Is Your House Too Clean? with Sarah Archer

Have you scrubbed down the top of your fridge lately? Home & garden correspondent Sarah Archer is here to tell us how and when we got so obsessed with the antiseptically clean house as a status symbol, and whether we really need to worry about every bit of dust on that baseboard. Find out more about Sarah Archer:https://www.sarah-archer.com/Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks: http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas. And with that, I will see myself out.

• 0:17Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You 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

• 0:59Sarah Marshall?

  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 Cookbook, one of my personal favorites. Our most recent bonus episode, by the way, is our March bonus on Marilyn 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 Linley. You can find bonus episodes on Apple Plus subscriptions and Patreon,

• 1:41Sarah Marshall?

  and you can find our newest episode right here, right now. Here you go. Thank you for being here.

• 1:56Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast where we ask you, isn't your house clean enough already? It probably is. And 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.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Hello, Sarah Marshall.

• 2:14Sarah Marshall?

  Hello. How are you doing?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  I am doing okay. How are you doing in these strange times?

• 2:20Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, you know, just toddling into spring.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  I do know.

• 2:24Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And that's part of our topic.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  That is part of our topic. Health, human services, things of this nature. Yes.

• 2:31Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I do. I have to say, I'm not on TikTok, though. So I was kind of getting it second and third hand.

• 3:03Sarah Marshall?

  But it was still seeping out like light through a badly framed door.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like, like somebody who's used too much cleansing fluid.

• 3:12Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and so tell me, like, what is clean talk to you?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  So my understanding of clean talk is that it was like 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, 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.

• 3:54Sarah Marshall?

  Potemkin countertops.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, it was kind of, it was not in the genre of, say, you're 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.

• 4:11Sarah Marshall?

  And like the smallest amount that you can reasonably get away with as well, which is a very nice piece of information to have.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Which is smart and thrifty, exactly. So that this is more, it's almost like the, the sort of cleaning product, like Bizarro World's version of those, 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.

• 4:37Sarah Marshall?

  Right. 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.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  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?

• 4:53Sarah Marshall?

  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 that's also a lot of transparent rage bait to drive engagement.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I think that's the main impetus.

• 5:06Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 5:47Sarah Marshall?

  Like, do you ever really need to fill your toilet with ice? I'm not an expert, but no, you don't ever.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  I don't think so. You don't. No.

• 5:55Sarah Marshall?

  I am a grown up woman who has sort of learned in adulthood truly how to clean. And I've learned a lot of it from social media where, you know, I am watching for enjoyment, but where I learn in a, 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.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  You're sniffing it out, just kind of snorkeling around.

• 6:17Sarah Marshall?

  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, it stays a

• 6:59Sarah Marshall?

  little bit for everyone, rather than turning to a lot a bit for one person who is the mom who is Santa.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. And which is also a good business model. If you're the kind of person who sells cleaning products.

• 7:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  To have everybody at it constantly, like a low to medium simmer.

• 7:17Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:48Sarah Marshall?

  Because they drive engagement. And I think a lot of people are worried, possibly, well, kind of not believing it, but also maybe kind of believing it, that everyone is deep cleaning every day.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:02Sarah Marshall?

  And so the question that I brought to you are one of them, because I have mixed feelings about this whole phenomenon, right? Because like, I like to watch it. I am 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.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 8:18Sarah Marshall?

  That's improved my life dramatically.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:20Sarah Marshall?

  And it doesn't cost anything.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:21Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  And then it's like a little spa day in your bathroom.

• 8:30Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:56Sarah Marshall?

  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

• 9:41Sarah Marshall?

  extent. But if something isn't going to take off, it isn't going to take off. And like, it's interesting that so many people, myself included, just want to watch people clean.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Isn't it fascinating?

• 9:52Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  We probably would. I have taken to enjoying power washing videos. Do you watch power washing videos on TikTok?

• 10:11Sarah Marshall?

  Every so often.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Every now and then. Those are very satisfying.

• 10:13Sarah Marshall?

  Those are great. Yeah. Like, here are a couple of matrices, things they're happening on, right? Where there's like, a big contingent of people who are like, oh, my God, there are too many microplastics. I've got a sandwich bag full of microplastics in my brain, probably. I have to avoid all plastics and also sleep with my retainer in somehow.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  The darned Invisalign.

