Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Trash

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

From reality television to theatre productions to foreign goods, the word trash has a long history of being used to deride things that are thought to have no value.To find out what this history is, and how this language has been used against women in particular, Kate spoke to Kat Marchant of Reading the Past. *WARNING there are adult words and themes in this episode* Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!  We're offering a very special discount. The code HISTORYHIT will provide 60% off the first 6 months. This means you can subscribe to History Hit for under £3 per month! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely bed twixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Fair do's. This is a podcast of an adult nature. There will be adult themes, adult language,

adult discussion between adults about adulty things. And if that isn't for you, don't even worry about it. Just run. Get out now. Get out while you still can because fair do's you have been warned. For the rest of you, let's get into it. it. What is trash? Hmm, trash. Trashy TV, trashy magazines, or do we mean like actual rubbish, like our American cousins say, take out the trash? It's probably not something you've

ever stopped to think about for very long, but that's exactly what we're doing on today's episode. Trash is a word that has been used on a regular basis to degrade someone or something for centuries, a lot longer than you might have thought it's been around. So when did we start using it in its modern sense? How did it come to be used that way? And when Shakespeare said that something was trashy, what did he mean by that? Oh, money, it moves. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. So, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history. of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. One man or woman's trash is another man or woman's treasure. You know what I mean? You know what I mean.

And we might use this saying today to talk about, I'd now a car boot sale or a charity shop, but this idea actually goes a long way back. In this episode, I am talking to Cat Marchant from reading the past, and she is an expert on all things trash. From the Dutch church libel to early modern theatres, modern-day women's magazines. We're going to find out what has counted as trash through the years. Who's been calling who trash? And how the concept of something being

trashy or less than has been used to keep groups of people down. I'm ready if you are. Hello and thank you for joining me betwixt the sheet. Kat Marchant. How are you? I'm wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. I'm incredibly excited to be here. I'm thrilled to have you here. I really am. Your research, to this subject. It's fascinating because we're really talking about, I don't want to say one word, because it's not, it's not one word. It's like a whole thing that comes out of it. But let's talk trash. And how did you come to study the history and the meaning of that word? Yeah, that's a big question that I will try and slim down. So it all started when I was doing my master's.

and the person who comes on to be my doctoral supervisor, he showed me this document called the Dutch Church libel, which is put on the wall, potentially actually of the French Protestant Church in London, in the 1590s. And it's this doggerel ballad of just anti-immigrant hate. It hits all of the keynotes. They're coming over here and stealing our jobs and our houses.

They're raising rents. They're not really refugees. They're secretly stuffed full of Spanish gold. And it also talks about how they take away all of our useful things. It lists lead, vitil and ordinance. So the stuff that helps us to defend ourselves. And they bring us Gord's good store, is the phrase it uses. And I hung on this word Gord.

And I thought, gaudy. And then I thought about valueless things. And I started looking into other words about valuelessness. Because I think when you look at history and you look at the word, When you look at the work of historians, I frequently found that we look at aspiration. We try to define what's motivating people from the past by what they want, what they're aspiring to achieve. But I think that we sometimes miss the abjection, the thing they're trying to avoid. So an example I often give is if you're an alien, you were sort of dropped into Kings Cross.

Other stations are available. You would probably notice that there are no bins. And if you're an alien and you only have the context clues of now, you look around and go, this is environmental. They don't want people creating rubbish, so just no bins. But if you're of a certain age, you actually know it's about bombs. It's about fear. It's about what you reject and what you don't want to happen.

And so I started looking into this notion of valuelessness and avoidance. And words like trifle came up. And then I noticed the word trash. And if you do a little OED search, Oxford English dictionary, It tells you that trash formerly was a doing word. You trash things. The city of Troy is trashed. Oh, we still use it like that today, right?

Yeah, and I think it still holds that meaning. And I think actually that destruction is integral to actually the origin of the word, the noun of trash. But that appears in the early 1500s. So we're just sneaking towards the English Reformation. And it means a little item of little or no value. And across that century, which is the period I looked at, you see it just increase in use. And there are spikes. If you connect it to like corpices of books, you can do a search of how many times the word appears in a certain year. And what's interesting is that when you do that search, you notice that with words like trash and trifle, they spike around moments of change and anxiety.

