaning work is still not too common where I live. After all, if you want to do things legally and pay a decent amount, it’s not too cheap and the majority of people don’t make all that much money.

It is increasingly common, however, to externalize caring work, not just by enrolling children in kindergarten and school and after school classes at increasingly early ages. In the case of the elderly and for some disabilities, nursing homes are not the only solution and hiring part time or paid-per-hour nurses is very common. Governments sometimes have schemes for that too. In nuclear households such as the ones common in Western Europe, a small core of individuals fend for themselves, and multi-generational living arrangements are increasingly uncommon. This may increase the load of childcare, but also often complicates caring for our elders. And anyways, with these busy lives we lead, caring for our grandparents, parents, children, partners, pets and also ourselves is becoming almost impossible. Terms such as the “care crisis” have been coined to explain this situation and its consequences.

Here is the thing. The model of the nuclear family is an economic model that needs two things for working: one is a providing partner that earns enough money for the entire household to live comfortably, the other is a partner who will bear the burden of reproductive labor. You don’t need me to tell you how this is divided by gender.

Today, many women have joined the workforce. We are often more highly educated than men, and we want our own careers. Many reject the idea of having children altogether. But I think many people overfixate in the fact that women have joined the workforce and have gained economic independence to explain the failures of the nuclear family as a model, not realizing that the nuclear family as we think of it today is a phenomenon that was only realizable in very specific conditions. In many cultures, and for much of history, households have held many generations of the same family, for example. People also often forget that women have been working outside of the household for much of history. Women have labored the land, have done domestic work for richer households, have run artisan shops, and more –even in Medieval times. Another aspect that in my opinion is not talked about enough and that made the nuclear family model as I’ve described it possible for a relatively short period of history while it’s more difficult today, is that it was not unheard of that one single salary could sustain an entire family, sometimes a very large one, just some decades ago. Now it’s simply not possible for the majority of families in the Western world to live on a single salary. For the majority of people below 30, living alone is simply not an option: even renting a flat has become too expensive for one salary.

There is another handy concept now, that of the “double shift”, the idea that women have joined the workforce but very often after their work shift is over, they have to get home to care for the children and clean up, thus creating a second work shift of sorts. This double shift is almost inevitable in the case of single-parent households, but I think we often overlook that though, yes, this double shift is gendered and affects mostly women who are mothers, it also applies to every single person who lives alone while working. Today we are often in a conundrum: we work too much (even when we live in childless couples) to properly take care of all reproductive labor, yet we don’t have the economic ability to externalize it altogether. And anyways, who is taking care of whom?

There is a concept that I really love because of how useful and unique it is, the transnational care networks. This is the name of a phenomenon that we need to discuss when talking about the externalization of care and domestic labor. As I commented earlier, care workers, cleaning personnel and domestic laborers are usually immigrant women. This is so present that it has even been part of the literal economic development plans of entire countries (most notably the Philippines) because the importance of remittances to home countries is sometimes so large that it can make up entire portions of the Gross Domestic Product. The idea behind the transnational care networks is that while wealthy women in Western countries hire immigrant women to care for the children and the cleaning, these women often leave their own children at home, sending money to pay other women (often family members) to care for them at home, creating a transnational network that deals in care as much as it deals in money. I really like this concept because it highlights the harsh reality of immigrant workers and the globalized work we live in. Could we argue that just as it is said that behind every great man there is a great woman, behind every (wealthy) “girlboss” there is a poorer immigrant woman supporting all her domestic labor?

