Academia, Bizarre

Kitchen Bull Connors: Professor Denounces Cleanliness as Sexist and Racist

Professor Drenten has struck out at a social media trend of posting videos showing off different ways to organize pantries. Where many see neatness, Drenten sees racism and sexism. She notes that these video creators, “predominantly white women,” have created “a new status symbol” to replace the old one of “nice houses,” “nice yards” and “nice neighborhoods.” She wrote:

Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of “niceness”: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.

What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.

She warns others not to fall for “pantry porn”:

Magazines like Good Housekeeping were once the brokers of idealized domestic work. Now online pantry porn sets the aspirational standard for becoming an ideal mom, ideal wife and ideal woman. This grew out of a shift toward an intensive mothering ideology that equates being a good mom with time-intensive, labor-intensive, financially expensive care work.

Pantry maintenance is a new area of racism and sexism for Professor Drenten. Before she went after domestic Bull Connors, she blew the whistle on video gaming with papers on “Video Gaming as a Gendered Pursuit” and “More Gamer, Less Girl: Gendered Boundaries, Tokenism, and the Cultural Persistence of Masculine Dominance.”

134 thoughts on “Kitchen Bull Connors: Professor Denounces Cleanliness as Sexist and Racist”

  1. If you don’t think that cleanness is important, you will live with bugs and rodents.

      2. Appears I am guilty, guilty, guilty and not ashamed. I was taught cleanliness and order. It is a basic sign of civilized behavior.

  2. Whenever any writer mentions “social structures,” you immediately know that you are dealing with a critical theorist. Critical theory was founded in the 1930s at Frankfurt University’s Institute for Social Research. (Interestingly, the Institute’s founder wanted to name his center the Institute for Marxism, but was saved from Hitler’s nascent gas chambers by advice from colleagues that such a name might be too controversial.)

    Critical theory is an example of what I call “search-and-replace” Marxism. Take any standard Marxist text, search for “worker” and replace it with your preferred victim class. Then, search for “capitalist” and replace it with your preferred victimizer. Voila! You have your custom-tailored critical theory, ready to spawn the Marxist revolution of your choosing.

    Critical theory has gained status within the radical left in direct proportion to the degree that growth of the Western middle-class has discredited Marx’s original fable. It hard to foment a worker’s revolution when workers are aspiring to and attaining solid middle to upper-middle class lifestyles. Here is America, you are far better off using America’s indisputable original sin of slavery as kindling for your revolutionary inferno. Convincing the weak-mined and gullible that the myriad pathologies stemming from the mixing sub-Saharan African tribal cultures and Western civilized societies are all caused by White exploitation is comparative child’s play, as we are now learning.

    1. “. . . search-and-replace’ Marxism . . .”

      That is very clever.

      What it shows is that the two movements are identical in their basic premises and goals: Deny the reality of the individual by pushing collectivism; deny that man has free will; punish and shackle the “oppressors;” demand the unearned; enslave everyone.

      And their method of “thinking” is identical: Start with a desire. Then concoct a means to satisfy that desire.

  4. the left remains, as the old joke goes, like granola: what ain’t a flake is a fruit and what ain’t a fruit is a nut. really simple, isn’t it? the flakes, fruits and nuts on the left consider their mental illness normal.

  5. My father owned an apartment building. He said that the biggest slobs to cleanup after vacating the apartments were single women teachers and nurses.

    1. I owned a janitorial service and women’s restrooms were far and away the worst.

    1. So how many well off black people will this offend?
      Well off people like to have nice clean and well organized houses, don’t they?

  8. I’m probably wrong, but isn’t it kind of racist to make the claim people of color are incapable of keeping clean and orderly homes and only do so due to pressure from racist White women?

  10. “Cleanliness” has always be part of the ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ process of the Kitchen.
    Mr. Clean is the utmost dominant supreme being of White Male Pattern-Baldness Cleaning Idols,
    Ivory Soap is the Holy Water additive of Dish Pan Baptisms for Generations of White Households,
    and Kitchen Aid the do-it-all White helper. No more Kitchen Mammy Nursemaids and Uncle Bens to do the job.
    Gone are the days of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Mrs. Butterworth.
    They have all been Liberated. Cleansed and washed away, Free at last! Free at last!

      1. I don’t need your Approval,
        I need your Obedience.
        Order must be kept in the Kitchen at all times.

    2. In other news, PETA demands an end to “Sweeping away dust bunnies”.

    3. Free at last. My home is like my husband says is ‘lived in’ …. Like 99.9 % places not used for ‘entertaining’….. Which is all the 99.9 % who live in homes do. No one except movers and shakers and the connected need the task of their organization. At all! but we do need it because that’s the , “standard” they will use to take away our kids to make them sex slaves in foster care. if we ain’t perfect! plus the fire Marshall can say he needs a clutter free house. Kiss my ass. I can do via a fire drill….and let my unorganized place burn up or down. There comes a point of liberation….and when can I finally check out? Cleanliness really? What is it? Saudis bath maybe once a week. Even for American dementia patients we ask once a week! What is cleanliness? It sure is not organizing cabinets. She’s right on this…organizing cabinets is a power play by the powers to be…..to invite themselves into homes then kid nap innocent kids from them because by then the house isn’t clean enough. For them. You like to say cleanliness is like godliness….but my God said you harm one hair on them kids I’ll put a millstone around your neck….he said that while his feet were being warshed with olive oil…not the kids unholy diirty from outside feet!