So reformation. They spike around our shifting trading relations. So as we start trading or trying to trade with the Islamic world, the rise of the professional theatre is another one. The values and the cultural norms are changing. And you just see this incremental uptick in the word trash being used and spikes as well. So when it was being used back in like the 16th century, the word gaud that you mentioned, that doesn't mean like a root vegetable. That's like gaudy, right? Yeah, it's with a W. Okay, that makes more sense. Yes. I was like, immigrants are bringing us vegetables. That doesn't sound true. That would be a good thing. Bring me your pulses, indeed.

Oh, no. Bring me snacks. Okay, that makes more sense. So Gordy was a word that was in force. How are they using trash? It means so you can trash something and it means to make it a little value. When do we start getting it used as like a noun, your trash, that's trash? And does it mean the same thing? Yes. I mean, I think in many ways the word trash that we use is the very close. descendant of the word trash they're using, I do think that we have in some ways mentally separated it from the verb. So we see, oh, there's trash that's valueless and it's just peripheral. But I do think on a cultural level, subconsciously maybe, we are using it with its original, destructive, infectious, devaluing to the wider whole of the community. And I don't know if we

are aware of how often we are doing that. But if we look at what it's deployed against today, I think very similar things are happening. In terms of it in the period, the earliest extant use we've got of it in a printed text is John Skelton or Shelton's Magnificence, where a character is mocked for the loss of his plate of silver and such trash. So right back there, it's this something think that's a frippery, it's magnificence, and it's being referred to as being actually valueless. And that starts to track through. Reformers start calling idols and relics and vestments of the Roman Catholic Church. They start calling that trish trash, the trash of the Pope. And when we start seeing the rise of the issues with the basement in the kind of later parts of the century,

we start seeing people get very concerned about what's being traded. Because of our coin is recognised as being less valuable, then we start being very concerned about what's being brought in. And increasingly, all of these things get connected to effeminization and the feminine. So the Roman Catholic Church starts being referred to as the whore of Babylon. It becomes feminized and sexualized in that way and promiscuous. There's definitely a promiscuity in this. And then when we start talking about traded goods and particularly fashions, European and foreign it's the fear of how it makes Englishmen somehow less English, but also potentially effeminate. It effeminizes them. And this is something that tracks through, that trash is

bound up inherently with the feminine. There's a lot to take on here. And I think I'm still struggling with the fact that to my ears, trash sounds like a really modern word. Like Americans, like, we take out the trash, or like, when you say someone's trashy, and again, I think that's got a strong feminine vibe, actually, doesn't it? It's not too far from like, slutty or, you know, that kind of thing. But it's really old and it's so caught up in these like religion, reformation, sexual mores. I'm quite surprised by just how expansive the history this is. And that's where I kind of got really hooked on it. You're completely right. When we talk about something being trash TV, trashy magazines, we're not talking about FHM.

Other magazines are available. We aren't talking about football or wrestling, are we? We aren't talking about that. We're not talking about the mass media entertainment that is made for, by and starring men. That's not what trash is. It's the stuff that's made for by and starring women. And implied within it, all too often, is things about attractiveness, things also about sexual freedom. There was a book published, I want to say the late 90s, early noughties, and the title is Vulgarians at the gate. And it's an American book about trash media. And the author in question question gets quite air rated both about Madonna and sex in the city. And in both cases, it's will somebody think of the children? And by children, he means girls. And what he also means

is, won't somebody think of the girls and maintaining their marital value? Because Madonna is trashy, because she is valueless, what she produces is valious, but it's also destructive and infectious. And it can devalue other women. That's so true. When you just said that, I'm just like running through my brain of all the things today that we would describe as being trashy. And they are linked with things that either women enjoy or women spend their time doing or just, if you said someone looks trashy, you're not thinking of a man. No. I don't even know if you describe a man as being trashy, actually.

