Let Them Wipe Bums

Victoria Smith writes:

In her excellent 2021 book Care and Capitalism, the sociologist Kathleen Lynch describes the way in which the devaluing of care work is tied to negative attitudes towards dependency and the body. “When care involves body work,” she writes, “it is dirty work; it involves cleaning and managing leaking fluids from the orifices of the body that are often uncontrolled and even uncontrollable”:

The leaky body smells, soils, and demands a huge amount of time and energy to keep it managed without harm, to keep it under control; the management of this human waste adds to the designation of hands-on caring as low-level life work.

I thought of Lynch’s book upon hearing Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s rather brutal defence of migration on BBC Question Time. “One in five care workers are migrants,” he told us. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum.”

As a pro-immigrant argument, it is double-edged, to say the least. As many have noted, it does seem to imply that there’s an “us” — a non-migrant population — for whom bum-wiping is too disgusting and lowly, and a “them” — immigrant workers — who can take it on because, well, they don’t mind. It also conflates care work in general with the disgusting and the lowly. You, the thinker, the genius, the progressive, aren’t going to want to get your hands dirty, or sacrifice your identity. That’s for immigrants, and maybe also older women (the other group doing a disproportionate amount of care work — people like your mum, who have all these essentialist, conservative ideas about bodies and relationships mattering more than your big ideas).

As I argue in my book Unkind, within the “progressive” left represented by men such as Polanski there is a tension between laudable aims to redistribute wealth, labour and access to power, and an identity politics which denies dependency and the body whenever they get in the way of narcissistic self-realisation. Who identifies as a bum wiper? I sure don’t, and woe betide anyone who questions my non-bum-wiper true self’s right to exist. Body and dependency denialist ideologies — in particular, those which coalesce around sex denialism — have provided privileged leftists with a means to prioritise self-interest over actual social justice. It’s the selfishness and individualism of the right wrapped up in the rhetoric of agency. You’re not saying you’re better than the bum-wipers or that you were born to higher things. It’s just that bum wiping’s not who you are, deep down inside, which is, like, totally different (thank god for the wiping-inclined immigrants!).

As Lynch writes, “the atomistic vision of the self is closely aligned with neoliberal capitalism”. This is true even if your favoured atomistic vision has recast those who recognise selfhood as relational and co-created as unreconstructed bigots. The outrage of Polanski, Zarah Sultana, Owen Jones and others at the very idea that men can’t be women simply on their say-so — that such a claim might in fact have an impact on how women themselves can articulate where they stand in relation to men — is but one facet of a worldview which refuses, to quote Lynch, “to put the relational self at the centre of meaning-making, to move beyond the idea of the separated, bounded and self-contained self”. It’s the same world view which legitimises multiple forms of coercion and exploitation in the name of identity and choice. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to be prostituted or used as a commercial surrogate, either, but I could always work on the basis that some people do, and that the demand for such services aren’t rooted in the entitlements of the powerful and the desperation of the marginalised, but in essential desires that only a true self-denying bigot would challenge.

Ironically, there is much I agree with in Polanski’s other arguments about the scapegoating of migrants. However, if you are going to quote Thatcher’s “no such thing as society”, perhaps it’s worth considering whether your own embrace of self-contained identity over relationality — I am whoever I say I am — enacts the same denial of human interdependency. If you want a society that is focussed on care, empathy and inclusion, it has to be one in which you recognise that, as Marina Benjamin writes, “we are wired to be co-dependent, networked into a delicate lattice of connections”: 

Everything we do to try and forget this fact is merely part of an enabling fantasy of autonomous, self-directed personhood, which the grunt work of caring exposes as just that, a fantasy.

The “progressive” politics of Polanski falls at the final hurdle because it remains in thrall to this fantasy, hawking it to more privileged voters on the basis that it squares the circle of being a kind person while pandering to your own self-interest and indulging your equally self-centred peers. Indeed, this is how you end up with the “kind” people siding with male doctors demanding to share changing facilities with female nurses. God forbid anyone questions said doctors’ autonomous, self-directed personhood (and besides, aren’t nurses members of the natural born arse wiper class?).

#BeKind rhetoric can only go so far. “I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum” is a moment where Polanski’s mask slipped. It’s not just that it revealed a nasty sense of superiority over those whose humanity he claims to champion. It exposes the common ground his identity politics shares with every other individualistic, privilege-entrenching political vision. Prioritise individual self-realisation and cast anyone who gets in the way as less-than. It doesn’t matter whether you are openly claiming that some classes are better than others, or blaming those at the bottom for noticing that no, we don’t get to be whoever we say we are. The outcome you want is the same.

You won’t have to care. Someone else will and you’ll tell yourself that’s just what those people are there for.