Tradwives and performativity

For the past few years, social media has seen the rise of “trad-wife” and "trad-wife" adjacent content. What is it exactly? I’d define it as content that shows an idealized version of a housewife, that is seen as more traditional, and the natural place that women should occupy or go back to. In a lot of ways it’s simply a more attractive and persuasive way of telling women to “go back to the kitchen”, except that it’s other women telling them to do it. I completely understand the frustration behind this trend: the economic uncertainty, the lovelessness of this age, the insecurity, the idealization of the past. When you are fed up with working 40 hours a week, or more, while seeing how hard it can be to advance in your career, just how many glass ceilings there are to break, how exhausting all of that is and how, even despite all that effort you might still not live comfortably to old age, the idea of being a woman who is economically supported by her husband/boyfriend and doesn’t have to work another day in her life (so to speak) can be really attractive. Hell, I have even said often that my ideal job would be as a wife to a diplomat. But it’s a joke that hides a dark truth, not just because I could never be a “stay at home” wife and because I just don’t like domestic labor but because it’s a chimera. It’s an idea that only comes from idealization and the misunderstanding of just how life-consuming it is to dedicate your entire life to reproductive labor. And moreover, it ignores just how dangerous it is for a woman (or anyone really) to be economically dependent on another person. It’s like the internet is selling a very specific idea of what a housewife is while completely forgetting the literal hundreds of years of fighting over and over again that has taken women to be able to divorce, to be able to open up a bank account under our own name, to own things, to be able to choose whether we prefer to have children or not. And granted, working or not working is often not a choice but a decision made entirely based on economic necessity.

Often, when the woman becomes a stay at home mom it’s because of an economic decision (if the man has a higher salary, her taking care of the child might be cheaper than the alternatives), just as it is to keep working even after bearing children. But I think the very fact that the trad-wife debate even exists proves that now we get to choose. The rights we have gained and claimed should not be forgotten. Even nowadays, these rights are not universal and women still are not independent from their male relatives in many parts of the world. These rights can be reversed, and quickly, and it isn’t something happening just in fiction such as Margaret Atwood’s “The handmaid’s tale”. It is also an observable, real-world truth we can see in places such as Afghanistan where in the last couple years the new Taliban regime has expelled women from schools and forbidden even the literal voices of women from being heard in public. I find it so frustrating that young women are forgetting or ignoring these historical and current realities and buying a discourse that directly harms all women. It makes me want to scream and cry in frustration.

User professorneil on TikTok and other social media has talked about how the trad-wife trend has much to do with the fact that these women belong to the “leisure class”, that is, they have time to do some non-crucial tasks such as cooking cereal from scratch while wearing fancy dresses because they aren’t doing any of the other, crucial work, like cleaning the toilet⁵. We only see the “aesthetic parts”. And honestly, I only need to look at what Nara Smith wears in her videos while cooking to know that a) she is not cleaning them afterwards and b) she is so ridiculously wealthy that she doesn’t care if her designer clothes get spoiled while cooking. Assuming she is the one actually doing her cooking. Thus, the labor of these content creators is mainly creating content. They have other people doing the grueling work for them, even if I am sure they have huge workloads just taking care of their children. They don’t show the reality, just a very idealized version of a very specific type of people doing a very specific type of domestic labor, all while looking aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, even relaxing⁷. If that isn’t propaganda, then I don’t know what is.

Reproductive labor as an act of love

Reproductive labor is most often invisible. Now it is talked about more frequently and there have even been movements to recognize it as “real”, paid labor to help bridge economic gaps between those who dedicate themselves to reproductive labor full time and those who participate in paid labor. But even when we recognize it’s necessary and it has a value (economic and otherwise) we often still talk about reproductive labor as a necessary evil, a task that we have to do but never want to do, a reality to accept but not love. I have talked about its repetitive nature, how impossible and neverending it is. But I also want to look at reproductive labor through a more positive lens. It might be a necessary evil, but it can also be a work of love. Yes, as women we are pushed into it more, and sometimes it’s demanded from us. It’s ungrateful labor that we often do for ungrateful people, and most of the time it is something that we all (men and women) do because we have to. But caring for others, and ourselves, is not only an important part of living, it is also a crucial way in which we show compassion, respect and love.

Caring and being taken care of is a directional relationship that takes trust and empathy, crucial features of living as social creatures. Often women complain about their male partners not helping, and it is true that when men “help” they often do it with very specific tasks like taking out the trash or with more "prestigious" tasks such as cooking, instead of cleaning the toilet. But many times, hopefully most times nowadays, there is dialogue between partners.

