And I was definitely trying to point out the flaw in the idea that if you buy something to clean your house, you’re not participating in oppression, or you’re doing so less than employing someone to clean your house. It probably IS better than employing someone, but not if you just consider that you’ve upheld human dignity, done and dusted. Do you know who works in chip factories? Pe

I wasn’t sticking up for dudes – the patriarchy sucks, and so does class oppression, and the interaction between the two is synergistic: women of lower socioeconomic position experience negative effects that far exceed the addition of class to gender oppression.

Seriously. Because what we know of it is nothing to write home about, but plenty to blame about.

joy
August 11, 2010 at 3:03 pm

Class -is- important, Alexa, as many women are lower class. Lower class women aren’t just oppressed by the fact that they’re women — they’re oppressed doubly by the fact that they’re on the bottom of the shit pile, or as Jill once said, stuck in the slimy lower strata of this fetid capitalist swimming pool.

Surely I said “stratum“?

Add race to this and you have a damn lot of people who would in fact argue that class is pretty fucking important. Intersectionality, whoa.

Talking about people in factories and dudes cleaning warehouses/airplane hangars/boats/whatever is a little bit derailing, though, as this entry is mostly about female housekeepers and the radical feminist implications of housework.
It’s kind of interesting that whenever a woman (who happened to be me this time, but it happened upthread a few times too) posted her actual experiences living at the intersection of lower class and female, the responses were, “What about the people building Roombas (etc)??? Don’t THEY have needs too?!”

Someone still suffers to make said stuff (oh, and how they do), but at least when a person purchases a secondhand item they aren’t DIRECTLY contributing to this suffering.

Plus it keeps this item from going to the landfill.

Revolution is the way. I keep trying to foment something around this site, but get a profound response of ‘meh’ from everyone other than, say, Jill. Like someone else said on here one time (I’ve been reading the archives a lot to keep my militant flame alive), “people only want to join the revolution if it doesn’t inconvenience them too much.”

People on the bottom, meanwhile, are pretty damn inconvenienced, and have been for a fucklong time. Let’s get a move on this already.

I hate discussing things when you know the poster isn’t feminist, but acts feminist while quietly crapping on everything to get past a mod policy. Some internet dwellers need lives.

Note: bringing up other more important oppressions on. A feminist blog is a sign the person hates feminism. Just a tip from captain obvious.

You can’t win. If you pay someone to do something you don’t want to do yourself, you’re exerting class privilege. If you can afford to and do buy a machine to do that task, it’s almost certain that someone manufactured it under conditions you wouldn’t work under. That’s class privilege, too.

On a related note – there are plenty of horrible places to clean that aren’t residences, and plenty of dudes – underclass dudes, of course – clean them. It’s just house-cleaning we see as an exclusively female domain.

People upthread, long long ago, asked a.) to hear from people who actually clean house, and b.) wondered how many single women hire housekeepers. So here you have it.

I’ve worked as a housekeeper before. I am a lower-class radical feminist anarchist with PTSD, and sometimes the freelance writing work just isn’t enough to pay rent. Can’t have honky daddy (who ran out on my mom when I was a baby) or mommy (who’s lower class herself) bail my ass out of trouble, so I have to do something to keep from being homeless.

It’s either cleaning floors or sucking dicks. Let me let you in on a secret: I resent both the people whose dicks I’ve sucked and the people whose floors I’ve cleaned (the elderly and disabled aside) — albeit for different reasons.

It’s nice having money to pay rent, cover basic necessities, etc. That’s true. Thank you rich honky ladies for providing some of us with your (or your Nigel’s) income in exchange for scrubbing up your well-heeled baby’s puke! I’m sure that money was richly earned and whatnot.

You do what you got to do to get by, but abolishment of capitalism, downsizing of lifestyles, making Nigel do it, etc., is the way to go. Really.

Meanwhile, I recently posted an ad for a woman-owned, woman-run cleaning business. If I’m gonna do this again, I want to clean for women. Single women, partnered lesbians, disabled women, elderly women, I just want to clean for women. My ad makes this abundantly clear: I am a housecleaner who wishes to clean house for women.

I’ve received no responses thus far. Except from pornsick dudes asking me to pick up after their fuckforsaken messes and blow them while I’m at it. They’ll pay me $20 an hour.

That should clear up any lingering confusion.