      1. But they continue….knowing our dod gets their volunteers from family….and knowing how it works for recriuts records being merged…China has taken a new low. To the point of hacking dod kids records and planting false crap that would make them ineligible! I demand to see the third parties insert to my kids medical records! It’s either china or the public school! Some one or either are commies!

  11. 30 years ago there was a house a woman owned in a small town that was one of the messiest and littered in the South part of the county. The city took a public nuissance complaint out on her but she objected so the measure went before the town clowncil. Of course, she herself was a councilwoman for the city yet was required to recuse herself during deliberations. The rest of her peers voted to abate the nuissance and it went from there.

    Each member of the clowncil had an area of responsiblity, such as finance, public works, etc. What was hers?….

    Public Health and Sanitation
    ~+~
    Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of “niceness”: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.

    What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.
    ~+~
    Sorry for my bluntness but…what a crock of shit. It would be almost laughable if it wasn’t so monumentally asinine. I’m amazed that she could even show her face in public after writing such rubbish.

    2. Darren – great to get your actual thoughts on a topic!

      As for showing her face, it depends whether her academic bubble constitutes “in public.” She undoubtedly gets applause and kudos at her left-wing faculty cocktail parties attended by other stupid-smart lunatics just like her.

  16. Ultimately this sort of absurdity is best understood in the context of the overall Cloward and Piven strategy of the left – to attack every standard of excellence, every standard of accomplishment, every critical institution, to attack even logic itself, thought itself, not to mention creating scholarship, wealth, delivering great services – in an effort to so demoralize and induce mediocrity into all aspects of life as to collapse the society, the confidence of the society in its own values, the economy and reduce us to a state of panic and fear making us willing to surrender our values and our liberty to the left.

    3. “overall Cloward and Piven strategy of the left”

      I don’t see conservatives as great paragons of scholarship at all. As far as I can see conservatives do not care about Great Ideas or the Great Works. They care only about the bottom dollar.

      Being educated or intellectual is for those damn ivory tower libs–so stay all the hell away from being well-read. I agree with Sir Roger Scruton on conservatism and intellectual/philosophical thought.

      1. “I don’t see conservatives as great paragons of scholarship at all. As far as I can see conservatives do not care about Great Ideas or the Great Works. They care only about the bottom dollar.”

        Perhaps, Prairie, you need better education so that you don’t make such broad statements using a term that is fluid and means different things to different people.

        Perhaps we should name a few famous people considered conservative.

        Confucius: Maybe you don’t like his ideas of social stability and family values. That is common to most thought to be conservatives. The Golden Rule is espoused by Confucius, but maybe he “digs in its heels” to advance it.

        I think you know who Cato is because he frequently is mentioned on the blog along with John Locke, another Conservative.

        Perhaps you have heard of these three conservatives, perhaps not since your comment doesn’t seem to indicate recognition of conservatives as important. To you “They care only about the bottom dollar.” You do realize Cato was not a man of luxury.

        Shall I mention Edmond Burke? No. More than three might be too taxing for your “great paragons of scholarship.”

      2. “I don’t see conservatives as great paragons of scholarship at all. As far as I can see conservatives do not care about Great Ideas or the Great Works.”

        True or false that is not an argument.

        My focus is on the penultimate ideas that have birthed the liberty and prosperity of the modern era.
        Mill, Locke, Smith, not whether they are liberal or conservative ideas.

        Adam Smith. John Locke, JS Mill were he liberals – often radical left of their era.
        Today thay are portrayed as stodgy old conservatives.

        What matters is the ideas and their merit.

        Marx was brillian, He is ideas are still a disaserous failure.

        Those of Locke, Mill, Smith have withstood the tests of logic, reason and time – they work.

    4. “to attack every standard of excellence, every standard of accomplishment, every critical institution, to attack even logic itself, thought itself, not to mention creating scholarship, wealth, delivering great services – in an effort to so demoralize and induce mediocrity into all aspects of life as to collapse the society, the confidence of the society in its own values, the economy and reduce us to a state of panic and fear making us willing to surrender our values and our liberty to the left.”

      Conservatives do this to themselves just fine. As far as I can tell, ignorance is preferable to being associated with intellectual thought (the terrible bastion of liberals,! *gasp*). Without an actual counterweight philosophy to the excesses of the left, the right gets dragged along behind like a petulant child who has no idea why he doesn’t wanna go along, he just doesn’t wanna. It is the conservative personality that digs in its heels rather than any opposing philosophy. It is self-inflicted to a fair extent.

      2. “As far as I can tell, ignorance is preferable to being associated with intellectual thought (the terrible bastion of liberals,! *gasp*).”

        To clarify, it seems for far too many conservatives ignorance is preferable to being associated with intellectual thought (the terrible bastion of liberals! *gasp*).

        To Andrew, yes, I agree–don’t be ignorant. 🙂

      3. Two things are certain, change and resistance to change. The left demands change – now! And when they achieve it are they happy? Hell no, we need more change – now! The right is resistant to change, wanting to preserve aspects of life that are important to overall happiness. Digging in their heels? You betcha.

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