There are three things that make me unreasonably irritated while watching TV. The first is when the person on screen hangs up the phone without any acknowledgment that the conversation is over. Nobody does that in real life. It’s sociopathic! The second is when people put their suitcase on their bed to pack or unpack (this is extremely common on reality TV). “Do you know where that suitcase has been?” I yell at the telly whenever my eyeballs are confronted with such smut. “There’s a 99.99% chance you now have faecal matter and rat urine on your sheets, you filthy animal!”
Continuing that theme, my third pet peeve is when TV characters lounge on their beds with shoes on. I’m not a hygiene freak – I’ll happily eat food that has fallen on the floor even after the five-second rule has passed: I’ve always believed that a little bit of dirt a day keeps the doctor away. But I have my limits, and the idea of street shoes on a bed makes me gag. This obviously also applies to real life: I don’t care who you are, you are not setting foot in my house with shoes on. (And before you bring pets into this, let me state for the record that I wash my dog’s paws after a walk: he’s a good clean boy). Anyway, I’m not going to bother going into all the statistics about how there are apparently 421,000 units of bacteria on the outside of an average shoe, or how 93% of shoes will have poo on them after a month of normal use. I am not going to bother trying to argue this topic because, unlike most issues in life, there is no room for debate here: only a barbarian wears outdoor shoes indoors.
Clearly, I’m not alone in thinking this. Every week the internet chooses something to get collectively apocalyptical about and last week’s theme, as my fellow Twitter addicts will know, was shoes. You can blame the Wall Street Journal for starting the fuss. They published a piece they clearly hoped would go viral titled Here’s Why I’ll Be Keeping My Shoes on in Your Shoeless Home.
To be clear: the article was supposed to be lighthearted. But a key tenet of modern life is that 98% of people do not read beyond the headline (congratulations to you for making it this far), nor do they read between the lines. And, to be fair, the piece was lighthearted in a deliberately irritating way. It was the semantic equivalent of someone jabbing you repeatedly with their index finger while going “jokejokejokejokejoke” and hoping for a reaction. And it certainly achieved that. Someone called it “imperialist” (not me, although that is definitely something I would say). Someone else called it a “hate crime”. And an overwhelming number of people suggested that only a white-presenting person could have written such a piece.
Dear white people reading this, I’m going to say this as delicately as possible but I’m afraid you have something of a reputation when it comes to cleanliness. Last year, for example, there was a heated online debate about white people not washing their legs in the shower. This followed on from a debate, instigated by a white person, about whether swimming counts as bathing. Then there are all the rich white celebrities who love boasting about how they don’t like washing themselves (Jake Gyllenhaal), their kids (Ashton Kutcher), or their clothes (Stella McCartney). When you are a non-white person who has to deal with stereotypes about “dirty foreigners” it can be grating, to say the least, to see privileged white people revel in being disgusting. But, you know what? I’m not going into the racialised aspects of hygiene discourse here. Instead, I would like to ask a member of the white community to come forward and condemn the grotesque actions of some of your wearing-boots-inside brethren. If white people want to be good allies, it’s time to take a stand! But not in your dirty shoes, obviously.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
