Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas. And with that, I will see myself out. Welcome to Your Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we have a special spring cleaning episode with our home economics correspondent, Sarah Archer.
About this time last year, Sarah came on to talk about the trad wife. And now we're going on a thought cruise through the history of cleanliness and the rise of clean talk. And we are going to be asking the question, how clean is clean enough? And how clean is too clean?
I loved this conversation because it felt like part of a bigger conversation that I'm always having with Sarah Archer about our relationships with our houses and cleaning and cooking and gender and the politics of everyday life. And it just remains completely fascinating to me.
So I hope you have a good time listening. And we also, if you are tickled by this episode, have a fun bonus that Sarah Archer was on recently about Peg Bracken and the I Hate to Cook book, one of my personal favorites. Our most recent bonus episode, by the way, is our March bonus on Marilyn Manson's
Monroe's dress and the time Kim Kardashian wore it. That's a wonderful conversation that I got to have with Caroline O'Donohue and Eve Lindley. You can find bonus episodes on Apple Plus subscriptions and Patreon, and you can find our newest episode right here, right now. Here you go. Thank you for being here. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we ask you, isn't your house clean enough already? It probably is. And we're
What's the historical precedent for all of this cleaning? And when can we stop? And with me today is our home and garden correspondent, Sarah Archer. Hello, Sarah Marshall. Hello. How are you doing? I am doing okay. How are you doing in these strange times?
Oh, you know, just toddling into spring. I do know. Right. And that's part of our topic. That is part of our topic. Health, human services, things of this nature. Yes. Things that we do to distract ourselves when things are weird.
So we're talking today about the project of cleaning the house, which I think is one of the most fascinating topics in culture. My opening question, building off of our work about this time last year, talking about the trad wife, and I continue to have a lot of questions about home economics. And the one I bring to you today is,
Do you remember the rise of clean talk during the pandemic? I do. I have to say I'm not on TikTok, though. So I was kind of getting it second and third hand. But it was still seeping out like light through a badly framed door. Yeah.
like, like somebody who's, who's used too much cleansing fluid. Well, and so tell me like, what is clean talk to you? So my understanding of clean talk is that it was like a, the genre next door to the phenomenon of people sort of making fruit loops from scratch. Like that kind of, that there's a little bit of a sense of a,
there's a deliberate absurdity to it and that there's a kind of you know posing a question how best to clean this thing and then the solution is always like well you dump like an entire canister of barkeeper's friend on it and then you dump an entire thing of palm olive dish soap on it and then you do some weird theatrical scrubbing and it's all and then it was kind of like clean
puppet theater or clean interpretive dance or something. Potemkin countertops. Exactly. Like it was kind of, it was not in the genre of say your Martha Stewart's or your other home gurus of kind of telling you exactly the right amount of cleanser to use and the exact right brush and the exact right tool not to use too much.
And like the smallest amount that you can reasonably get away with as well, which is a very nice piece of information to have. Which is smart and thrifty. Exactly. So that this is more it's almost like the sort of cleaning product thing.
Like bizarro world's version of those weird cooking videos where people were putting all the ingredients in a single casserole or something. And it was just some grotesque. And there's probably a name for that. And I feel like that has gone down or else I'm just...
personally seeing less of it but we had a lot of like wasting food theatrics for a while yeah which I just hate I hate wasting it's just so like just it's so sad why do you why do you want to waste food you know the like countertop nachos or you know that lady who made like a million of these and one of them was like countertop spaghetti and it's also a lot of transparent rage bait to drive engagement I think that's the main impetus and and this kind of thing was often sort of like
People in their 30s sort of acting like kids TV hosts in a very varied, slightly unsettling way. And in this case, it was like a grown up woman pretending to be mixing cocktails inside of her toilet bowl. Which brings us over nicely to the world of clean talk where you first fill your toilet with ice.
And then you put all your product on it so that like theoretically the ice melts and it can coat the inside of the bowl. But isn't that what foam was invented for? That's the story. I think it's just because it's a really striking visual to fill a toilet with ice. Yeah.
Like, do you ever really need to fill your toilet with ice? I'm not an expert, but no, you don't ever. I don't think so. You don't know. I am a grown up woman who has sort of learned in adulthood truly how to clean. And I learned a lot of it from social media where, you know, I am watching for enjoyment, but where I learn in an incidental kind of way how to do the occasional thing while I'm searching for dopamine like a truffle.
pig in the forest. You're sniffing it out, just kind of snorkeling around. And occasionally, accidentally, you'll learn something. And I think we're living in a time of greater than usual obsession with like cleaning and organizing and decorating in our houses and what they say about us and who we are because of them and what we consume and how we consume it.
And social media is playing a big role in all of this. One of the things that I have have come to believe, basically, which is unfortunate because I didn't want it to be true, is that the secret to cleaning and housework broadly is that you have to just constantly be doing a little bit of it. And if you're constantly doing a little bit of it, then it doesn't pile up that much. And if each person living in a household is constantly doing a little bit of it, then theoretically, yeah,
Yeah.
at like a low to medium simmer. And I guess what I'm trying to figure out and what I believe is maybe like the secret to some kind of happiness is like, how much little bit do you always have to be doing? Because I think in theory, it's like not that much, right? You have to wash dishes and those do pile up if you do anything ambitious, like you have to clean surfaces, you have to sweep. But we're also, I think, in this sort of
clean talk social media world being shown a model of existing where, you know, also the people doing the most outrageous things rise to the top. Right. Because they drive engagement. And I think a lot of people are worried possibly about,
Well, kind of not believing it, but also maybe kind of believing it that everyone is deep cleaning every day. Yes. And so the question that I brought to you or one of them, because I have mixed feelings about this whole phenomenon, right? Because like, I like to watch it.
