It's no accident that earthiness as a household aesthetic-think macramé wall hangings, abundant houseplants and those pesky little droppings they leave-took hold in the early 1970s, right around the time women cut the cord between their vacuum cleaners and their value to society. But one glance at TV these days makes it clear that dirt and debris, like body hair (that other relic of the 70s), is out of style in a very big way.

On the heels of the shelter-porn cable boom comes an army of missionaries poised to help the messiest cases. Now Lifetime has joined the party, with How Clean Is Your House, a new reality program, premiering this Monday. The show practices rehabilitation through outright humiliation. I took a sneak peak recently and had to hide my eyes under the covers. Images of mold, grease, clumps of hair and animal waste appear with such frequency and in such unflinching close-up that I found myself longing for that digital scrambling technique used to censor exposed nipples and explicit tee-shirts.

But I also found myself thinking that 30 years after cleanliness gave up its seat next to godliness, it's realigned itself with the entire notion of morality. As we see on How Clean is Your House, as on the countless home improvement shows that promise better living through paint sponging, being a respectable member of society is now contingent not just upon on earning a living or loving ones neighbor. You also have to maintain good hygiene, a flattering wardrobe and a pristine, stylish home. Indeed, "before" and "after" pictures have become stand-ins for religious conversion. Always, they elicit tears. All over cable television and in god knows how many magazines, the rapture comes again and again-even to a condo in Alhambra.

The name How Clean Is Your House suggests that we might be learning from the show how clean our own houses are. I expected chirpy tutorials along the lines of "did you know you risk a staph infection every time you chop vegetables on a cutting board that hasn't been washed with chlorine bleach?" Instead, the program is the closest thing we currently have to a public stockade. The subjects of the first episode, a middle class family from Tujunga who has somehow failed to do the dishes for weeks and allowed traces of human fecal matter to collect on the sofa, appears to have been cast solely to make the rest of us feel better about ourselves (another empowering moment from Lifetime.) Comprised of five children, ten cats, two pet rats, a pet snake, and two addled parents who are given to remarks like "there's just too much to clean" and (on the subject of the grease laden microwave) "throw it away and buy a new one," the Bradfords are in as much need of a licensed therapist as they are a steam cleaner.

How to Clean Your House is chiefly about Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie, its droll and starchy British hosts, who are already stars in England and may just be headed for cult status in America. But even their endearing, larger than life presence cannot eclipse the enormous elephant that lurks in every rancid room of the Bradford home. As the hosts survey the damage, the theme from Psycho screeching in the background at the sight of unflushed toilets, countless pet droppings and a master bed containing a brick, a screwdriver, and box of old French fries, I wanted nothing more than some answers to the questions that tumble from this show as if from an overloaded dryer: what's really going on when there's cat poop in your bed and pet rats running loose in your kids' bedroom? When does run-of-the-mill messiness become pathological filthiness and where is the 12-step program that will treat it? Unfortunately, and unaccountably given how glaring the pathologies on the show are, How Clean Is Your House isn't willing to address any of that.

BBC America's program The Life Laundry does what How Clean Is Your House fails to do. It explores our relationship to our possessions with some interesing depth. Whether we hoard them or just abuse them, our stuff can become a stand-in for our very souls. In every segment of The Life Laundry, a heap of household clutter is placed in a yard or warehouse for the owner to behold in all its meaningless glory. Then, only a few items are allowed to be salvaged. "I've been forced to face the fact that I probably can't do everything," says one tearful hoarder who risked losing his wife if he didn't pare down the debris that blocked her movement throughout the house. "It is," he adds, "at great personal cost."

The new clutter consciousness is about financial cost as well as personal cost. That's because it's ultimately a matter of social class. Cleanliness can be bought in the form of professional help. Does that mean morality can be bought? When I was growing up, I believed only rich people had housekeepers. Today, there is a vast force of cheap immigrant labor that cleans the houses of those who can't be bothered or, increasingly, just don't know how. When I think back on the messy houses I knew in the 70s, I remember their occupants as distracted college professors, hippie-ish artists, maybe even (horrors) feminists. The messy house was a anti-bourgeois statement, an accoutrement of bohemianism and intellectualism. Today it suggests poverty, possibly even mental illness.

It also suggests something almost as bad: sexual undesirability. In watching these programs and, in all honesty, noticing my own domestic priorities (the older I get, the more I care about my sofa more than my shoes) I wonder if a new kind of Victorianism has descended upon us, one that shuns not sex in and of itself but sex involving those who are not suitably clean, groomed, and in possession of the proper, Queer-eye sanctioned Crate and Barrel bed. "You should be denied all bedroom pleasures," Woodburn of "How Clean" says to the Bradford man-of-the-house upon inspection of the filthy kitchen. Conversely, she scolds his wife about the state of the bedroom, asserting that the couple cannot possibly have intimate relations given its current state.

Granted, very few people would sing the erotic possibilities of urine-soaked sheets, a brick, a screwdriver, and a box of French fries. But it's curious that the more wrapped up our culture becomes in acquiring things, the more value we place on keeping them out of sight.

It also seems possible, given cyclical patterns and growing tides of political (if not yet hygienic) dissent, that we'll see a return to that 1970s earthiness sooner than we think. In the film We Don't Live Here Anymore, which is ostensibly set in the present day but bears all the trappings of its 70s source material, Laura Dern plays a character whose moral, parental, and sexual failures are embodied by her messy house. She's a pariah but she's also the energy center of the piece. When she rages, she rages like a woman with a messy house and nothing more to lose. Her cleaner, neater friends turn to cardboard in her midst.