While the labor is gendered, it is many times born out of a pure sentiment of solidarity and compassion. For example, during the AIDS epidemic it was lesbian women who took care of the gay men who were affected, even when no one else dared even touch them ⁸. Svetlana Alexievich in her amazing “The unwomanly face of war” collects the stories of women who fought in the Soviet army during World War II and explains how women who enlisted as nurses provided not just crucial medical aid but inestimable emotional support to soldiers. So reproductive labor can be a work of solidarity, compassion, and many different types of love, and empathy. Caring for your children, or your elders, is often a task of patience and much, much genuine affection.

But now let’s pause for a second and talk about reproductive labor as relates, specifically, to romantic love.

Just to make sure you’re well fed

Heterosexual relationships are often decidedly marked by gender relations and the roles men and women are supposed to assume, used to assuming and/or are expected to assume. On the other hand, loving relationships imply not just reciprocal feelings but reciprocal care. There are many ways in which we might show love but I think some of the ways in which we show them are heavily marked by what we are used to doing, but what is expected and has been expected for us, which is often affected by gender relations and roles. Therefore, women often show their love, or in any case contribute to a relationship, by doing acts of service that have to do, very often, with reproductive labor. In social media, especially with the rise of the so-called trad-wife discourse we pointed to earlier, women speak of how they want to “take care of their man”, and sometimes talk about the pride they take in caring for their male partners. While the packaging of this discourse is now surrounded by many things relating to our political and social climate (and much of it is a reactionary response to women’s increasing independence in the West), the discourse itself is far from new.

The conflation of desire as a sexual and romantic feeling that’s also mixed with a wanting to care is present in popular culture as well. In her 1960 song I just want to make love to you, Etta James sings to her beloved (presumably a man) “All I want to do is wash your clothes / I don’t want to keep you indoors / There is nothing for you to do / But keep me making love to you” and later on “All I want to do is cook your bread / Just to make sure you’re well fed”. The juxtaposition of service, care, love and desire is transparent in James’ voice as she croons how much she wants to give this person her love.

This type of “discourse” was also present in other real-life spaces. About a decade ago, when I was obsessed with classic rock from the sixties and seventies, I stumbled across Pamela Des Barres, a famous groupie at the time, and her memoirs. I think it was her who described groupies as “wives on the road”, and talked about it wasn’t about the sex, it was about the music, it was about love, and how they would even wash the rockstar’s clothes and so on⁴. I remember being quite impacted by this sort of discourse at the time, but I wasn’t sure why exactly. Now that time has passed, I understand why. These men, these rockstars, were essentially taking advantage of the comfort these women were giving up almost completely for free⁶. Similar to Jimi Hendrix’ song Little wing, this mystical being, the groupie, was just conveniently there. As much as it has been reviled, the figure of the groupie has also been idealized and (as I experienced first hand) idolized even decades later after the fact. Everything seems more beautiful through the eyes of nostalgia, particularly nostalgia for a time and place you never even lived in.

Cross half the globe and flash forward three decades. Hong Kong is a high paced, modern city that is just three years short of its return to the Popular Republic of China. It’s a true melting pot, a city with dozens of languages and millions of citizens roaming around crowded neon-lit streets. Everything is moving, ever faster. Famous filmmaker Wong Kar Wai releases Chungking Express in this context. One of the storylines in the movie features a young woman (played by the one and only Faye Wong) who falls in love with a police officer that often comes to her shop to eat. Eventually she ends up getting keys to his apartment and secretly sneaks in to clean and decorate the place. For quite some time he doesn’t even really pay too much attention. Faye’s ploys are clearly shown as an act of love and when the police officer realizes she’s been doing it, he also reads it as a sign of love (or romantic interest in any case). Here, too, caring, cleaning and reproductive labor is clearly shown as an act of love.