I'm one of the millions of people who clearly enjoys watching it. And I think there's a lot of great people on it. There's Vanessa Amaro who taught me how to roll a towel. That's improved my life dramatically and it doesn't cost anything. Yeah, you roll it like it's like the way they do in spas. And then you look at your towels and you're like,
Look at those towels. And then it's like a little spa day in your bathroom. Exactly. And that's the light side of clean talk of the force, right? Because it's like it doesn't cost anything. It's a skill. And that's in, you know, as we always come back to, who will win the Martha crown in the Game of Thrones? The one who teaches skills. Yeah.
And Martha, in fact, is the person who taught, not me personally, but taught the community of which I am a member, how to fold a fitted sheet. And that is one of the things that I'm actually extraordinarily good at. I gotta get on that. I do not know how to fold a fitted sheet yet. And I guess like looking at Clean Talk, right, because there's like, there's, you know, it's a full-sided die. And a big side of the die is a terrible metaphor. But one of the sides of the die is very corporation driven. And
Part of my feeling is like this is clearly driven to some extent by sort of the corporatization of everything and how
you know, if you are an influencer and you sell people Amazon gadgets and products, then you are obviously incentivized to teach them how to use the products faster so they can buy more of them and they can buy more different ones. And we can have this sort of cleaning arms race where no one's house is giant or clean enough. But also you look at it and you're like corporations can, they're very insidious and they can certainly drive culture to an extent. But if something isn't going to take off, it isn't going to take off. And like, it's interesting that,
that so many people, myself included, just want to watch people clean. Isn't it fascinating? It's a little bit too much cleaning. And I have to think that maybe it's connected to the fact that we might be a little freaked out. But to learn about that...
Maybe we'd have to go back in time. We probably would. I have taken to enjoying power washing videos. Do you watch power washing videos on TikTok? Every so often. Every now and then. Those are very satisfying. Those are great. Yeah. Yeah. Like here are a couple of matrices, things that are happening on, right? Where there's like,
Yeah.
The darned Invisalign. I don't have a retainer. I have teeth like David Mitchell, but everyone else does. And then there's like in a way that feels sort of like, again, like some sort of weird balance to it. People who are evidently like microplastics maxing, you know, because again, if you're going to like clean and organize to a certain extent, then like everything is going in an acrylic container. You have to be able to see your milk. You have to put it in an acrylic thing and write milk on it or
Or not. Just trust yourself to remember it's milk. I'm not against freescaping, but you got to stay on top of expiration dates or else you're going to be confused. And, you know, there's that. And then there's also this obsession with cleanliness and cleaning and disinfecting everything and putting bleach on everything and exposing yourself to a lot of caustic chemicals that probably it would be nice to, like, limit your exposure to because, you know. Yeah.
Paired with, you know, us also living in a time, you know, of kind of realizing how many people don't believe in basic germ theory. Like it was way more than I thought it would be. But something I also wonder about is sort of whether around this time of the dawning of germ theory of sort of this being something we were just beginning to figure out or to understand the scientific basis behind and also seeing people accepting or rejecting germ.
Whether that is similar to what we're going through today, where we know that there are dangerous things coming into the house and like, you know, the kitchen where we prepare food and the bed where we sleep and all these other places and the toilet where we put ice. Famously. But we don't know exactly how they're getting it or where they're coming from. And that makes us feel like we have to just go over the top with absolutely everything. Maybe. Yeah.
Right. Which kind of gets to the naturalist fallacy. I think that this idea that anything that's chemical, in air quotes, is dangerous and bad, and anything that's natural, in air quotes, is good for you. But kind of not understanding that it's sort of you're applying kind of a human binary to the natural world that doesn't make any sense. And that the way in which our bodies interact with chemicals of all kinds
is impossible to police. It's impossible to trace every interaction. And it's impossible to say, for instance, when you read an article about the fact that there's, let's say, certain kind of cancers are on the rise among younger people. And then you're kind of consuming TikTok content about people using 10 times the amount of cleanser that they're supposed to for a given toilet ice bath and think like,
Like, who knows? Who knows why these things are happening? Maybe it's the oil industry. Maybe it's microplastics. Maybe it's any of the above. And the idea of sort of fixating on what we feel like we can control. Exactly. When things are out of control. Feels like part of this, too. Yeah. And that's why the fixation on the home. Yeah. Well, why don't we unwind by cracking open an 1884 vintage of housekeeping manual?
Well, that sounds like a little slice of heaven. Doesn't that sound like a little good, clean fun? It does. Uh-huh. Okay.
So this is a housekeeping manual written aimed, as I think historically most housekeeping manuals are, at like the young housewife starting off, young ladies, and kind of, you know, implicitly aimed at the middle to upper middle class white woman, basically, or the upwardly mobile working class white woman. But there's a lot of fascinating class language in this. And
Also very racist against the Irish. So let's get into that. Not surprising. So this is Chapter 8, To Clean and Keep Clean. And what is this book? What is the title of the book? Oh, this is called Anna Maria's Housekeeping. And it's the character of Anna Maria telling you how to keep your house clean. It was written by...
Wow. I don't think I've ever seen this before. That's amazing. This is by an author named Susan Dunning Power, who's writing in character as Anna Maria. Wow. Okay. Chapter eight, to clean and keep clean. The neighbors who remember her speak of my grandmother as a pattern housekeeper of the old style with a love and
children, a large circle of acquaintances to entertain, and a fastidious husband, she managed to do and direct everything for house and family in the nicest manner without losing her serenity. Better not lose that. Or being other than delicately neat in her dress. In the Yankee phrase, dirt wouldn't stick to her. Therefore, I have always had great respect for one of her favorite maxims handed down, that one keep clean was worth a great many make cleans.
Again, I think that's true. And it's also the most annoying advice that anyone could possibly give you. You know what it reminds me of? It's very like how to write your dissertation in 10 minutes a day. Like it's that you should it's like, don't do it all the night before. Do it, you know, in little pieces every single day, like a discipline, which is so irritating. And you're like, you know, if I hadn't waited until the night before, I wouldn't be reading this book, would I? Yeah.
