(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) A recent TikTok trend shows people sharing the results of their spring cleaning by making videos organizing their pantries, closets and refrigerators.
When responding to the trend, Jenna Drenten, a Loyola University Chicago marketing professor, declared the desire to be clean and organized as racist and sexist.
According to the Daily Wire, Drenten authored an opinion piece featured in The Conversation, in which she derides the trend as capitalistic and claims the “desire for niceness,” is racist and sexist.
She offers a brief history of pantries, and recounts their move from hidden rooms to open status symbols over the centuries. She dubs the showing off of sleek, organized pantries as “pantry porn,” arguing that it stems from the early 2010s trend of “food porn.”
Drenten continues, positing that tidiness equals status and people who want the places where there food is stored to be clean are hopeless bigots.
“Storing spices in coordinated glass jars and color coordinating dozens of sprinkles containers may seem trivial,” she says.
“But tidiness is tangled up with status, and messiness is loaded with assumptions about personal responsibility and respectability,” she adds. “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.”
Simmering underneath what she calls the “anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance,” lies classist, racist and sexist tendencies.
“In my research, influencers who produce pantry porn are predominantly white women who demonstrate what it looks like to maintain a ‘nice’ home by creating a new status symbol: the perfectly organized, fully stocked pantry,” Drenten explains.
In Drenten’s mind, a clean, well-stocked pantry is a sexist trope and reinforces the housewife as an “aspirational standard for becoming an ideal mom, ideal wife and ideal woman.”
Drenten was relentlessly mocked on Twitter for her ridiculous take.
When everything is racist nothing is racist.
— Jim Talbot (@Jim_Talbot_II) March 16, 2023
Do you ever look in the mirror and realize you are a racist? You think cleanliness and niceness are racist? Why, because you don't think minorities can be any of those things? People like you disgust me for your racism of low expectations. Do better.
— Coolidge Rocked (@CoolidgeRocked) March 16, 2023
LOL!!!! GFY, you divisive scumbag.
— James Dombrowski (@thenomadboots11) March 15, 2023
