Other people's lives, part N

[mme_hardy]

I was reading r/amitheasshole, as one does, and I came across somebody explaining how often you should vacuum your house. They explained that you should vacuum one day a week for each person and pet living in the house.

I am a terrible housekeeper. My parents, who were anything but, had a cleaning lady in once a week, and the only time the vacuum came out inbetween times was when something large got spilled on the floor.

Comments

[oursin]

Are these people living the retro-Victorian lifestyle, with a secret exception for hoovers? I can quite see that in the days of horse transport and probably not terribly effective crossing sweepers, and well before the Clean Air Acts (Coal Smoke Abatement Society f 1898, Clean Air Act 1958 after the Great Smog of 52) - not to mention your pretty green arsenic wallpaper was probably shedding - vacuum cleaning on a regular basis would have been an entire boon and changed people's lives.

Alternatively, there is some deep Mary Douglas Purity and Danger stuff going on there.

[mme_hardy]

Tell me more about Mary Douglas, if you feel like it!

[oursin]

She made a very influential analysis of concepts of dirt, purity/impurity, the sacred, clean/unclean across different societies and times in Purity and Danger (1966). That it's not about literal filth but all sorts of factors are involved.

E.g. how dare Ignaz Semmelweiss imply that surgeons could be carrying impurity? (because men, status, etc).

(I recently saw a very good tweet thread applying this to people's attitudes to pandemic risks, sigh - 'My friends could not possibly be carrying contagion....')