Here we go. Still, one must make clean before she can keep clean, and Irish Katie has not left the kitchen in the glorious neatness we were talking about last time. I don't envy you the house cleaning, but if bringing purity, order, and safety into the dark corners of the world is a heavenly mission, yours is one. And where should such purity and safety begin if not in one's own home?
You have read of Miss Octavia Hill, the English lady who rented tenement houses in the worst part of London and had them cleaned, taking part, I believe, in the scrubbing and whitewashing with her own hands to give the wretched poor a glimpse of that friendliness which is next to godliness. It was one of the finest missions of the century, and I have thought some homes where education and taste had place needed a similar visitation.
She's saying rich people have gross houses, too. One would think the pictures would leave the walls. The books come down from the shelves. The tidies and knickknacks get up and shake off the dust and homes kept with the negligent half order, which is all people seem to attempt now, their time being too much taken up with Kensington work, tennis and clubs and socials.
to see that their houses are pleasantly or wholesomely kept. They let the poisonous dust gather under the beds and in corners, allow contagion to breed in vile, damp places left by slops, and food becomes tainted in their close closets. Their very garments gather musty odors while they are taken up with finer things, as they suppose. As if one read poetry with a face unwashed.
Wow.
Wow. Holy mackerel. So this is fascinating because it's actually, when was it published? Did you say? 1884. 1884. Okay. Would you like to guess, just for fun, the year that physician and scientist Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus? Ooh, 1884 to 1884.
It was 1882. Ah, nice. Oh my God. Anna Maria is on top of it. Totally on top of it. And this is kind of like gets into this super interesting connection to European modernism because a lot of it grew out of the reaction to tuberculosis. That there was this kind of big push to all of that what you were talking about, sort of, you know, sunlight, space, big windows, you know, kind of no dark corners, you know,
There were a lot of sanatoriums built and architects like Le Corbusier and Peter Behrens and Bruno Todd, one of the big, really influential early modernists, Alvar Aalto, designed sanatoriums in Europe. The chicness of flat surfaces. This was another big thing. In the Victorian era, you wanted to show your abundance and cultivation by having lots of stuff built.
and upholstery and fringe and lots of carved wood. It was like a real knickknack era. Yeah. And like hair art made by young lesbians. Totally. I certainly will. A lot of time and energy and persons to keep all that stuff clean, to dust every little nook and cranny. So one stylish solution to that is to have a lot of flat surfaces and to have lots of
plains geometric so one of the reasons i feel like i effed up in a classic victorian way actually because i'm looking around my house and it's like a lot of velvets and sort of like high nap you had a lot of stuff yeah a lot of a lot of knickknacks well you're very 19th century and that's what happens that's you know yes but everything is covered in cat hair that's the thing i mean tell me about it
If I had like a gross beige house, I could wipe everything clean, but I just love surfaces that attract cat hair. So what am I to do? Yeah.
And I think people still sort of find it chilly. It's not cozy. It's not homey. It's not this sort of sanatorium chic. It's a little museum-y. It's a little museum-y. It's clinical. And it was meant to be because this was really kind of like in an era when people were, between that and the flu pandemic, I mean, it was a terrifying bacterial era. Yeah.
right? If you were, you know, the 1880s to around World War I. And that was really what modernism grew out of, at least in a technical sense. So of course, the fact that it was also utopian, you know, designed to be sort of accessible to the common person. That's what brutalism is all about. You know, everybody get it for concrete. It was also really, you know, kind of people were spooked by germs. And so,
one of the things that I find really interesting about like MAGA aesthetics which is not not an interesting topic I hate the fact that I that I have to be interested but it's like forced itself to become interesting I think over time yeah it has forced itself on us it's not minimalist it's really maximalist there's a lot going on it's kind of like chock-a-block and there's something kind of Victorian about it or perhaps even rococo perhaps let's go crazy let's say it might
even be rococo i mean you look at mar-a-lago it's certainly an attempt at rococo absolutely it's it's rococo revival and it's also kind of spanish but then there's the parts where they like ran out of money and they yeah there's gaps and it's kind of that like south florida like sort of like fantasia of like spanish architecture right that was happening like the red tile and all that stuff but i i mean you look at mar
a while ago and it's got to be a germ factory, right? Because it's like all of these upholstered surfaces, you know, there's a lot of antiques. To name my favorite subreddit, impossible to clean, or is it horrible to clean? Yes. And so all of which is to say, as a long-winded way of saying, that aesthetics and cleanliness have a long history together. They have been in tension and gone together for many, many, many years.
It also strikes me that the early days of our most recent pandemic were interesting because there was a period when we all believed, and I think that the data was kind of supporting this, but we also were, I think, maybe trying to control what we could, that it was spreading through surfaces, right? And we all were like cleaning the mail and stuff. Yes, cleaning mail and cleaning iron.
doing this I remember going to get a bunch of canned goods and like lysoling with like wipes yeah like all the cans it very earnestly I thought this was a great idea yeah I mean I mean and that and the thing is like it's it's nice to kind of look back and laugh about it now but like
that is what you do when you don't know as much as you would really like to, you know? And think about what we're seeing now with a sort of Make America Healthy Again movement, which is not something that I think is good, but I think given the
The vagaries of what you were mentioning before, microplastics, etc. All of these kind of mysterious things that are seeping into our world unbidden. We don't know what the effects are. There's been a lot of seeping the last hundred years or so. There's a lot of seeping. Yeah. We're exposed to a lot of stuff. I mean, you know...
And also kind of roughly this time period, right, the late 70s, we had all the news around Love Canal where basically like... Absolutely. Toxic waste was seeping into the groundwater underneath an elementary school and a residential neighborhood and only area moms dared to fight back. And, you know, that's the kind of the birth of the Superfund site is around that time. So it's... Yeah, in the 80s, we had kind of done...