• 10:36Sarah Marshall?

  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 gonna 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 not, just trust yourself to remember it's milk. I'm not against friskaping, but you gotta stay on top of expiration dates or else you're gonna 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

• 11:20Sarah Marshall?

  yourself to a lot of caustic chemicals that probably it would be nice to like, limit your exposure to because you know, 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, 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

• 12:03Sarah Marshall?

  other places and the toilet where we put ice.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Famously.

• 12:09Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Right. Which kind of gets to the natural, what is it, 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 know, you read an article about the fact that there's, let's say, certain kind of cancers are on the rise among younger people.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And then you're, you know, kind of consuming, you know, TikTok content about people using 10 times the amount of cleanser that they're supposed to for a given, you know, a toilet ice bath and think 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.

• 13:18Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And the idea of sort of fixating on what we feel like we can control.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:23Sarah Marshall?

  When things are out of control feels like part of this, too.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's, that's why the fixation on the home.

• 13:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, why don't we unwind by cracking open an 1884 vintage of housekeeping manual?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Well, that sounds like a little slice of heaven.

• 13:39Sarah Marshall?

  Doesn't that sound like a little good, clean fun?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  It does.

• 13:44Sarah Marshall?

  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, and 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, let's get into that.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Not surprising.

• 14:17Sarah Marshall?

  So this is chapter eight to Clean and Keep Clean.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And what is this book? What is the, what is the title of the book?

• 14:23Sarah Marshall?

  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 some other lady.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Wow. I don't think I've ever seen this before. That's amazing.

• 14:35Sarah Marshall?

  This is by an author named Susan Dunning Power, who's writing in character as Anna Maria.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 14:42Sarah Marshall?

  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 eleven 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.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And you're like, you know, if I hadn't waited until the night before, I wouldn't be reading this book, would I? 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

• 16:18Sarah Marshall?

  with her own hands to give the wretched poor a glimpse of that funliness 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 in 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

• 17:02Sarah Marshall?

  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. There is more sincere refinement in the clean bare floors, spotless pantries, and sweet airy bedrooms of plain homes where pictures and books are luxuries than in fine houses where everything is attended to, save the cardinal virtues of health and neatness.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Wow. Holy mackerel. So this is fascinating because it's actually, when was it published? Did you say?

• 17:40Sarah Marshall?

  1884.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  1884. Okay. Would you like to guess, just for fun, the year that physician and scientist Robert Koch discovered the tubercule bacillus?

• 17:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, 1884, two?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  It was 1882.

• 17:58Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, nice. Oh, my God. Anna Maria is on top of it.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  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. There were a lot of sanatoriums built, and architects like Le Corbusier and Peter Behrens and Bruno Taut, one of the big, really, really influential early modernists, Oliver Alto, designed sanatoriums in Europe. The chicness of flat surfaces, this was another big thing, that like, instead

• 18:47Speaker 01

  of, like, in the Victorian era, you wanted to show your abundance and kind of cultivation by having lots of stuff, and upholstery, and fringe, and lots of carved wood.

• 18:56Sarah Marshall?

  It was like a real knickknack era. Yeah. And like, hair art made by young lesbians.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 19:02Sarah Marshall?

  You look into it.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  I certainly will. 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 planes, geometric. So, one of the reasons why-

• 19:21Sarah Marshall?

  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-

• 19:28Speaker 01

  You had a lot of-

• 19:29Sarah Marshall?

  Stuff. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of knickknacks.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Well, you're very 19th century, and that's what happens. That's, you know-

• 19:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, but everything is covered in cat hair. That's the thing.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  I mean, tell me about it.

• 19:41Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  People, and I think people still sort of find it chilly. Like, you know, it's not cozy. It's not homey. It's not, you know, this sort of sanatorium chic.

• 19:56Sarah Marshall?

  It's a little museum-y.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  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, you know, between that and the flu pandemic. I mean, it was a very, it was a terrifying, like bacterial era, right? If you were, you know, but 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 could get it forward, concrete. It was also really, you know, kind of people were spooked by, by germs. And so I, 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-

• 20:40Sarah Marshall?

