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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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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.

In the USSR/Russia the switch happened when rubber soles became the norm in the middle of the last century. With leather-soled shoes everyone had to wear galoshes to protect the shoes from rain and snow and mud, so the shoes themselves were clean and dry. But rubber soles killed off galoshes, and people started taking off their shoes indoors.

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.

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