70s and 80s, we were seeing the effects of having done all the damage that we did with these like marvelous inventions that we came up with, you know, during and after World War Two. Dow Chemical. Right, exactly. Yeah. And I mean, and that's and that to me is part of the picture, too, right? Because we have like one of the clean talk people who I...
Who I delight in following, who is very over the top, like has these, you know, huge racks of like cleaning supplies just like in her bedroom. Wow. Just, you know, I think it's because she likes them or because it's, you know, it's free advertising for your TikTok shop if you do that, if you also sell cleaning supplies, which a lot of people do. But like, you know, I've seen people comment like, I don't know if you should be sleeping with all those cleaning supplies in your room. And like...
I think it's probably fine if they're in their containers, but like, but also there's, you know. You don't want to be like inhaling that stuff. Yeah, but there's a level of daily cleaning, especially in an enclosed space where if we're following the guidelines of sort of what marketing wants us to believe versus what the sort of minimum that we need to actually get something done.
then it feels like we're at risk of inevitably like some amount of overkill. It does. It does. I think, and, and sort of lack of ventilation and, you know, kind of using more products than necessary and kind of, you know, it's also, you know, your home doesn't need to be, let's say as sterile as like an operating room. Right. It doesn't, you know what I mean? Hopefully, I mean, until we have to start doing surgery at our houses. Well, but only part of the house, only like, you know, a big bathroom or something. Yeah.
So it's like, if you're going to kind of like do a counter wipe down, it doesn't have, you don't have to sort of take out the big guns every time you need to wipe off your countertop. It's like, you don't want to be sort of,
You know, I've definitely had experiences when I was cleaning and kind of didn't open a window and maybe using something that was kind of on the stronger side and kind of feeling it. That, you know, that feeling sort of like you breathe in and it's like if you're cleaning with bleach or something, it doesn't feel great. Oh, no. I am not at all comfortable with using bleach. Like I should use more of it because like I don't really...
cook meat very much. And part of the reason is because I don't feel secure that I know how to properly disinfect things. And I don't have a whole other cutting board for it. And I don't feel like buying another cutting board. And I've been in a detente, you know. But right, it feels like we have pretty much the information we need, I think, to know how to keep our houses from getting us sick at this point.
Which we didn't always. Right. And what we know basically is like, you know, clean your bathroom, wash your hands, like oral fecal is a vector for infection, one of the big ones. And not that people didn't have a sense of that before we had germ theory. They just didn't know exactly why. Properly disinfect your kitchen and stuff that you handle and prepare raw meat on or with or just, you know, avoiding mold, keeping things like
dry. And, you know, like, it's not hugely overwhelming. I think it's basically about like places where you eat and go to the bathroom are kind of the main focus, you know, pretty much. Yeah. And but I feel like when we look at sort of the culture of clean talk, like, or the cleaning culture that you can sort of see some people exhibiting or at least enjoying a viewership of it's like,
It feels like there's a contradiction, but I think there isn't as much of a contradiction as I think there is when I get closer to it. Because part of me wants to be like, well, some people don't believe in germs and some people believe in germs so much that they're sanitizing everything all day long. So that's different. But really, I think there's a lot more kind of superstition at play in overcleaning, right? Because, you know, past a certain point,
It can't really get any cleaner. It doesn't need to be deep cleaned again. You're just doing it because you feel like it or because you're under contract. You're compelled. Yes. And if you're compelled and it's something that you're aware is a compulsion, but that you're managing and that's not negatively affecting your life, then I don't know. That's probably fine.
I mean, if you're using relatively mild products, then that's probably fine. That's maybe the main thing. Yeah. If we're going to pour too much of something all over everywhere, then let's use some Dr. Bronner's. Exactly. Mrs. Meyers. I have never seen someone theatrically pour a whole thing of Dr. Bronner's on something, and I would love to see that happen. And then a dramatic reading of the label. It's time. It's high time. But yeah, that it's like there's a certain...
minimum amount of just like hygienic cleanliness that it's not that hard to reach. I mean, cleaning is always hard, but that you don't have to spend most of the day every day cleaning in order to definitely that is like, yeah, that that even Irish Katie can manage. I'm so sorry. And then on top of that, it feels like we're actually kind of getting back into what to my understanding was what people basically believed, at least in the United States and sort of
English speaking cultures before we sort of accepted germ theory for a while, which is the miasma theory of disease, which is just that like bad smells or it's vibes. It's a vibe. It's a feeling. Yeah. Can you talk about that?
Right. So my understanding, although the early modern period is not my speciality, but let's say just in general, my understanding is that there was an early sense, like the word quarantine comes from the Italian word for 40, meaning 40 days, like you separate a patient for 40 days. And they learned that, I think, from physicians from the Islamic world. They kind of like germ theory in its very earliest, nobody knew what a germ was, but there was a...
They stole their ideas and then took credit. Yeah, exactly. And so this kind of seeped into, since things were seeping, Renaissance Italy, and there was a kind of like general understanding that not what we would consider scientific, that you would sort of need to isolate a patient who had something that appeared to be communicable. What the vector of contagion was that, you know, maybe didn't know. And this idea that it was like a fog or a smell or a kind of
bad odor that would descend on an area you know and then everyone would get the sweating sickness or something and weirdly it happens a lot in poorer neighborhoods oddly enough and i'm thinking back to those like the sort of those wild um plague masks with like the beaks that are kind of like during the great plague but there was this belief that you could sort of
protect yourself from the miasma by wearing this getup and you would put something nice smelling in it right yes yeah like something like freak like a posy a sort of floral or something sweet that would kind of disinfect and so they were in a strange way they were kind of it was a stab at something real like they got that there was something in the air they just didn't know what it was
And I think that what this speaks to is this sort of generalized awareness and understandable fear of chemicals in the groundwater, superfund sites, microplastics, etc., that we cannot control. There is just absolutely no way. And frankly, if we had all the resources and money and time and manpower in the world, probably still couldn't control it.