I've never heard it. You could, presumably. Unless a man's in drag as a female impersonator, then I hear them get called trashy. But that's obviously about the femininity that they are wearing in that case. I've never heard a man get called trashy. No. Because like the original meaning of it to like destroy something almost feels like that's got quite masculine connotations.

When does it start being associated with attacking sexuality and kind of promiscuity? When does that before Madonna presumably? Oh yes. Yeah, much before Madonna. I think when we start talking about traded goods and fashions coming in and effeminizing, we're starting to get there. But I think the real place, and interestingly, it's also a. in mass entertainment. The real place that we start seeing trash as effeminizing and sexualizing

is when we start talking about the rise of the professional stage in the latter half of the 1500s. And we talk about things like women's dress and it refers to them as being trolls, T-R-U-L-L-S, and the problem being, it's past my skill to discern whether they be men nor women because of the way they're dressed. And that obviously connects to a cross-dressed theatre. So this kind of potentially voracious, confusing cross-dressing, which we then see played out in pamphlets like Hick, Muller and Haikvier, the manish woman and the womanish man,

and these kind of satirical, potentially judgmental moralising pamphlets about the need to dress to match your sex. because if you don't, it's in some way monstrous. And of course, that's what the players do. And the players have set down these routes, principally in the liberties around London. And they have set themselves up as all-male companies, on the stage, at least. And they themselves are desperate to cast aside this vagabond past,

this ethically ambiguous, morally questionable heritage, by setting down routes and presenting themselves almost, I think, like a guild. Is that when no girls were allowed on the stage? Because like, yeah, it's not illegal. It's the choice of the companies. I thought that it was like prohibited proper thou shalt not have a girly on the stage stuff. No? No, because at court, the queen is in masks performing. Italian companies come over. They have women. It's a choice of the all-male professional playing stages. And some scholars have suggested that they're trying to replicate the university theatre companies. I think they're trying to replicate guilds. And the fact that some members, really famous

members of the playing stages, get themselves guild membership. So they do apprenticeships, apprenticeships in big commas. But having that capacity means that he, as a guild member, he can then take on apprentices and thus train up other boy actors. And having a masculine space, they certainly react to accusations that they're trash. So people who want to attack. People who want to attack the playing companies, there's a direct quote that I'd like to read, because I think it's really important. It's from the School of Abuse by somebody called Stephen Gosson. What school of abuse? That's a hell of a title. I mean, it sounds kinkier than it is. I'll give you that. It's a lot less fun than it could be. But he says, let us shut up our ears to poets,

pipers and players, pull back our feet from resort to the theatres and turn away our eyes from beholding of vanity. Then he goes on, were we not so foolish to taste every drug and buy every trifle, players would shut in their shops and carry their trash to some other country.

Yeah, he doesn't have much fun at all. It's no fun. And he also talks about how the theatres are places where nothing but hoarder and scurility are maintained, which to me sounds like a lovely time, but apparently it's a problem for him. It's so funny, is it?

Now the theatre has this kind of air of, yes, I'm going to do the theatre. And it's quite well to do, isn't it? But back in the day, no, that was trashy as hell. And certainly the kind of Puritans, as we know, they are really reacting against it. And when they get their hand on the tiller, theatres are yeated into the sun. That's just not going to be a thing they're going to do. But the theatre for their part has a privilege that the other stuff doesn't have. A relic can't respond. Traded goods can't respond, but the theatre can. And so not only do they set themselves up as this man. masculine space, they also position themselves, I think, as a containment field. So they stage trash and they stage how to deal with trash and they teach how to deal with trash appropriately. And Shakespeare refers to trash over and over again. And it's interesting that one of the plays where it comes up the most is in Othello. And the person who uses the word is Iago.

this person who is utterly corrupting the values of the community has been allowed to become its arbiter. So what does he mean when he says trash? Like when you said that the theatre produces trash, what do you mean by that? What did Iago mean by it? So Iago refers to, he talks about who steals my purse steals trash. He refers to Bianca as this trash.

