An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal attracted an unusual amount of attention as the author declared that she would not be taking her shoes off when entering a “shoeless home” primarily for the reason that she considers her shoes to be cleaner than many things that enter people’s living spaces.
Author and Wall Street Journal deputy editor Kris Frieswick stresses that she will take her shoes off for people of certain cultures or religions that require it, but otherwise and unless her shoes are coated with “snow, mud, blood, condiments of any sort, lava, excrement, concrete dust, or biomedical hazardous waste,” she’ll be keeping them on.
“Turns out there’s already an effective old-fashioned way to achieve your goal of a clean floor while neither insulting my hygiene habits nor endangering my delicate, vulnerable, long-suffering feet: It’s called a doormat,” Frieswick writes.
It’s not clear what in people’s homes might pose such a danger to Frieswick’s feet or why they are so delicate, but she spends the first couple of paragraphs upholding the genius invention of shoes and suggested that she has broken at least one toe.
She further argues that the things like E. coli that people worry might be on shoes, because poop is most often found on the ground, are “everywhere” and that babies and pets represent a greater threat in that respect than anyone’s shoes, strangely quoting a doctor on that who specifically asked her not to. She also complained about the difficulty of removing and putting on shoes and the risk to her nylons. She doesn’t mention if she had considered upgrading her outfit to the 21st century.
The article has been widely panned on Twitter by people who find it to be incredibly rude and gross, with many people remarking that they simply would not invite her into their home or would kick her out if she refused to remove her shoes. It got to the point where some people wondered who hates Frieswick enough to let her publish this article.