After reading Ehrenreich's article, I find myself concluding that people criticize things in very strange ways. In Halberstam's article earlier this semester, which defined the "bathroom problem," I questioned why it was necessary to put such a strong social stigma on something as basic as excretion. There is also the relic of a social stigma on sex ever since the Victorian era, as Foucault has noted, and here in this week's articles is the presence of a societal stigma against the act of maintaining cleanliness. These are very basic functions that animals perform all the time (and let's face it, humans ARE animals in the scientific sense). The problem appears to be a class/race/gender conflict, but perhaps it is driven also by the inability of society to be satisfied with admittedly ever-shifting "normality" while still maintaining the pretenses of being so. The housework industry seems to be an example of instinctive competitiveness (survival luxury of the fittest), despite its consumers' attempts to depart from associations with "animals" and "lower class." To be "normal" or "like everyone else" is to fall out of consumer culture and the modern fashion to have better things and live better lives than others. One's ability to hire (and exploit) others - in this case, maids - is yet another way to distance "self" from "other" across various racial, gender, class and national borders and within both public and private domains.