He talks about somebody as this poor trash Venice. He is asserting the value of a community, or he is claiming that role, when we know and we see that he's actually doing everything he can to upend the value, to take Desdemona and literally trash her into destruction at the hands of her husband. And so what the audience is seeing is be careful of the way in which you ascribe value and recognise it. And in defence of playing, there is a text produced that talks about how the theatre is this containment field, that it's a space that teaches the public to be obedient. It teaches them and it shows them the problems of engaging in traitorous and phelonious

stratagems against their rightful king. So they're saying we will stage this deviant behaviour. We will stage these people like Iago. We will stage the cortisanne Bianca. But look at us. We're a safe space. We're a containment field. In the humeral body of the nation, we don't let the infection of trans.

get out. So we're a good thing. I think that's some mental gymnastics to get to there. Like, I have seen Shakespeare. I know how many rude jokes there are in there. That is a leap. The reason I have to be up here saying so many rude jokes is really for your own moral goods. Yes, I'm going to stage the deposition of Kings

so that you know not to do it. Because it's very naughty. Yes. Okay, I like that. Okay. I'll be back with Kat after this short break. On God Medieval. from history hits, we're here to spoil you with the biggest names.

Chingis Khan, the thing that really galvanised his wars of conquest, was his belief that he had been given a mandate to have dominion over the entire planet. We explore new archaeological finds. After the Viking Age, lots of medieval artefacts coming out of the site as well. And delve into the lives of those you might never have heard of. He's not a bad and evil king-like King John. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis, from surviving everyday life in the Middle Ages to dynasty-shattering events.

Gone medieval is the place to quench your thirst for history. Subscribe now to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The players themselves, do they respond to this and use this word trash? They're being called trash, which presumably means not of much value when it's being used about them? Yeah, I mean, it rocks up in their plays. So Ben Johnson, his play Bartholomew Fair, this is the clearest example of it. He has a character called Joan Trash. She is a gingerbread saleswoman.

And she is accused by another character of selling rotten gingerbread that can make you sick. Joan. She says it's not true. So there's this fight about whether her wears the gingerbread bodies that she's selling, whether they are in fact infectious or not. Oh, that's clever. Right. I see what we're doing.

Okay. We're not talking about biscuits, really, are we? I think there's definitely a dublon tondra, if you will. And what's interesting is that that play begins with a stagekeeper sweeping the stage. So the mechanism of theatre, and presumably I would imagine it sweeps away the broken bits of gingerbread and the other detritus that Bartholomew Fair has created on the stage from the previous day, or the previous performance, and the man of the stage, the person controlling the space, resetting it, is just sweeping it away.

because that's what the theatre can do. Wow, that is interesting. And is it being used to mean like rubbish, like we'd use it today? Was it being used like that then? It's usually a commodity or a thing that other people value, but they are wrong in their value system. And in that we tie into these notions of faith and appropriateness because your values is your value in the community.

And if you get it wrong, as other people see, then there's something deviant or divergent or in need of conversion. I think a really clear example of that, we have to go over to the in quotes new world and see how the first interactions with the indigenous population of the Americas were being described. This is Columbus and its descriptions of the indigenous population as naked. There's a lot of naked, unarmed. and then we hear about how interest they are in things like broken bits of mirror, buttons, all of these kinds of things that would not necessarily be commodities for us.

And as the texts get produced, the things promoting the colonisation, the plantation of the new world, as a race between Roman Catholics and now Protestants in later decades, they start talking about how we can take our trash over there and they'll give us pearls. and gold. And it's a sign that because they don't really know the true value of pearls, as we see, once again, going back to Othello, he talks about being a base Indian, meaning presumably a native indigenous person of America, like the base Indian that threw away a pearl richer than all my tribe. There's a recognition that if you don't value pearls what they're worth in Europe, then you're somehow religiously, morally, ethically,

in need of assistance. Like, there's just no defending him. It's just awful. I mean, this process, for any atrocity to be committed against another group of people, there has to be a very slow but gradual process of dehumanisation. You can't just go in and do it straight away

because if you see somebody is the same as you, it's very difficult to do it. So there has to be a process of othering. There has to be a process of denigration of making the other person worth less in your eyes. And this idea of trash and the vocabulary around it actually played a part in what basically turned out to be the genocide of Native Americans. Yeah. So there's an incredible image collection that are made. There's watercolours by a man called John White, who ends up as the first governor of the failed colony of Roanoke.

