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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9335 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.

Keeping your shoes on in my house after I have asked you to remove them is so incredibly rude that I have trouble taking this seriously.

As a Canadian reading this thread I find people's reluctance to remove shoes hilarious.

If you live in a place that gets frequent snow, and the associated grimey, salty slush as it melts, removing boots/shoes when coming inside is so obviously the correct action.

And then because everyone is used to removing shoes, in the warmer dryer seasons people still do, even though the benefits are more marginal.

The only real exceptions to the "shoes off" rule are things like more formal events, where people are wearing nicer footwear, taking pains to avoid getting them dirty at all, and where extra cleaning by the host is going to be required anyways.

Shoes in the house was thé norm in America until recently, even in upstate New York(with some of the snowiest winters anywhere). But it’s still very rude to refuse to remove them when asked by the host; this is the hicks being, as usual, deliberately strange.

I think New York is seeing sense more and more now though - and bet they're switching to no shoes faster than Texas is (though I have few friends I'm the hotter areas of the US to confirm).

I do think it's been a big change over the past twenty or thirty years among American whites, and that it has a lot to do with the changing role of women and men in the household. Historically, women did all the cleaning/vacuuming/sweeping. So men were unconcerned with making a mess of the floors, it wasn't their problem, and men being dominant in the household they didn't worry about it. Now men share in housework and they're not going to make a mess that they themselves expect to clean up.

I dunno. Both my working-class grandfathers (WW2 vet and Korean vet) were "no outdoor shoes in the house" guys. Adults had house shoes or slippers they changed into and kids ran around in sock feet.

One could just as easily say that women used to stay home and so had plenty of time to clean. Now that they work too, they’re more concerned about preventing messes. That also tracks with who usually seems more worried about people wearing shoes in the house. In my experience, it’s rarely the men.

I might just be overmapping to myself, where i became a strict no-shoes guy once I started vacuuming.

I find it (1) odd for anyone to ask you to remove your shoes and (2) incredibly uncouth to put up any pushback about removing shoes if asked.

(1) odd for anyone to ask you to remove your shoes

I would imagine in most of Europe people remove their shoes so as to not carry around dirt and filth from the outside. I don't think I have ever in my life lounged around someone's home with our shoes on, it's only happens in very brief 'get in, get out' instances.

If you come to someone’s house for a nice dinner party, you take your shoes off? That’s so foreign to me.

Yes, almost always. I think shoes inside was more common in the UK back when I was a kid, but I haven't been to any shoe-wearing homes for a long while. We have dinner parties in socks.

So you wear a dress shirt with dress pants in socks?

You put on your smoking jacket and slippers, obviously.

Yes, and put your (inside) dress shoes on.

Tbh I generally just go with whether there's a visible pile of shoes by the door and/or whether my host is deshoeing which is easy enough to calibrate

(1) is more and more popular, I think primarily coming from Asian-American cultures? It makes a lot of sense to me, after a little thought. My kids don't think twice about putting their hands on the carpet while playing. Even my nicest shoes walk outside on sidewalks where birds often poop. "Wash your hands before eating" is the obvious first line of defense here, but "don't touch the carpet with the same surface that touched the bird poop" isn't a bad backup. It's just the same thing everybody who does outdoor work/gardening/etc does with work boots and "mud room" areas for them, but for other outer footwear in foyer/entry areas.

In my culture when I was a kid it would have been rude to remove your shoes in someone else's house without asking, because don't feet smell and don't we need shoes to help cover that up, but it turns out "make sure your feet don't smell" is an acceptable alternative solution for that. The level of work and exercise that can make your feet too sweaty and smelly to walk around in bare socks is the kind that probably already merits a shower for your whole body before lounging around the house, much less social events.

I’m coming from the perspective of footwear as being formal. So I wouldn’t still expect your footwear when coming over for a social call to be muddy or dirty in the first place.

Unless a guest is coming over from an attached house or another apartment unit with direct access to your own, or unless the guest is strictly carried on something where his shoes don't touch the ground, I'm not sure it's possible for the footwear that someone wore while traversing to your house not to be dirty. Even if, e.g. this friend was your neighbor across the hall in your apartment building, he's going to take at least one step in the shared hallway, which will inevitably have some grime from neighbors stepping on it with outdoors shoes, some of which will get on his shoes before entering your home. And someone walking on the sidewalk or on the driveway to/from their car is going to expose their footwear to even more grime than that.

That level of aversion to any dirt seems wild to me. What about socks? How do I as a guest know your floors are to that level of clean?

How do I as a guest know your floors are to that level of clean?

The pile of shoes by the door, probably?

If someone's floors clearly doesn't meet the standard that you find acceptable to walk on with socks, it seems reasonable to refuse to enter without shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to take off your shoes indoors. Much like how if someone's shoes are clearly very muddy or dirty, it seems reasonable to refuse entry to them without taking off their shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to allow people to keep their shoes on in your home.

In typical cases, though, I'd say the dirtiness of shoes that have been worn outside is far beyond the dirtiness of the floor of a household where everyone takes off their shoes in a way that the dirtiness of such a floor isn't far beyond the dirtiness of the socks of a typical person. The former involves bringing dirt from foreign/outdoors/public sources into a private/personal space, whereas the latter is just private/personal dirt being swapped around. Personal dirt can certainly be dirtier/more mysterious than public ones, but in typical cases where people put in effort to taking care of their homes, it tends to be the opposite.

I just think in the main where it isn’t obviously dirty one way or the other, fretting about dirtiness is obsessive.

I'm, unfortunately, a pretty a messy and somewhat dirty guy, but I find the standard of "obviously dirty one way or the other" to be far too high for determining whether I care about the dirtiness of something that's going to directly touch various parts of my skin all the time.

How often do you clean your shoes? If they're shoes that you wear outside regularly, they're obviously dirty in comparison to a typical indoor space.

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