  It's forced itself to become interesting, I think, over time. Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  It's, 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 Chaka Block. And there's something kind of Victorian about it.

• 20:52Sarah Marshall?

  Or perhaps even rococo.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Let's go crazy. Let's say it might even be rococo.

• 20:59Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, you look at Mar-a-Lago, it's certainly an attempt at rococo.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's, it's rococo revival. And it's also kind of Spanish.

• 21:06Sarah Marshall?

  But then there's the parts where they like ran out of money and they, yeah, there's gaps.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And it's kind of that, like South Florida, like sort of like fantasia of like Spanish architecture thing that was happening, like the red tile and all that stuff. But I, I mean, you look at Mar-a-Lago 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.

• 21:26Sarah Marshall?

  Because it's to name my favorite subreddit, impossible to clean. Or is it horrible to clean?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yes. And so all of which is to say, is, is a long-winded way of saying that aesthetics and cleanliness have a long history together. They go, they have gone, they have sort of been in tension and gone together for many, many, many years.

• 21:45Sarah Marshall?

  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, you know, 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?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:01Sarah Marshall?

  And we all were like cleaning the mail and stuff.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yes, cleaning mail and cleaning. I remember doing this. I remember going to get a bunch of canned goods and like lysoling with like wipes.

• 22:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Like all the cans. It very earnestly, I thought this was a great idea.

• 22:17Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, and that is, 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?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And think about what we're seeing now with the sort of Make America Healthy Again movement, which is not something that I think is good, but I think, given the vagaries of what you were mentioning before, microplastics, et cetera, all of these kind of mysterious things that are, you know, seeping into our world unbidden, we don't know what the effects are.

• 22:50Sarah Marshall?

  There's been a lot of seeping the last 100 years or so, you know?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  There's a lot of seeping. Yeah. We're exposed to a lot of stuff.

• 22:56Sarah Marshall?

  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

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 23:04Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:19Sarah Marshall?

  So it's, yeah, in the 80s, we had kind of done, 70s and 80s, we, we're 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 II.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Dow Chemical. Right, exactly.

• 23:34Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 23:51Sarah Marshall?

  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 I, you know, I've seen people comment like, I, 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.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  You don't want to be like inhaling that stuff.

• 24:15Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  It does, it does. I think, and, and sort of lack of ventilation and, you know, kind of using more product than necessary and kind of, you know, it's also, your, 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?

• 24:47Sarah Marshall?

  Hopefully, I mean, until we have to start doing surgery in our houses and then, well, but only part of the house, only like, you know, a big bathroom or something.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  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, and kind of feeling it, that, you know, that, that feeling, you sort of like you, you breathe in and it's like, if you're cleaning with bleach or something, it doesn't feel.

• 25:20Sarah Marshall?

  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 day time, 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.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Which we didn't always.

• 25:51Sarah Marshall?

  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, um, you know, like it's, 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?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Pretty much. Yeah.

• 26:32Sarah Marshall?

  And but I feel like when we look at sort of the, 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 you, 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 it's, I think there's a lot more kind of superstition at play in over cleaning. Right. Because, you know, past a certain point, it can't really get any cleaner.

• 27:14Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  You're, or you're compelled. Yes.

• 27:21Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're using relatively mild products, then that's probably fine.

• 27:37Sarah Marshall?

  That's maybe the main thing. Yeah. Let's, if we're going to pour too much of something all over everywhere, then let's use some Dr. Bronners.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. Mrs. Myers.

• 27:49Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  It's time. It's high time.

• 27:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. 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.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 28:12Sarah Marshall?

  That is like, 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 are, it's vibes. It's a vibe. It's a feeling. Yeah. Can you talk about that?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Right. So my understanding, although this, 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 separated a patient for 40 days. And they learned that, I think, from physicians from the Islamic world. Like, they, they kind of like germ theory in its very earliest, that nobody knew what a germ was, but there was a, an observation.

• 29:15Sarah Marshall?

  They stole their ideas and then took credit. Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:47Sarah Marshall?