His granddaughter is the first English child born in the New World, Virginia Dare. And he creates these watercolors that then get made into engravings by Fyodor de Bray. And while white's watercolours are by no means perfect, there seems to have been an attention to face shape, body posture, clothing to make it look almost like a proto-ethnographic text as much as possible. I'm not saying it's perfect. But when you compare it to what DeBri gets up to, oh boy, the leather aprons on women suddenly become thin and gauzy. You can see the contours of thighs. There is a change. in the posture to make them look more classically minded, like classical statues, the hair changes, tattooing becomes less pronounced, and also their posture looks more recognisable. But what there's also a play on, and there's a text that goes beneath it by Thomas Harriet, it talks about how they're fascinated by rattles, and they conflate children's toys in Europe, European rattles, with the faith practice of using rattles to worship in Indigenous communities.

So they think these two things are the same. And so they think that their worship is childlike. And that somehow maybe what's happened is because they don't talk about the Americans in the Bible. So what must be the case is there was no flood here. These are Edenic people, but we've got to be careful because now they've been met either by the Catholics or the Protestants, depending on which side of that particular coin you're on. they could easily be corrupted and trashed. So it's better that we convert them to the true path

because in their childlike innocence, they don't even know what a pearls were. And as we know, pearls are a representation of Jesus. So if they can't value Jesus, then they are themselves in danger and we must protect them. Not only is that not makes sense on any level, but then I'm just tired of thinking, so you think that they're actually children of Eden.

So how did you end up murdering them all, you bunch of knobheads? They were so perfect. that that was the only response. I have no idea. It's not like our earth logic. It's horrific. But it started in a presentation that these were non-violent people that wouldn't require much convincing. And I wonder if those narratives get spread around. And when it comes time to actually do the convincing, it turns out to be more complex. And then the people who've read these stories like, hang on a minute. I read a book with some pictures in it. There are fish in that river.

And you're going to want to be a Christian more than you want to want. So let's do this thing. Why do you think I'm being silly? That's not the rules. Was this like concept of trash? Did it play a part in sort of other, like colonisation, definitely. And you can certainly see that attitude playing out in Britain, well, all colonising nations, but Britain particularly doing this all over the place, is this idea that, well, you can't look after yourself, so we better do it for you. But racism in general, more like xenophobia, did this turn play a part in that? Did you see it cropping up there? I think certainly in the case of questions about refugees coming over and the fact they bring

over their trades, so they bring over things like lace making and they bring over things like starching. And there's whole narratives around yellow starch and somehow that being a sign of an immodest sexual woman. That yellow starch. Yellow starch? Yep. I'll be honest. I'm not 100% sure how they get there, but there's a conversation that if your linens have this yellow appearance that's in some way a sign that you are involved in sex work or will, to. So it's in the same way that they talk about people on the continent being butter beers because they're drinkers. Yellow starch gets tied into immodest women in a way that I can't quite see the tracing of. But it's a foreign commodity that's come over and is placed on the

garments. My only thought is that in the humeral mindset, having white at your neck and wrists that stays white is a symbol that you aren't exuding anything nasty. And so thus you must be pure. Yes, like off-white. Yes. Yes, that makes sense. I was wondering for a second there, because I know that some medieval sumptery laws, sex workers were required to wear yellow-striped hood. Oh, I wonder if there's a connection there. But I think the idea that it's like off-white. That sounds a bit more compelling to me, the idea that you were dingy white. Yes. I think that when we understand the notion of trash and how it is understood within the context of the early modern England, Europe maybe, we have to look at it in terms of the humours and the body of the