Because it's already out there, to be honest. Like there have been a lot of barrels of nuclear waste hidden in a lot of parks, to quote The Simpsons. In a strange way, I can see where putting your faith in something...
that sort of can't really be disproven because it's so innocuous, like, you know, rather than kind of like the reality, which is probably there is there, there probably isn't a way to detoxify all the stuff that's floating around and, you know, that is may or may not be harmful. And then it's, you know, it's, it's beyond your control. So kind of you sort of putting your faith in something that's a little bit superstitious. I can see where you can't measure the results. It's there's, there is, there are no results. So, so why not?
you know, kind of say, Oh, I'm going to kind of like ritually do this thing. And it's, you know, it helps. And then I think the answer to that is, and to the, like, how clean does your house need to be question is like as clean as you need it to be. Right. Because it's for you. You're the one who lives there. And you, you know, you deserve to be able to feel comfortable with people coming over, but like,
There's in Peg Bracken's I Hate to Housekeep book. One of the things she talks about in that book is that no one has ever said, oh, I love so-and-so. She has such a perfectly kept house. I just love that about her. And if your house is a little bit ratty, it'll make the neighbors feel better and it'll make your friends feel better. And as long as it's not, you know,
unhygienic then i think that's basically true you know 100 i think that yeah i have never in my entire life gone over to someone's house and thought you know like well have you seen the top of the refrigerator because i just went in there i mean nobody cares and it's even i'm pretty fastidious about stuff like this and i don't care right it's just i think that there are things like when people are coming over i'll do i have kind of like a like a 10 to 15 minute
supermarket sweep that I'll do to just kind of hit like a few surfaces and areas and kind of tidy up. But I think honestly, like if you want to make somebody feel welcome, like flowers or something to eat, it's like that's really you want somebody to sort of feel like you're happy to have them in your house.
And that like, if they're not going to take a magnifying glass to your like, baseboards or upholstery or something to say like, well, there's cat hair. Of course, there's there's going to be cat hair. Like that's just there's cat hair. But I think there is a kind of anxious response, which I have had to kind of unlearn over the years to be like, well, there can't be any dust there can't because then what will people think?
You know, and that the fact is that most people don't think anything about it because they're going to think you're Irish, which is true, which is accurate. And they're going to be right. This also makes me think of just speaking of.
Speaking of anti-Irish sentiment, that famously typhoid Mary's full name was Mary Mallon. And it does seem interesting that she became the poster child, and this is a phrase we still use today, whether we know the story or not, for the idea of knowingly spreading a disease, right? Or I don't know if you have to do it knowingly. I think we use that term just in a more general way. I think that's kind of fast and loose. But I think it's, you know...
It certainly is. She's not she certainly is not endured as a sympathetic figure. And to be honest, I don't think she really was because she apparently like threatened with a piece of kitchenware. The first guy who came to tell her that he thought she had typhoid. Really? Oh, my gosh. You know, you got to you got to do what you got to do. She's a working woman. You got to defend yourself. And but she had been.
I think spreading typhoid for like six or seven years in these different households she works in. And she was just asymptomatic herself. Like she just didn't have. She was asymptomatic. And she also apparently believed for her entire life, at least according to her, that she never, she never believed that she had typhoid. And at a certain point there was, you know, enough evidence that like she really probably needed to accept that she did. But I mean, there's yeah, there's some interesting complexity there.
to that. You know, this was a case of somebody who for many years was working and remaining undetected and just kind of leaving typhoid in her wake. And actually I think only when she got to a more wealthy community where there hadn't been typhoid in a while and whether, whether it was more of a sense of, Oh, we're going to look really bad if there's typhoid unchecked, right. That people kind of brought out the big guns and figured out what was going on because she would always just kind of move on. Wow. She just kind of go to the next house and, and,
Wow. And, you know, spread a little typhoid and make her famous, uh,
peach ice cream dessert, which is ice cream with frozen peaches with a little typhoid on top. Which apart from that last part actually sounds incredible. Yeah, it sounds great. Yeah, we should all have that. But like she was not the only person spreading typhoid, you know, but it was just like it was an interesting story. It was an interesting case study. And it was also coming in through an Irish kitchen servant or through an Irish cook specifically. And so that speaks to this kind of like evergreen anxiety about sort of immigrants as being unclean.
which goes back as far as, you know, I mean, as far as people have had immigrants to be racist about probably. Yeah. Let me read you a little bit more of Anna Maria's housekeeping again, because there's just, I mean, part of this is actually somewhat useful information, but also is just the language of it is, is really just kind of fascinating. Her writing style is incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Like blown away. Okay. How,
House dust is minute particles of soil from the street, sprodden by the feet or sifted through door and window casings, fine ashes from the fire, mixed with minute scales of skin from our bodies and fluff from clothing and carpets. These particles, nearly invisible themselves, collect in such amount that they will soon show in an unswept room in the locks of lint which gather under tables, along walls, and undisturbed places.
Escalated.
Don't throw sweepings about the yards or vaults, but burn them instantly. Or if that is not convenient, keep them in a barrel to burn the first chance. The grime on the paint left by Katie's careless washing is the sediment of dust in the water and dust settled in the steam of cooking, which if not often aired and washed, leaves the dingy look of frowsy kitchens. You don't want a frowsy kitchen. Begin to wash doors and baseboards and you will see the annoyance dust harbors.
In the moldings of doors and windows run the dust lice, which gnaw books, paint, and wood, and are ready to fall into food. Smeary paint invites that ugly moth, which delights in nothing so much as a greasy spot in a warm room in which will lay its eggs next in the dining room carpet.
In that dusty corner behind the wood box, a venturous aunt has made her nest. And some July morning, you will be surprised by her emigrant family in the storeroom, especially if spilt sugar and meal are left to tempt them there. Under the sink, in dampness and greets, water beetles and roaches increase like wharf rats.
