Laundry is a Perfectly Legitimate Kink
Plus: Has the “millennial feminist” gone the way of the dodo? The Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery of newsletters is on the case.
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Spreadbunnies,
Robyn, the Swedish pop phenom who, thanks to Jia Tolentino, we now have 100 more reasons to love, has a theory for why New York clubgoers are superintense—whereas happy, chilled out Swedes, like, chat on the dance floor. “That’s because [Swedes’] lives are too good,” she tells Tolentino. “New York is this place where people just work so hard, and you’re…in a country that’s really failing at taking care of its citizens. And that combination, I guess, is really good for people like me, who want to play for an audience that feels something.”
You could pound out your personal misery and/or rage about our failed social contract on the dance floor. Or you could pour it into your art. But some of us prefer to scrub it out. Sort it, organize it, cleanse it, control it. Launder it, bitch. In the past 48 hours, we have seen: “Coming Clean: How I Tricked Myself Into Enjoying Laundry Day with Luxury Products” in Vogue and “7 Things You Should Never Put in the Washing Machine, According to Pros” in Real Simple. We have learned that Laundry is an official Topic to follow on Apple News. And that laundry baskets are a particular kink: Wirecutter gives us “The Quiet Luxury of a Collapsible Laundry Basket”; Consumer Reports, the more workmanlike “Best Laundry Baskets.” (Even before this revelation we had been stuck in an identity spiral over a handmade model from amishbaskets.com that was recently rhapsodized about in Secret Strategist. “To hate something you touch every single day of your life is unacceptable.” Sure, but are we $180 laundry basket people? And that story about washing your sweaters in snow… the nerve of the New York Times to introduce us to this concept right after our two-foot mountain of the stuff turned to muck.)
Sensing a groundswell, Vox takes the laundry beat up a notch with a profile of a man named Kismai, a self-described “fat, sweaty slob who eats with wild abandon and apparently never learned to use cutlery as a toddler,” who has “singlehandedly changed the way people do laundry” by introducing a sizable swath of Redditors to the enzyme lipase, which can apparently get that splotch of ghee out of your favorite overpriced T-shirt like nobody’s business. (It’s science, and there’s a professor at the University of Tasmania who says it’s true.)
We suppose we could take a feminist tack here and ponder the tradwifery of it all: Has there been an uptick in laundry content, now that women are back to our god-given purpose as baby factories? It’s true that the tone of many of these stories is an intoxicating blend of permission (“Is it Okay to Wash Bath Mats with Towels?,” asks a querulous Southern Living) and judgment: “You’re doing your laundry wrong!,” blares the Daily Mail. But the truth is, we’re fine with laundry porn. This is a world in which there is a solution to every problem, a fix for the stains of life. So yes, we will read (and promptly forget) the advice in all of those stories, and more than that, we’ll do it for fun—while our dirty clothes pile up.
So fresh, so clean,
Rachel & Maggie
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