nation as a humoural body where people can be a moral humour, a fiscal humour, and essentially everybody is either value adding or value subtracting. And if you have too much that is value subtracting, people spending too much money on the wrong things, in quotes, people being amoral or immoral, then you poison the whole body. And the things that you buy, the things that you put on your own physical body, as bodies are leaky and permeable, they can soak in and they can transmute you. And so watching the wrong thing, wearing the wrong thing, touching the wrong thing, can infect you. There are questions about what it means for theatre people to wear the clothes that don't belong to their class or their sex. If a man puts on a dress, does it effeminise him?

Does it change his corporeal makeup, if you will? There's been a lot of research, and this has just popped into my head as you were talking there, about something called the disgust reflex. It's something that we all have, and it's basically a really important primal part of your brain, and it needs to override almost every other sense, because that's the one that if you're starving, but there's rotten meat, the disgust reflex needs to kick in and make basically gag and vomit and not want to go anywhere near it. And the same thing happens with vile smells, or when we think of, like, decay and cadaver, that feeling of like, and it can override anything. Like, if you're really horny, but somebody has terrible B-O, the disgust reflex kicks in.

and it's like, but there's been a huge amount of research now that's emerging about how important that is in social behaviours because it feeds into fears of contagion. And there's more theory emerging now that it's not just smells that can do it. It's fears about social contagion, about being made ill. I actually read a paper about did Donald Trump win the election because he managed to trigger the disgust reflex by making people convinced that immigration and immigrants were going to come in and infect them, like morally, socially. And then that, That reaction is so powerful that it makes you just go, get away, get away, get away. Do you think that this idea of trash could kind of be playing into this disgust thing going on here?

Absolutely. And I think that it would be good if, as a community, we were more aware of who was determining something was trash. Who is getting to make that valuation? And where are they directing it towards the most value-adding mover within the economic sphere, they say is teenage girls? They have such an incredible amount of decision-making power and so much stuff is marketed at them. And yet, despite the fact that their pounds or dollars are going to be so desired by society, the state, commodity makers,

it doesn't stop them from ridiculing those same individuals as liking silly fripperies and basic stupid things that waste their time. Well, why are you doing that? That's a waste of time. Who decides? Who decides that watching, Madonna videos or Sex and the City or the Kardashians, who decides that that's a waste of time?

Whose time? Why is her time not hers to waste? Why do you think you get a say in it? How does her time belong to you? And you know what? When you actually go back through history, like now you'd have this kind of idea that if you're reading a book or going to the theatre, that is a value-adding experience. But go back to when theatre's worst first started out and it was really naughty.

And there was a period when novels were first kicking off when there was genuine concern. that that would send women deranged nymphomaniacs and it was a complete waste of time. Yes, I think that these sorts of media shifts, so when theatre becomes reclaimed, re-owned, appropriated, once the state can find a purpose for it, once the people who wish to ascribe value to the exclusion of others can find a value for it,

then it becomes a possession that other people can be excluded from. And then it becomes valuable. Yes. This is the idea about determining what is and what isn't a value. And again, once you've cast something is not valuable, it becomes almost like that disgust reflex again. It's like almost contagious. Like, oh, get it away from me. Get away from me. If something's unfashionable or if something is cast as, oh God, Gen Z have decided now that skinny jeans are out and I'm devastated. But I haven't worn them since I learnt that. No, but who are the trendsetters?

Who are the value makers? And why do we listen to them? When we allow people to tell us what isn't valuable, the thing that we should reject, that has a massive effect on how we live our lives. The notion of certain things that we enjoy doing being guilty pleasures. Why? Why are we putting that on it? Why is the guilt involved? That's really weird. Yeah. It's really weird. It is, isn't it? I mean, you know, obviously there'll be people who really do have guilty pleasures, but you know, we're not talking about that. We seem to have a real stigma around something that's just enjoyable, like your time and just not struggling and working really hard, basically. So where, I mean, I do also, I was going to say, I think you're going to ask where we're going.

