"The point at The Maids, apparently, is not to clean so much as it is to create the appearance of having been cleaned, not to sanitize but to create a kind of stage setting for family life. And the stage setting Americans seem to prefer is sterile only in the metaphorical sense," says Barbara Ehrenreich. When reading this article, in conjunction with Enloe's Globetrotting Sneaker, I can't help but feel disgusted and terrified by the trajectory of American consumerism/materialism. In a culture where social reproduction is completely devalued, kids' time is spent taking SAT prep classes instead of doing chores and playing with friends, and, as Ehrenreich describes in the quote above, people don't have enough time about things beyond immediate appearance, how are people ever going to slow down, pay attention to what they are consuming, or just scrub their own damn floors?
I was especially struck by Ehrenreich's statement that "the result is a kind of virtual existence, in which the trail of litter that follows you seems to evaporate all by itself...a servant economy breeds callousness and solipsism in the served." She also says later that children growing up in the 'servant economy' suffer a "metaphysical loss, a matter of no longer being centered in your environment," thus perpetuating the social alienation and apathy that arises as a result of a complicated, technological world. I've observed this firsthand a few times in watching really wealthy peers who grew up in such an environment, and some of them have the most disgusting sense of entitlement, as if the world belongs to the individual rather than the individual belonging to the world. I had a close childhood friend with this attitude and upbringing and we eventually just couldn't be friends anymore because she was selfish, careless, out of touch with reality--probably as a result of the 'metaphysical loss' that Ehrenreich mentions. Is this sad phenomenon ever going to change, or will it continue to get worse? Is it possible to make people care more about what they consume? (Or maybe I should start with, how do I make myself care more about what I consume? How can I make myself continually aware that any material pleasure I've ever experienced was possible only because of the pain of an underpaid and undervalued (probably female) worker in some distant place?) Also, who's to blame for the crisis of commodified and devalued domestic work? Surely some would say that feminists are at fault, because they decided that women could do more than just housework, thus supposedly de-valuing domestic labor. Of course, that's not fair, because women can do more than housework but they can do housework too, and so can men and children. Isn't there a happy medium somewhere, where the societal norm is for one to balance his or her work life and personal, domestic life, instead of putting too much emphasis on work and money? (And where everyone is equal and we take of the Earth and hold hands while singing and eat berries and live in the woods...)