  And weirdly, it happens a lot in poorer neighborhoods.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Oddly enough, and I'm thinking back to those, like the sort of those wild 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.

• 30:08Sarah Marshall?

  And you would put something nice smelling in it, right?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Like something like frag, like a posy, a sort of floral or something sweet.

• 30:15Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, right.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  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, you know, chemicals in the groundwater, super fun sites, microplastics, et cetera, 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.

• 30:48Sarah Marshall?

  Right. 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.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  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 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 that it's, you know, 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 that you can't measure the results. It'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.

• 31:34Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  It's yours.

• 31:45Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Oh, love.

• 31:54Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. 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, I'm pretty fastidious about stuff like this and I don't care. 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, you want somebody to sort of feel like you're, you're happy to have them in your house. And that like, if they're not going to take a

• 32:58Speaker 01

  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 everybody has-

• 33:21Sarah Marshall?

  They're gonna think you're Irish, which is true.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Which is accurate. And they're going to be right.

• 33:26Sarah Marshall?

  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, you know, 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, you know, in a, in a more general way.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  I think that's kind of fast and loose.

• 33:56Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Really? Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, my gosh.

• 34:15Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, you gotta, you gotta do what you gotta do. She's a working woman.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  You gotta defend yourself.

• 34:20Sarah Marshall?

  And, uh, but she had been apparent, I think, spreading typhoid for like six or seven years in these different households she works in.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  And she was just asymptomatic herself, like she just didn't have.

• 34:30Sarah Marshall?

  She was asymptomatic and she also apparently, 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 didn't. But I mean, there's, um, yeah, there's some interesting complexity 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, where there was more of a sense of, oh, we're going to look really bad if there's typhoid unchecked.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:09Sarah Marshall?

  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 to the next job.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  She'd just kind of go to the next house and, and wow.

• 35:18Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Which apart from that last part actually sounds incredible.

• 35:31Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  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, I probably.

• 35:56Sarah Marshall?

  As far as people have had immigrants to be racist about, probably.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 36:01Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Her writing style is incredible. Yeah.

• 36:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Like blown away.

• 36:17Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. House dust is minute particles of soil from the streets, sprouted 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. This waste goes on day and night, grinding of dust from roads, wear of clothes and carpets, fine dust flying from fires, and atoms from human bodies. It irritates the lungs to breathe. Ever so little damp begins to ferment in it, poisoning the

• 36:57Sarah Marshall?

  air, and the only safe way to dispose of it is to sweep it up and burn it. 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 dingsy look of frowzy kitchens." You don't want a frowzy 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

• 37:41Sarah Marshall?

  in nothing so much as a greasy spot in a warm room, and which will lay its eggs next in the dining room carpet. In that dusty corner behind the woodbox, a venturous ant has made her nest, and some July morning you will be surprised by her immigrant 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 wolf 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

• 38:23Sarah Marshall?

  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."

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 38:33Sarah Marshall?

  Which is like, I guess, basically true, but like, boy, was that a scary way to say that. And also, weirdly, again, like, why are the ants immigrants? Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Well, listening to that made me think that in this, this time period when she's writing, there's the kind of like dirt and grime of just being a human being on planet Earth that has, that is eternal.

• 38:58Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And there's like the dirt and grime of the Shire.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:11Sarah Marshall?

  Which probably if you're, if you're worried about that being dangerous, you probably also shouldn't be burning it in a barrel.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:18Sarah Marshall?

  But again, she tried.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  You know, by the 1880s, it's, you know, we're in industrialization. So there's both. And there's, you know, there's, 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 a, like the sort of insect immigrant analogy is like not super great, but I do understand that sense that you're under siege, that like things are, you know, something's in the walls. It's kind of, you know, because 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.

• 39:59Sarah Marshall?

  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, mixing with a sense of anxiety and racism aimed at other human beings and classes, and 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.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  And needs to be visited by a social worker.

• 40:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And let me also read to you just a little bit here about from this.

• 40:36Sarah Marshall?

