Are we too obsessed with cleanliness?

How many times do you wash your hands in a day? And your face? How many products do you apply? Do you change pillowcases every night or only twice a month? Before storing sweaters and coats for winter, do you take them to the dry cleaners? And shoes? Do you store them as they are, or do you wash them with a sponge first? Do you wear them indoors? And when you organize a dinner with friends, do you ask everyone to leave their shoes at the door? How many products do you use to clean the bathroom? How often and with what intensity? If this barrage of increasingly specific questions has made you anxious, welcome to social media. More specifically, to clean tok, the part of TikTok where cleanliness is performed.

Even Cleaning Is Content

Have you seen the content we are talking about? The latest one to make a splash is that of a woman who claims that you need to wash the artificial Christmas tree. For this purpose, she puts it in the bathtub and cleans it thoroughly with a generous amount of detergents. Apparently, it's futile, as the water at the bottom of the tub is perfectly clean. Moreover, some time ago, another user's video went viral on social media, throwing many different detergents into the toilet, all different in consistency (liquids, powders, creams) and color. A kind of ASMR of cleaning, potentially very dangerous: chemical reactions are just around the corner, and cleaning products are no joke—the fumes can be very harmful. Similarly, videos of professionals cleaning carpets with their machines have the same effect. No problem, and they are indeed very relaxing, except that they fit into a broader obsession with cleanliness that starts from the clean girl trend and ends with content that encourages disinfecting everything, obsessively, including grocery items before bringing them home or, every Sunday, stacking an unreasonable amount of wet wipes or dishwasher tablets in specially purchased, identical containers to restock and start the week clean and ready to fight any dirt.

Issues with Performative Cleanliness

The problems with what Vox has called performative cleanliness are varied. Firstly, it is indeed a performance, a way to feel superior to others and, not too subtly, judge them or make them feel inadequate if they are not as clean as we are or do not have the same habits. Secondly, these are unrealistic routines that set impossible standards for anyone with a normal life. Who has time to take a shower only in the evening and not in the morning because "otherwise you go to bed dirty"? Or to change sheets twice a week? Needless to say, these are often content that encourages purchases. A new sponge, a new polishing cream, a new disinfecting gadget. And, it's worth noting that these contents are created almost exclusively by women for women, with a strong emphasis on keeping the house in order. In short, it falls back into stereotypes that portray women as homemakers, in control of their children and cleanliness, both theirs and their environment. As if that weren't enough, disinfecting everything is not guaranteed to help people avoid illnesses. Disinfectants also kill good bacteria, those that, for example, help digest food or build our immune system. Furthermore, eliminating every speck of possible dirt can cause long-term antibiotic resistance, not to mention the already mentioned toxic fumes.

The Answer Is an Anthem to Normality

As expected (after all, these are extreme and polarizing contents), the response has already emerged in the form of videos. Busy moms show their normal homes, propose realistic and normal tidying routines under the cry of #nonaesthetic. This happened, for example, when Julia Fox showed her home. On that occasion, the comments were full of people praising her because it was a normal, lived-in place, not sterile, in shor:, relatable. But since when is normality so far from our social media that it needs to be applauded and welcomed with relief? Even Marie Kondo, the queen of tidying up, admitted to not keeping her home perfectly clean. Finally, K.C. Davis, who wrote the book How to Keep House While Drowning and dedicates her account to giving realistic cleaning tips to anyone who finds it challenging to take care of the house, warns us all: cleaning should absolutely not be made a matter of morality or righteousness; on the contrary. According to her, performative cleanliness happens when: "We clean our house because we hope to become someone we are not, instead of understanding that who we are right now is important, and we need to take care of it." In a reachable and realistic way, perhaps.

Clean (and Exist) Away from Social Media

In the end, the advice is always the same. If social media makes us feel under pressure and always deficient, proposing ideas of beauty, cleanliness, perfection, purity, and superiority that we find impossible to apply in our lives, perhaps the fault is not in our lives but in the content we consume and the influence we allow it to have on our day. You don't need to be exactly like the clean girls to be clean. A healthy dose of detachment from what we see, mixed wisely with the real conviction that we are doing the best we can with the means we have, might help us. Both to not be saddened by the perfect lives of those who film themselves cleaning for a living and to appreciate ourselves a little more, altogether.