In more recent times, we can see a flipside to this discourse. It’s not just women caring for men but also women expressing their gratitude towards men for handling their house tasks in a very specific way. Singer Katy Perry was heavily criticized when she said that she would sexually compensate her partner for things like doing the dishes. In a cheekier, more satirical tone, Sabrina Carpenter sings in her 2025 single Tears “I get wet at the thought of you being a responsible guy [...] Baby just do the dishes, I’ll give you what you want [...] Assemble a chair from Ikea and I’m like (uhh)”. Here, too, sexual desire and housework appear as closely related. A man doing the bare minimum appears as desirable, as worthy of praise. The discourse of sexual desire, romantic love, and house work as services and signs of said love are still closely related, only now it is presented in a different way. In the examples I have quoted in the beginning, from Etta James’ song to Chungking Express, the discourse is more about a woman expressing her love and desire for a man by looking after them in a very physical sense: by cleaning, cooking, washing clothes, and providing physical and sexual comfort. In the examples of Katy Perry’s interview and Tears the discourse has somewhat shifted. Men are expected to take more of the workload at the house. However, doing the most basic tasks (the dishes, assembling furniture) gains praise, and a heavily gratifying sexual response from their partners, real or imaginary. Before, the woman was expected to do this because it was part of being a woman, part of the bargain of being in a relationship with a man. Now, the expectations has shifted, but the reality is similar enough that the man is either physically compensated, comforted, or praised and met with increased desire for doing the things the woman previously handled entirely on her own.

While I believe that acts of service, including reproductive and domestic labor, are indeed very important ways in which we show love, I also think it is a heavily unbalanced situation. I want to cook for my loved ones (and here I’m not just talking about romantic partners, I’m also talking about family and friends). I want to take care of the people I love when they are sick. I will wash the clothes, even if I don’t want to, and add a little extra touch and iron them, and so on if I know the person I love is going to need it for a big occasion. I will clean the kitchen, brush my partner’s hair, and help them fix their car. Because I love them, and all of those things are ways in which we cooperate with others, ways in which we love and show love. But I expect to receive the same from my partner (or anyone I’m living with for that matter). I expect the house chores to be cleanly divided and I refuse to do it all on my own. And if you ask me –yes, house chores are good enough reasons to completely break up with someone if need be. Because as much as cleaning, cooking, ironing, swiping, washing, folding, grocery shopping and everything else is a labor of love, and a necessary one, it is also a sisyphean task. We spend our lives keeping everyday chaos at bay, to keep the disorder low. It’s a fight that we’ve already lost because we always dirt and eat much faster than we can clean and cook. Why should only one partner have to deal with the enormity and mental load of such a demanding, time consuming and frustrating task?

Have you tried making your bed in the morning?

Whether we like it or not, reproductive labor is not only necessary, but crucial to our well being. And it is a task of love not just towards others, but also towards ourselves. Keeping our bodies and houses clean heavily affects, and is affected by, our mental health. Our sense of self esteem and self worth is closely tied to our looks and image. To be well fed, to sleep comfortably, to have a clean space we can work and rest in are crucial things that directly affect our self-image and our entire lives. Eating and sleeping well gives us energy. Taking time and effort into our appearance may reflect positively in how we look at ourselves. For women, who are taught from childhood how particularly important and desirable beauty is, this is even more crucial (sometimes it seems in fact as if being ugly is the worst thing that can ever happen to you, as a woman). I am not just talking about going to the gym, exercising and doing your skincare routine, though all of those are important too and in my opinion are part of reproductive labor as well. I am also talking about housework here: about having clean dishes, a clean bed, a moderately tidy space, a moment to cook and eat.

Self care has become a buzzword for fancy, multy-step skincare routines, expensive lingerie, and in short, another way to try to sell us even more things. But true self care is sleeping enough, eating nutritious food, washing your face, brushing your teeth, having clean hair, even when you are too tired to do any of those things. In major depression disorders, these types of things become a task so heavy to bear some people are completely unable to do it. In turn, the lack of these routines and self cares often worsens mental conditions. We tend to feel more anxious and overall bad if we have to cook a meal quickly in a dirty, messy kitchen than if we have a long time and an orderly space, for example. Reproductive labor is the ultimate form of self care, in my opinion. It’s the thing we need to do for ourselves, and we can do it in healthy ways and incorporate little treats that make us feel better. For example not just showering, but also putting on a perfume we really love after we are done.

