Woman Sparks Debate After Nailing Decorative Towel To The Wall After People Keep Using It
Is it for drying your hands or for decoration?
Krakenimages.com via Shutterstock / Zac Gudakov via Unsplash / Megi Satyo via Canva A mom named Jessica found herself at the center of an ongoing online debate around household decor. She posted a video to TikTok that was titled, “When your kids don’t know what a decorative towel is.”
Her towel rack had three towels on it— one long black towel, a smaller olive green towel, and an even smaller towel monogrammed with the letter “D.” But apparently, they were for decoration only.
The woman sparked debate after nailing the decorative towel to the wall to stop people from using it.
The comments beneath her post highlighted just how divisive the idea of decorative home goods can be.
People are free to run their households however they want, as long as they're not causing active harm. Yet according to some responses from commenters on TikTok, you'd think this woman was personally insulting or injuring them, all due to her choice to nail a towel to the wall. The majority of people commenting declared that they didn’t know what a decorative towel was and that any towel spotted in a bathroom was fair game to use.
Others pointed out that nailing a towel to a wall wasn’t likely to stop people from drying their hands with it, yet the semi-permanent positioning would only make it more of a hassle for the mom to wash the towel.
“Now they can use it and it never gets washed,” noted one person, seemingly concerned about both practicality and hygiene. “Sweet! Wall-mounted hand drying towel!” Came another tongue-in-cheek-comment.
“My parents did this and I just took the nail out of the wall," said someone else, explaining an evidently obvious flaw in this mom’s system.
While the mom's actions were fairly divisive, her extreme towel-mounting technique highlights a truism for all people — We all have different things that are important to us; for this woman, it appears to be decorative towels.
Yet Towelgate 2023 led some people to discuss issues they had with living in households where aesthetics won out over comfort.
“My mother had decorative cushions we had to pile up in the corner and [were] never allowed to sit on them,” one person said. “I hated it.”
“My parents were like this,” someone else proclaimed, saying they were “happy to move out… grew up in a museum, it was torture.”
Towels have a long and storied history, dating back to the Ottoman Empire.
Allure Bath Fashions detailed the history of the towel, noting that archaeological findings hold that the first towel was made during the 17th century, in Bursa, Turkey. These initial towels were called “peshtemals." They were handwoven and made of cotton. They were used by members of the upper class after visiting steam baths. By the 1900s, towels were made more available, in part due to the rising cotton trade, massive industrialization, and the expansion of the textile industry. There were more towels to go around.
The use of towels was initially seen as a symbol of wealth and status; yet it seems for some people, like the mom in question, it still holds true today.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers parenting, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.