  Insane book about the tools that you're gonna 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

• 41:21Sarah Marshall?

  cloths which ring easily. You must have good tools to work with, and a well-set mop and large cloth will do the cleaning in half the time of four ones. If you haven't old cloths enough, it pays to buy a yard or two of coarse toweling for floor cloths, and sixpenny 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,

• 41:46Sarah Marshall?

  a cake of mineral soap, eight cents, a pound of whiting, five, a pound of washing soda, five, a can of solid lye or potash, ten, a quart of cheap ammonia, twenty-five, mop, fifty, broom, twenty-five, two whisks, ten, flannel, twenty-five, two yards of toweling, twenty, two yards of cotton, thirteen, and all four sixteen, save five dollars to allow for difference in prices. You would pay this for the poorest servant one fortnight, or for a charwoman half a day each week and 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.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  That you would hire. There's virtue in doing it yourself because you've got skills.

• 42:33Sarah Marshall?

  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 immigrating into my kitchen.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:05Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  So you're not being paid, because you're right, you're not paid to clean your own house. You're kind of doing that because it's, it's good for your, the health of your family.

• 43:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm kind of enforcing this idea of a holy bond between.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:15Sarah Marshall?

  The woman in 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.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 43:30Sarah Marshall?

  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 first women who can be expected to keep a home all by themselves, which wasn't really, you know.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Exactly, which wasn't possible before.

• 43:49Sarah Marshall?

  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 the sort of era of the servantless virtue signaling housewife, or the, 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.

• 44:21Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, I'm just looking up how much $5 in 1884 is today.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Are you on the inflation calculator?

• 44:28Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. So about $160, but that's like for.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  That's for everything.

• 44:34Sarah Marshall?

  The rest of your life, you know?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  It's pretty good.

• 44:36Sarah Marshall?

  She'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 forbears, 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, you know, we're, we're sort of fixated on the performance of hygiene, perhaps more than

• 45:21Sarah Marshall?

  actual hygiene. And that also seems linked to the fact that we're being very, at least, and 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

• 45:53Speaker 01

  It's a recipe for misery.

• 45:54Sarah Marshall?

  is unnecessary. It's not for you. If when it stops being for you, it's, it'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, 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 Seppich and to everybody else's stuff. Right. But this basic idea that doesn't have to be minimalism, I think so much is just having your, 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

• 46:36Sarah Marshall?

  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. 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, A, you know, there's a lot

• 47:17Sarah Marshall?

  of questions surrounding what affording anything means when the dollar is so destabilized and when 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-a-plenty into your life, like, can I afford this in terms of time? You know?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:43Sarah Marshall?

  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 know, maybe not necessarily happy, but keeping up with everybody else, no matter what, it costs time.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  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, it's

• 48:39Speaker 01

  about kind of exactly what you're saying, essentially making your house work for you, because you're the one who lives there.

• 48:43Sarah Marshall?

  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 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.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  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, it seems very old school, 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 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, you know, let's sort of

• 49:52Speaker 01

  find smart ways to display that stuff rather that doesn't feel like it's a problem to solve.

• 49:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 49:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I think it's just, it's one of those things where like, cleaning and eating are like, 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, you know, and if it doesn't make you uncomfortable, then like, it just doesn't matter what you do.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  I love going into somebody's house and finding that it's really unusual, or just seems very them. You know what I mean? Like, 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 intimate slice, 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.

• 51:19Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And also it's like decluttering isn't something that you do once and be done with. You just kind of have to be thinking about whether the stuff you have is still stuff that you like kind of as you go. And yeah, the two things I've learned that I find so annoying to be true, but I really think they are, is that you just kind of always have to be cleaning stuff a little bit, and then you'll never have to be cleaning stuff a lot, or you will sometimes, but not that much. 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.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Well, maybe seven is the perfect number of measuring tapes.

• 52:02Sarah Marshall?

  It probably is.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Like one for every room? Like you can just have like a

• 52:06Sarah Marshall?

  Me and my six roommates someday. We all have to measure things simultaneously.

• 52:13Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right. I mean, they're always looking for a new problem to solve.

• 52:51Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Do you still use them?

• 53:07Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah, no, I do. Oh.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  That's, I'm very impressed by that.

• 53:12Sarah Marshall?

  Well, the back of the fridge is, is a problem area, right?

• 53:16Speaker 01

  It's a no man's land. Yeah.