Yes. I was going to kind of get there. I think it's hard to say because it's very difficult to do history, this close up, for me anyway. After her matchy the queen die, people wanted me to give an idea of what her reign would mean in the future. I'm like, no, sorry, too close to it. Not my business. I don't know what the effects will be. Maybe if I'm still around in 50 years, I might be able to have some idea, but this is, it's too close.

And I think that it's hard to do it in this context. but I also can see that we are currently living through a lot of value shifts. I'm not sure which dictionary coined it that the phrase of the year was perma crisis. And when we inhabit that notion of crisis, we're definitely seeing an uptick in trashing, the trashing of people, the trashing of concepts. In the current moment in society, it feels like we're in a sorting phase. Things are good or bad. Pile one, pile two.

They are treasure or they are trash. and I think that there's clearly something that is psychologically gratifying in doing that sorting. But when we come to the word trash, another reason why I think that's upticking is because one of the massive crises that we're facing is the notion of the environment and environmentalism and thus the production of what the Americans call trash, we in Britain call rubbish, is now an ethical concern itself. And so it's no wonder to me that the other trash, trash TV, trash policies, these trash people is also ramping up. And where that gets directed, it just feels like it's firing

on all cylinders. Has the word trash ever been reclaimed by anyone? You know, like, there were loads of words that had horrendous connotations, several of which I can't say as a very white woman sat here, but you know the ones I'm talking about. When they get reclaimed, then they can become empowering. Has trash ever experienced a moment like that? Has there ever been a trash power? I mean, I'm sure in some kind of countercultural movement, but not in the way that, For example, there's a lot of women I know that have reclaimed the word bitch. They're like, yeah, I'm a bitch. I love it. We reclaim it. We use it. I don't know if there has been anything more than a countercultural thing of trash. There are certainly club nights called trash. I'm not

sure who's marketing them and who's trash. It's not defined what the trash is, apart from maybe you're going to go get messy. Is the music trash? Are the people going trash? Are you going to feel like trash? What's happening there? It's non-explicit in that way, I think. It'd be quite difficult to reclaim it anyway because the underlining assumption of trash is just something that's a bit shit. Whereas like a word like slut or any of those words, they have very clear meanings and values that you can challenge. Whereas trash is like, how do you get into that and just kind of go, no, it's all right to be a bit shit actually. That's tricky. Yeah, I willingly accept that I am both valueless and infectious to my community. I am the problem. Yeah, you're right there.

It could be a tricky one to reclaim, but I think Jem Z are going to do it. They'll come through and save us all. I mean, that is the hope, isn't it? Mind you, I have heard recently that they are bringing back low-rise jeans, so I can't get on board with that, I'm afraid. No, I'm sorry. That really is trash. You just need to behave yourselves. I didn't do low-rise when they were the first time around.

And frankly, we've definitely gone through in the last few years, I don't wear a waistband anymore. Everything's elasticated because sod a buckle, sod a belt, don't want to. Yeah, damn, right? We all made deals during the pandemic that they were, no, we weren't going to wear brows, and we weren't going to wear tailored clothes anymore.

And quite frankly, I feel that people, have let me down on this. I am still very much in a sack at all times. I love it. I do wear a bra, but that's because that's for necessity. Nothing trashy about that. Oh, Kat, you've just been incredible to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your research, and they definitely should, where can they find you at? Well, I'm on the YouTube, so you can find me at Reading the Past on YouTube, and I'm on social media. I am on Instagram, and I'm on Twitter, and I'm on TikTok at a variation of Katrina Marchant. Sometimes it's got a dot in it,

and it's got an underscore in it. Yes, also, if you check me out on YouTube, you will find that I'm frequently sponsored by the wonderful team at History Hit, and we do have a special discount. If you use the code History Hit, you can get 60% off your first six months, which means that you can subscribe to History Hit for under £3 a month, and I can't think of a deal better.

Thank you so much for joining me. You've been incredible. Oh, thank you so much. It's been really lovely to talk to you. Thanks for listening, everybody. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.