All these and more in swarms I have found in the melancholy process of clearing after a kitchen girl who could not be at the trouble of keeping things entirely clean. These insects thrive on refuse and they cannot be regarded as safe or agreeable things in a kitchen, running over food and leaving corners offensive with their traces. Wow.
Which is like, I guess basically true. But like, boy, was that a scary way to say that. And also, again, like something like ants immigrants. Yeah. Well, listening to that made me think that in this this time period when she's writing, like,
There's the kind of like dirt and grime of just being a human being on planet Earth that is eternal. And there's like the dirt and grime of the Shire. Right. And then there's the mysterious seepage of like industrial byproducts, which is something that doesn't begin until at the earliest, the first industrial revolution. Which probably if you're worried about that being dangerous, you probably also shouldn't be burning it in a barrel. Right.
But again, she tried. By the 1880s, we're in industrialization. So there's both. And there is not a good handle on either one. So I can actually see. I'm not going to say that I can sympathize with her character as the sort of insect immigrant analogy is not super great. But I do understand that.
that sense that you're under siege, that like things are, you know, something's in the walls. That's kind of, you know, cause it's, it takes so much effort and time to mitigate any of that. And nothing is automated. Everything is, is hard to do. Yeah. It's, it's fascinating. Yeah. And I think it is like the, the sense of infestation by a new kind of dirt is true and real, but then it's has today mixed up with,
mixing with a sense of anxiety and racism aimed at other human beings and classism, crucially, because also then the clean house becomes a sign of virtue and anyone who can't keep their house clean must be a bad person and un-American as opposed to having no time. That needs to be visited by a social worker. Yeah. And let me also read to you just a little bit here about from this...
insane book about the tools that you're going to use because here we are in a time of anxiety, racially describing cleaning a kitchen and cleaning, you know, everything because we don't know where the threat is coming from. And it doesn't cost that much. So I'll read you what we're supposed to do. Okay.
Have everything eatable, covered closely and put away, tables and sink cleared, plenty of hot water, two pails, an old broom and a clean new one, two scrubbing brushes, a stumpy whisk broom for cleaning windows, a stout nut picker or sharp skewer of hard wood to get the dirt out of cracks, plenty of cloths for wiping glass and paint.
Old flannel or merino underwear makes soft mop cloths, which ring easily. You must have good tools to work with, and a well-set mop and large cloths will do the cleaning in half the time of poor ones. If you haven't old cloths enough, it pays to buy a yard or two of coarse toweling for floor cloths and six penny unbleached cotton for wiping paint. For your cleaning outfit, you will want a bath brick, which will cost five cents, a peck of clean sand, ten cents.
Yeah.
You would pay this for the poorest servant one fortnight or for a charwoman half a day each week in two months who would not do your work nearly as well and who would waste twice the supplies you will want in the time. So again, great advice paired with
the idea that you're doing this to prove that you're better than working class women, I guess. That you would hire. Yeah. There's virtue in doing it yourself because you've got skills. Because you're proving, and I'll say again, this kind of sense of moral superiority of like, I can clean better than someone whose job it is to clean. And I don't even make a living doing it, but I'm still better at it and I'm better than everything and the ants are emigrating into my kitchen. Yeah.
You've stopped the wave of immigration to the kitchen. Well, also, what's super interesting is that it's kind of classifying... It's denigrating the profession of cleaning and valorizing cleaning as a kind of calling. Right. So you're not being... Because you're... Right. You're not paid to clean your own house. You're kind of doing that because it's good for the health of your family. Yeah, and kind of enforcing this idea of a holy bond between the woman and the home, which is also interesting because this is really...
We have all this new dangerous dirt or, you know, some of it is. I mean, there's like soot everywhere if you're living in a city, you know, I mean, things are grimy and you're breathing in a lot of really dangerous stuff. You have during this period when industrialization is making homes dirtier also kind of because of that technology, the
the first women who can be expected to keep a home all by themselves, which wasn't really, you know. Exactly. Which wasn't possible before. Yeah. Because either you had, you know, you were just kind of getting by and you were doing what you could and taking care of your own house and your own stuff, or you were rich and you had a house that other people could take care of. And now this sort of era of the
servantless virtue signaling housewife or the housewife who has a cleaning lady but who's not good enough and who she always complains about which certainly is a type that has endured and who she says veiled racist things about also okay i'm just looking at how much five dollars in 1884 is today are you on the inflation calculator
Mm hmm. So about one hundred and sixty dollars. But that's like for that's for the rest of your life. You know, it's pretty good. He's also advocating for using steam heat to loosen stuff up, which, again, is like, you know, exactly what we're doing now.
So it feels like looking at our Victorian forebears, you know, things have changed and things have stayed the same. And the thing that stayed the same is that expressing the lack of control you feel about the world on your home by trying to control it is I think is something that people do.
But it used to cost less. And there are now so many more ways for us to overconsume products while doing it. And one of the things that this all made me think about, and that this is, of course, inevitably related to, is we're sort of fixated on the performance of hygiene, perhaps more than actual hygiene. And that also seems linked to the fact that we're being very, at least, there's a lot of social media culture that is
Pushing us to be very over the top about how much we consume and then all of the storage space that we need to house it and organize it and reconfigure it and put it in clear containers and organize it by color and all that and
I think home organizing is honestly one of the most important things that a person can do, but only if they do it to the level of their own happiness, because anything more than that is unnecessary. It's not for you. If when it stops being for you, it's that's there's no point to it. Or, you know, when it stops being for the people who live in the house.
And this is, you know, I think a big driving idea behind everyone's big Marie Kondo phase, which I still haven't read that book, but I feel like I probably absorbed it through seepage and to everybody else's stuff. Right. But this basic idea that doesn't have to be minimalism, I think so much as just having your objects serve you that like everything you bring into your home takes up a finite amount of space and energy that you have. And so you have to make sure that
The things you have are things that you really like because everything you own is something that has to live somewhere. You have to clean it. You have to pick it up and clean under it. You have to move it around. You have to find a place for it to go. And part of the aesthetic I think that we're seeing with over-the-top cleaning and also big open plan houses is getting a big house and then needing to get a lot of stuff to put in it so that it feels complete and then needing greater systems of organization in order to make it all seem cohesive as an aesthetic. Yeah.
