I’m not a Flybaby but I can tell who likely is because I’ve recently been reading her list with the same interest I had in Tammy Faye Bakker and her Fundie drones way back in the day. And there’s a lot of you Flybabies out there, open and closet, because when Flylady says, “Clean your closet,” suddenly people are blogging about cleaning their closets.
Flylady’s Yahoo group has over 469 THOUSAND members.
And people act like this is all cozy toes in the same tie-on shoe (I’ll get to that in a moment) and not a $4 million dollar business with at least 24 employees selling you on the notion you must buy her products to help you (oh the not very humorous irony of it all) to declutter your life.
“Declutter your unorganized life! Buy my stuff!”
Picture perfect irony.
It’s a fearful picture I get of all these women (yes, the list is geared for women folk) in their Flylady denim vests and Flylady key lanyards with their Flylady dusters cleaning house in concert with their Flylady timers, managing their lives via their Flylady calendars, fastidiously writing up their must-dos in their Flylady control journals with their Flylady Pens, ordering their business around their Flylady Office in a Bag, congratulating their kids with the Flylady pencils and stickers for doing their fair Flylady share, purchasing Flylady’s de-clutter kit in order to, you know, declutter, doing whatever it is they do with their Flylady Comfort Zone calendars that can’t be managed with the other Flylady calendar which is adhered to the refrigerator with your special Flylady calendar magnet, drinking out of Flylady water bottles, drying your hands with Flylady one-a-day dish towels, junking wallets and tote bags for Flylady’s wallet and tote bag, and putting on the Flylady purple and pink T-shirts all the better to fly in communion…with tie-up shoes.
And then there’s the Flylady doll you can buy for $8.
On the Flylady website is a photo of a little girl cuddling her Flylady doll in her sleep.
Despite 24 employees (I guess this includes the six people hired to reply to Flylady’s fan mail) the Flylady website has a hokey amateurish, “I don’t know much more about the internet than you do, can you tell me how to put up a photo?” feel. I guess all the better to foster the feeling of the accidental entrepreneur who’s down on her hands and knees cleaning the bathroom with you so she doesn’t have the time for CSS or HTML…and certainly she wouldn’t be hiring out the website or the housework despite the fact she’s got a four million dollar business with a road show and webcasts and a self-syndicated column…and the Yahoo list.
The first time I saw that cartoony graphic of the winged Flylady I immediately envisioned a fly swatter. It was my gut reaction and it’s stuck with me.
Now, I hold no malice against Flylady. I’m amazed by anyone’s ability to sell themselves. I marvel. I go, “How the hell do you do that?” I’m reading Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up” right now and I’m amazed by how he had this seemingly natural sell-self muscle…
But I read Flylady and I know she has over 469 THOUSAND members in her Yahoo group and I have this vision of a future where all these kids are growing up with the It Must Be This Way Exactly knowledge that on Mondays you do this and on Tuesdays you do this and on Wednesdays you do this…and all over America in fifteen years will be these brainwashed kids marching out to run their households exactly like mum’s Flylady said to do it and the odd ball will be the person who vacuums on Tuesday.
“You vacuum on Tuesday? Everyone knows you should vacuum on Monday.”
And this damn shoe business. Flylady wrote the other day:
I don’t want to hear, well I don’t wear shoes in my house. Well you do now, sister! Buy or clean up a pair just for that reason. You can have a great pair of indoor shoes that are real shoes, not slippers or flip flops. Don’t get stuck in that perfectionist thinking “I don’t wear shoes in my house”, if you want change in your home, you are going to have to change your thinking on shoes.
Seriously. You’re really going to let someone tell you, “Well, you wear shoes, now, sister!”
Try telling that to the Japanese.
You must do it this way or you will never change. What kind of BS is that?
It doesn’t strike you as a tad bizarre and irrational that Flylady decries someone as having “perfectionist” thinking if they say they prefer not to wear shoes, but she can say that if you don’t do it her way then you’ll never change–and this is somehow not being, what, perfectionist and rigid?
Which is why I decided to go ahead and write this post. That and the whole, “declutter and throw out all the crap you don’t need and buy my stuff that I searched the wide world over just for you and anointed as Flylady perfect with my Flylady logo” routine.
C’mon, that bullyish, full-of-itself Well, you do now, sister! doesn’t grate on you even just a little? It doesn’t make you go, “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”
If you’re conservative and the conservative Ed Morrissey’s “Heading Right Radio“–which hosted Republican Flylady in December of 2007–is the kind of thing you like to listen to, well, then, maybe you don’t mind people addressing you like that. A fairly recent Republican county commissioner, Flylady (her husband is a Republican judge) told Ed Morrissey his business is talking politics and hers is getting people to clean but maybe if people get their house clean then they’ll go out and vote.
I’ve been following her list, looking for any mention of politics. In 2000 she polled her group to see who they would be voting for and the results were over 60% for Bush and she crowed about a full Republican sweep in her county. She has been quiet on politics since then, but the appearance on Heading Right is interesting. She no doubt wants to keep her list as apparently bi-partisan as possible in the interest of her business, but she did say on Heading Right,
“Building the community is key because without my Yahoo group I don’t get the people to come listen to my radio show…I love cooperation and networking that we can do within ourselves because I can promote your show and I can promote my show…”
Whatever that means. It was very vague, this “building the community” idea and all that entailed. I didn’t notice her plugging “Heading Right” on the Yahoo list but she may have in her blogradio show.
Flylady, who happens also to be a Christian, is currently writing a book on Flylady spirituality.
I wonder if it’ll have a chapter on wearing your tie-on shoes for god.
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