• 53:19Sarah Marshall?

  Another thing that occurs to me is that I have never seen a clean talk video sponsored by Barkeeper's Friend. And I'm not saying that means they haven't done it. I'm not saying their hands are like, you know, perfectly clean, but Barkeeper's Friend is the perfect product because you buy one thing of it. I have like, the thing of Barkeeper's Friend I have will be like a third full when I'm dead.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Cause you don't need it. I mean, it's not like Windex.

• 53:45Sarah Marshall?

  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. It, all it does is what it says it's supposed to do.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  And it does. Yeah.

• 54:00Sarah Marshall?

  So I guess also like it's, it's a truth, unfortunately, that like a really good product is not going to be marketable in this way because it's something that lasts forever and that you don't need to buy that many of.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Right. That it's not inherently disposable.

• 54:13Sarah Marshall?

  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 okay too. And also it's okay 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 okay. So Ms. Sarah Archer, I threw you a curve ball 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.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Okay. So this is called, and I don't know what year it's from, but this is called The Ladies Dressing Room by Jonathan Swift.

• 54:57Sarah Marshall?

  1732.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Ooh, wow.

• 55:00Sarah Marshall?

  It's about Strephon and Celia. Not enough Strephon's running around.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Five Hours and Who Can Do It Less In by Hottie Celia Spenton 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.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Is that meant to be clen- clenly? Is it, is it meant to rhyme with men lie?

• 55:55Sarah Marshall?

  I think that pronunciations have shifted during the flight.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Pronunciations.

• 56:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  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 flour 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.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  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,

• 57:26Speaker 01

  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 seen. Oh, may she better learn to keep those secrets of the hoary deep. The petticoats, the gown perfume, which wafted stink round every room. Thus finishing his grand survey, disgusted Stefan stole away, repeating in his amorous fits. When Celia in her glory shows, if Stefan 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.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And wow, I've been thinking about that for a long time.

• 58:30Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia shits.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Is shits, does she ever?

• 58:34Sarah Marshall?

  And don't we all? And I mean, yeah, tell me your thoughts.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  When you're intimate with somebody and then 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 that who does things that are like you don't want to be all up in, and that that that you you need to kind of navigate those boundaries in in whatever way you can. And it's kind of. That the edifice of this, 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.

• 59:08Sarah Marshall?

  And 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.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Different chamber pots or different?

• 59:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  But basically.

• 59:18Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  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 what you want.

• 59:28Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  It's, yeah. I mean, it's, you can't get away from that. And I think to be kind of continually gross is to be alive.

• 1:00:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:08Sarah Marshall?

  To survive is to just keep finding new ways to be gross. And also it's like, as you age, like you're, but like not only, right? 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.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Welcome.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  It's good to have you here.

• 1:00:32Sarah Marshall?

  And what if the wind comes up and blows them in again?

• 1:00:38Sarah Marshall?

  And it is only the beginning, I know.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Yes. You have so, you have such a long adventure awaiting you. It's also kind of, I think there's like a generative AI slop aesthetic. Now that, now I have the word slop on the brain because of the poem, but it's also AI slop. That is exceedingly smooth and the idea of kind of computer generated or synthetic, you know, is an entity that doesn't have like gross hairs or gross skin cells or whatever it is that we're, we're constantly shedding in our, our domestic spaces and all around the world. And kind of wanting to be free of that, 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.

• 1:01:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And this idea of sort of. Women's work being partly concealing the grossness that just is required by existing and having babies and taking care of babies and raising beautiful cats as well.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Raising beautiful cats. Exactly. Yeah. If you want, you want a real depressing deep dive, go into the history of advertising for products to make women less odoriferous.

• 1:01:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yes. The vaginal odor industry.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  The vaginal odor industry is, yeah, it's just, it's so, I wish they would just leave everybody alone.

• 1:01:59Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, who decided that vagina wasn't a perfectly nice smell is what I would like to know.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  It's perfectly pleasant and people need to just, yeah, just let, let us live.

• 1:02:13Sarah Marshall?

  If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas. And with that, I will see myself out.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  It was great to have you here.

• 1:02:36Sarah Marshall?

  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.