And so really, I think the big question is, is your house serving you and is your stuff serving you? Or are you serving your stuff? And also in the question of, do you need all this? Isn't this overconsumption? I think the answer we've come up with culturally partly is like, well, it's fine if people can afford it. Which like, hey, you know, there's a lot of questions surrounding what affording anything means when the dollar is so destabilized and when the
the economy is so erratic. But also, I think, like, even taking that out, you could also ask whenever you want to get something new or thinking about, you know, just bringing a new, like, a new gadget or a new gadget or a new gizmo of plenty into your life, like, can I afford this in terms of time, you know? Right. Because the stuff you own costs time and the cleaning technology that you own and the things that you decide you have to clean in order to be, you
you know, maybe not necessarily happy, but keeping up with everybody else, no matter what it costs time. Your characterization of Marie Kondo seems right on to me because I remember watching her show and kind of reading up on her. And I think I wrote something about her when the show was on Netflix. And she's kind of actually not anti-
maximalism per se her philosophy essentially is like she doesn't care if like if what you really want is to have your like collection of like 800 china dolls on display in your living room that's what makes you happy and like the way to make room for that is to sort of deaccession some other stuff then like make it make that work like make it work for you and it isn't necessarily what somebody else would want and it's not necessarily you know it doesn't necessarily look decluttered per se but that's right
It's about kind of exactly what you're saying, essentially making your house work for you because you're the one who lives there. Which is a great idea to keep in mind, you know, that I accidentally learned without having to read a whole book. But, you know, that like, because as you're saying, like, it feels like everybody is looking into each other's houses now. There's more of a sense of like the home as performance and everything.
Yeah, it's nice to sort of come back into the reality that like, it has to be for you because it's not anybody else's and you're paying for the stupid thing. Right. You're and you have to be there all the time. And like, chances are you have to work there. I'm actually working right now on a piece that's tentatively called in defense of the China cabinet. Because there's this kind of like, I think that we've culturally we've fallen out of love with the idea of the vitrine that people are kind of, you know, it seems very old school. Yeah.
because we have so much there's such a push toward kind of clutter solutions and kind of organizational solutions for your house your garage whatever that i think we forget to celebrate the objects that are meaningful to us sometimes so it's like things just that you want on display that you want to look at every day that somebody made for you or that you collected somewhere that collecting there's nothing wrong with collecting stuff and
It's cool to have stuff on display, but let's sort of find smart ways to display that stuff that doesn't feel like it's a problem to solve. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I think it's one of those things where cleaning and eating are two things that basically everybody has to do or they should be doing. And so they inevitably become expressions of sort of how people feel about the world. And then you'll see people, you know, this is another big use for social media, people
telling you with absolute certainty something that you must be doing in your house or else you will die very soon, you know, or that you must be doing or else you're gross and nobody wants to be gross. Yeah, I think that what maybe feels a little bit radical at this moment is the idea that it's all personal and you get to, you know, above the level of hygiene where, you know, your house isn't dangerous to you.
And if it doesn't make you uncomfortable, then it just doesn't matter what you do. I love going into somebody's house and finding that it's really unusual or just seems very them. You know what I mean? That's so much more interesting than going into a house that's sort of like perfectly immaculately clean that looks like it was scrubbed with an inch of its lace and has no personality and no stuff and no mementos and no souvenirs from...
travel and you know just I like going into a house that sort of has that's full of stories and if you if you declutter the bejesus out of it then you're missing all of that that narrative and you know it's a way to learn about a person right and also it's like decluttering isn't something that you do once and be done with you just kind of have to
Yeah.
And B, that if everything has a place where it typically goes, then you can find it a lot easier, which is why I have seven different measuring tapes because they all went to different places. And every time I needed one, I had to buy a new one. And then
Last year, I cleaned my whole house and I found them all and I have seven. Well, maybe seven is the perfect number of measuring tapes. It probably is. Like one for every room? One for me and my six roommates someday. We all have to measure things simultaneously.
A certain amount of ritual is helpful in terms of just, you know, however much it is helpful to implement into your life. But the answer, I guess, is just that everybody, people know individually how much they do or don't need and what does or doesn't work for them. And I think it's just that so much of...
capitalism is being driven now or of consumer capitalism is being driven now by telling us new categories of things that we're not doing enough at in order to be happy. And maybe that's why we're not happy because we're not sleeping with all these appliances on our heads, you know? Exactly. Right. I mean, they're always looking for a new problem to solve. Yeah. But also if you like me thought that acrylic fridge bins would make you happy,
It's okay. And also they did kind of make me happy because it's easier to get stuff from the back. Yeah, I'm right in the middle on fridge organizing. Like, I think that you can take it too far. Do you still use them? Oh, yeah, no. I'm very impressed by that. The back of the fridge is a problem area, right? It's a no man's land. Yeah. Another thing that occurs to me.
is that I have never seen a Clean Talk video sponsored by Bar Keeper's Friend. And I'm not saying that means they haven't done it. I'm not saying their hands are perfectly clean. But Bar Keeper's Friend is the perfect product because you buy one thing of it. The thing of Bar Keeper's Friend I have will be...
like a third full when I'm dead. Because you don't need it. I mean, it's not like Windex. Yeah, you don't use that much of it. You don't need very much of it. It doesn't look cool when you use it. It's not an interesting color. It doesn't smell that good. It doesn't show up well on video. All it does is what it says it's supposed to do. And it does. Yeah. So I guess also like it's a truth, unfortunately, that like a really good product is not going to be
in this way because it's something that lasts forever and that you don't need to buy that many of. Right. That it's not inherently disposable. Yeah. Yeah. So the stuff you really need, you're maybe not going to be encountering in the most spectacular visual way. And and that's OK, too. And also, it's OK that we want to watch toilets filled with ice. You know, I'm I'm not going to tell anyone not to. I'm after we finish this conversation, I'm going to go watch six or seven of those.