Additionally, I believe there are some invaluable aspects in manual labor. Let me explain. As much as cleaning and wiping can be taxing, boring and completely unstimulating, its repetitiveness can also help us relax and concentrate. The satisfaction of seeing the oven clean often compensates the ordeal of kneeling down to scrub it. Doing things with our own two hands is extremely valuable because in a lot of ways it helps us be in contact with ourselves and move our bodies with a very specific purpose in mind. In short, it can be therapeutic. Don’t get me wrong, if I was a millionaire, my house chores would definitely be externalized. They are boring and time consuming – but I think it can be a type of repetitiveness, predictability and movement that can be beneficial sometimes. The fact we can choose to do these things for ourselves by ourselves (and in the process learn extremely important life skills such as the correct ways of cooking a specific meat, or what chemicals from common cleaning products can’t be mixed up, or the best ways to remove each type of stain) is something that’s extremely important, and worthy to be mentioned. House chores can also be things that we do entirely on our own, for our own benefit, in a world that often asks us to constantly look after others (at the cost of being seen as selfish) or that only is interested in extreme individualism that’s also entirely misguided by consumerism and advertising. It’s a way to protect ourselves, to reclaim a specific space or our own lives without necessarily having to buy all of those “self-care” devices, creams and services.

Sorry, the house is a mess

When I was a child, I never found time, or drive, to do housework, but as I grew up, it became inevitable. I don’t clean everyday –it’s impossible. My house is always messy to some degree, nothing lasts too clean for too long and with it comes a certain frustration, a certain inevitable sense of failure. Why can’t I keep my house clean in the same way that (at least it seems to me) my mom did during my childhood? Why is my house always messier than the houses of my friends? There is a sense of shame here, but perhaps there is something akin to social conditioning for that.

Recently I watched a very interesting video essay that linked open space architecture directly with sexism. Throwing down the walls and exposing kitchens meant women had to keep their house particularly tidy and ready at all times, while closed rooms allow for keeping the living room or guest room organized and clean while not having to expose the rest of the house to visitors⁹. Similarly, studies have shown that while domestic technology such as vacuum cleaners was created with the promise of saving time for women, they don’t actually do it[^ Weaponized incompetence]. They only save time, tangentially, for men. This is because, possibly, these machines and things like open space have actually made our cleanliness and tidiness standard higher than it used to be. So, instead of liberating labor, we just keep making the standard ever higher. But we don’t have time to do any of this, houses and our standards aren’t made to be kept by a single person, will anything shift?

Yes, I want my house tidy and clean enough to live comfortably in it, to have enough space to cook, to dress up in, to shower, to relax. I owe it to myself to be comfortable. But I don’t need a catalogue clean house. And that is ok. We shouldn’t apologize or feel bad for living in places that show that we live on them. What if I need to take a half dozen objects from my table before I have the guests sitting down? What if the floor is a bit dustier than usual because it’s been raining outside? What if I have some laundry to do? It’s ok. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just liveable, just tidy enough to be comfortable, clean and nice for me and everyone else and that is it. It is not a personal failing that my kitchen is kind of a mess after I cooked and then I was too tired to clean it afterwards. And yet, doing all of these things is a true act of self care, and when we do it for other people, it can be a way of showing them love. Yes, housework is sisyphean but it’s also something that will be good in the long run - and also something that is inevitable. So we might as well do it, when we are able, to think of a more positive attitude. We need to work towards a better divide of the housetasks, that lets everyone have a better time when dealing with these things that are necessary in life. Housework are important life skills and by learning them, we only gain independence over our lives. And yet, dividing it is really important because its nature makes it a very, very heavy weight. Not everyone has the advantage of having a home to take care of, not everybody is physically able to do things like cooking, showering, or doing the dishes by themselves. Housework has a sense of privilege, while being able to get rid of housework altogether is true privilege. I will finish by saying: be patient with yourself even if your house is not as clean as you would like, fight your partner(s) over housetasks division if needed, help others where you can, be patient to those people you take care of, and always, always be kind to the multiple people that are silently cleaning after you (even when you don’t realize it).