Curious Article on Kylie and Madonna cleaning dust
This is one of the weirdest articles we ever stumbled upon mentioning Madonna. It’s by Rachel Simhon and it’s called:
Happiness is a feather duster
Why is everyone so exercised by the fact that Kylie Minogue likes housework? As reported in Wednesday’s Telegraph , when she wants to take a break from her punishing schedule of concerts, making records, designing knickers and running a “gorgeous” French boyfriend, she likes nothing better than cleaning her cupboards. “I do like a good dust,” she said. “I’ll get my Marigolds on and have a fantastic frenzy.”
A few years ago, such a sentiment would have been professional suicide. Kylie is, famously, a babe. Admitting to enjoying the domestic is not generally regarded as a facet of babedom. Babes don’t do domestic: they do sex, and sex and housework are mutually exclusive. As Joan Rivers once observed: “Don’t cook. Don’t clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum – ‘My God, the floor’s immaculate. Lie down, you hot bitch’. ”
Rivers was very much in tune with her times. The social and political imperative of the 1970s and 1980s was to get women out of the home. It is hard to believe now, but the Wages for Housework campaign, which began in 1972, was actively opposed by feminists of the era, who did not believe that women should be paid for “unwaged work”.
Whenever a powerful or famous woman did talk about housewifely things, it felt insincere and patronising, much as Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess at Le Petit Trianon must have galled the average French peasant woman. When Madonna said she got enormous satisfaction out of removing the fluff from the tumble-dryer, it didn’t make us think she was Just Like Us; rather, that she was not like us at all, because we knew – or at least suspected – that she had armies of cleaners and housekeepers. One imagined orders going out that on no account was the fluff to be removed from the tumble-dryer because that was Madam’s little job. However, we thought that was probably the only thing she did do. Some residual folk memory made her feel that she ought to be seen to be caring for her home, but both we and she knew that the Material Girl‘s career was the thing that defined her.
Kylie Minogue is different. For a start, no one thinks her housework “revelations” have made her any less alluring. In a complete reversal of Joan Rivers’s observation of 20 years ago, one of the interesting aspects of Kylie and her Marigolds is how the picture this conjures up makes otherwise sensible men get hot under the collar – always assuming that executives on tabloid newspapers can be described as “sensible”. One suspects the reason for their enthusiasm is that they are imagining Kylie flitting round the house with a duster wearing her Marigolds and nothing else.
But the main difference is a change in our attitudes. Like Madonna, Kylie is not exactly poor. Even two years ago, her earnings were estimated to be upwards of £3.7 million a year. None of us really believes that she, like any hard-pressed, time-poor woman with a demanding job, would not employ a cleaner. However, with her ability to capture the spirit of the moment – that chameleon quality that has served her so well in her career – she reflects the shift that has taken place in our feelings towards the home.
Forty years ago, women turned away from the home because housework was seen as demeaning. Housework smacked of lives of quiet desperation, whereas a career was a passport into the real world. No one, with the possible exception of a Daily Mail leader writer, would now dispute that women’s lives and society in general have been hugely enriched by their entry into the workplace, and that they have grown in self-confidence as their earning power has increased.
But somewhere along the way, we lost the sense of the home as being at the heart of things. This didn’t matter in the heady days of the 1980s property boom when, as soon as the oven needed cleaning, you moved house. But those febrile days are gone and we feel poorer and considerably less safe. The Twin Towers, Bali, Madrid -politicians keep telling us they are so important that they are going to build a 12ft wall around the Houses of Parliament to protect themselves (but the rest of us will have to fend for ourselves) – all contribute to a sense of unease. In the midst of all this, the only place that seems safe is the home. It cannot be mere coincidence that the television schedules are filled with programmes telling us how to do up our homes or find a new house or sell an old one.
On a less dramatic level, many people feel their lives are spinning out of control, that they have been infected by the 21st-century scourge of perpetual “busyness”. Clearing out cupboards, polishing furniture and waxing floors give us some respite from it all. When Kylie puts on her Marigolds, she doesn’t have to worry whether some paparazzo has just snatched a picture of her celebrated bottom, whether her new album has bombed, whether the contract she has just signed is not in fact the goldmine she had supposed. For the woman working in a call centre, for whom the Government’s back-to-work policy has turned out to mean unsociable hours, rigid working conditions and only just enough money to make it worthwhile, the home is one area of her life over which she has control.
Our homes are increasingly seen as a sanctuary in a neurotic world, a place where it is possible to get a sense of satisfaction from routine, rhythm and the restoration of order, a place where the mundane becomes soothing. As Betsy Duncan Smith put it after five months of nastiness and uncertainty: “I am longing to iron a shirt again and get back to the normal things.”
Source: Telegraph.co.uk