But OK, so, Miss Sarah Archer, I threw you a curveball because I sent you a poem by Jonathan Swift that I told you I wanted you to read in this episode. And I hope that it makes a little bit more sense now why I asked you to read it. OK, so this is called and I don't know what year it's from, but this is called The Lady's Dressing Room.
by Jonathan Swift 1732 ooh wow it's about Strephon and Celia I don't have Strephons running around
Five hours, and who can do it less in? By haughty Celia spent in dressing, the goddess from her chamber issues, arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues. Strephon, who found the room was void, and Betty otherwise employed, stole in and took a strict survey of all the litter as it lay, whereof, to make the matter clear, an inventory follows here.
And first a dirty smock appeared beneath the armpits well besmeared. Strephon the rogue displayed it wide and turned it round on every side.
On such a point, few words are best. And Strephon bids us guess the rest, but swears how damnably the men lie in calling Celia sweet and cleanly. Is that meant to be cleanly? Is it meant to rhyme with men lie? I think that pronunciations have shifted during the flight. Pronunciations. Yeah. In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces the various combs for various uses. Filled up with dirt so closely fixed, no brush could force away betwixt. A paste of composition rare, sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair. A forehead cloth with oil upon it to smooth the wrinkles on her front. Here alum flower to stop the steams, exhaled from sour unsavory streams.
Hard by a filthy basin stands, fouled with the scouring of her hands. The basin takes whatever comes, the scrapings of her teeth and gums, a nasty compound of all hues. For here she spits and here she spews. But oh, it turned poor Strephon's bowels when he beheld and smelled the towels. Begummed, bematted, and beslimed, with dirt, with sweat, and earwax grimed.
why strephon will you tell the rest and must you needs describe the chest that careless wench no creature warned her to move it out from yonder corner all the time before as from within pandora's box when epimetheus opened the locks a sudden universal crew of human evils upward flew
He still was comforted to find that hope at last remained behind. So Stefan lifting up the lid to view what in the chest was hid. The vapors flew from out the vent, but Stefan cautious never meant the bottom of the pan to grope and foul his hands in search of hope. Oh, never may such vile machine be once in Celia's chamber scene. Oh, may she better learn to keep those secrets of the hoary deep.
the petticoats the gown perfume which waft a stink round every room thus finishing his grand survey disgusted strephon stole away repeating in his amorous fits when celia in her glory shows if strephon would but stop his nose who now so impiously blasphemes her ointments daubs and paints and creams her washes slops at every clout with which he makes so foul a rout
He soon would learn to think like me and bless his ravaged sight to see.
Such order from confusion sprung. Such gaudy tulips raised from dung. The end. Wow. I've been thinking about that for a long time. Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia shits. Does she ever. And don't we all? Yeah, tell me your thoughts. When you're intimate with somebody and you're attracted to them and want to be...
as close to them as you possibly can, that they're also still a human being who does things that are like you don't want to be all up in. And that you need to kind of navigate those boundaries in whatever way you can. And it's kind of that the edifice of an idealized person kind of falls away when...
you share a house with them or a room with them it's you know and everything is up close and personal when you shit in the same box which probably is what marriage meant in the 1700s or maybe they had separate boxes i don't know different chamber pots or different yeah i don't know right yeah that you're confronted with somebody's humanity and you never kind of quite see them the same way again but if it's you know that's
That's what you want. Part of, I think, what the sort of cleanliness theater that we're watching people go through with kind of, you know, whether we're actually doing it or doing it sincerely or just watching it as a spectator sport.
That so much of what women are doing online lately is basically like obsessively cleaning ourselves in the spaces we live in so that not a single flake of skin can exist as evidence that we were there, even on our own skin. We have to take that off too. And just the idea that like...
I don't know. To be a person is to be gross. It's fine. You can be gross. Yeah. I mean, you can't get away from that. And I think to be kind of continually gross is to be alive. Yeah, that's true. To survive is to just keep finding new ways to be gross. And also, it's like as you age, like not only does your appearance change, but also like, you know.
It just keeps doing new weird shit. You get hairs in new places like throughout your life, not just in puberty. I'm getting chin hairs now. I don't know why. Welcome. It's good to have you here. And what if the wind comes up and blows them in again?
And it is only the beginning. I know. It's only the beginning. Yes. You have such a long adventure awaiting you. It's also kind of, I think there's like a generative AI slop aesthetic. Now I have the word slop on the brain because of the poem, but it's also AI slop. Yeah.
Yeah.
And kind of wanting to be free of that messiness. All the stuff that we, like birth and death, all the stuff that we kind of push to one side and don't focus on. Things that used to be much more common to see in real life that nowadays are much less so. Yeah, and this idea of sort of women's work being partly...
the grossness that just is required by existing and having babies and taking care of babies and raising beautiful cats as well. Yeah, exactly. Raising beautiful cats.
to look at. Exactly. Yeah, if you want a real depressing deep dive, go into the history of advertising for products to make women less odiferous. Oh, yes. The vaginal odor industry. The vaginal odor industry is, yeah, it's just, it's so, I wish they would just leave everybody alone. I mean...
decided that vagina wasn't a perfectly nice smell is what I would like to know. It's perfectly pleasant and people need to just, yeah, just let us live. If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas and with that, I will see myself out. It was great to have you here.
And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for journeying into the future with us. Thank you to Sarah Archer for being such a delightful guest as always. Sarah Archer has written books that you should check out, including The Mid-Sanctuary Kitchen, Mid-Sanctuary Christmas, and Catland, The Soft Power of Cat Culture in Japan.
You can visit Sarah Archer's website at sarah-archer.com and you can find her on Instagram at sarcherize. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. We will see you in two weeks.