You're Wrong About - Is Your House Too Clean? with Sarah Archer

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

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/yourewrongaboutpodSupport the show

If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas. And with that, I will see myself out. Welcome to You're 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 tradwife and now we're going on a thought cruise through the history of cleanliness and the rise of clean talk.

And we're going to be asking the question, how clean is clean enough? And how clean is too clean? I love this conversation because it felt like part of a bigger conversation that I'm always having with Sarah Archer about our relationships with our houses and cleaning and cooking and gender and the politics of everyday life and it just remains completely fascinating to me. So I hope you have a good time listening and we also, if you are tickled by this episode, have a fun bonus that Sarah Archer was on recently about Peg Bracken and the I Hate

to Cook book, one of my personal favorites. Our most recent bonus episode, by the way, is our March bonus on Marilyn Monroe's dress and the time Kim Kardashian wore it. That's a wonderful conversation that I got to have with Caroline O'Donoghue and Eve Lindley. You can find bonus episodes on Apple Plus subscriptions and Patreon,

and you can find our newest episode right here, right now. Here you go. Thank you for being here. Welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast where we ask you, isn't your house clean enough already? It probably is. And what's the historical precedent for all of this cleaning? And when can we stop? And with me today is our home and garden

correspondent, Sarah Archer. Hello, Sarah Marshall. Hello. How are you doing? I am doing okay. How are you doing in these strange times? Oh, you know, just just toddling into spring. I do know. Right. And that's part of our topic. That is part of our topic. Health, human services, things of this nature. Yes.

Things that we do to distract ourselves when things are weird. So we're talking today about the project of cleaning the house, which I think is one of the most fascinating topics in culture. My opening question, building off of our work about this time last year, talking about the trad wife, and I continue to have a lot of questions about home economics. And the one I bring to you today is, do you remember the rise of clean talk during the pandemic? I do. I have to say I'm not on TikTok, though. So I was kind of getting it second and third hand.

But it was still seeping out like light through a badly framed door. Yeah. Like somebody who's used too much cleansing fluid. Well, and so tell me, like, what is Clean Talk to you? So my understanding of Clean Talk is that it was like the genre next door to the phenomenon of people sort of making fruit loops from scratch. There's a little bit of a sense of a deliberate absurdity to it. There's a kind of, you know, posing a question, how best to clean this thing? And then the solution is always, well, you dump an entire canister of Bar Keepers 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 then it was kind of like clean puppet theater or clean interpretive dance or something. It was not in the genre of say your Martha Stewart's or your other home gurus of kind of telling you exactly the right amount of cleanser to use and the exact right brush and the exact right tool not to use too much. And like the smallest amount that you can reasonably get away with as well, which is a very nice piece of information to have. Which is smart and thrifty.

Exactly. So that this is more, it's almost like the sort of cleaning product, like bizarro world's version of those weird cooking videos where people were putting all the ingredients in a single casserole or something. And it was just some grotesque. And there's probably a name for that. 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.

Which I just hate. I hate wasting. It's just so sad. Why do you want to waste food? The like countertop nachos or that lady who made like a million of these and one of them was like countertop spaghetti. And it's also a lot of transparent rage bait to drive engagement. I think that's the main impetus. And this kind of thing was often sort of like people in their 30s sort of acting like kids TV hosts in a very, very to slightly unsettling way. And in this case, it was like a grownup woman

pretending to be mixing cocktails inside of her toilet bowl. Oh God. 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. Like, do you ever really need to fill your toilet with ice? I'm not an expert, but no, you don't ever. I don't think so, you don't, no. I am a grownup woman who has sort of learned in adulthood truly how to clean.

And I've learned a lot of it from social media where I am watching for enjoyment, but where I learn watching for enjoyment, but where I learn in an incidental kind of way how to do the occasional thing while I'm searching for dopamine, like a truffle pig in the forest. You're sniffing it out, just kind of snarkling around. And occasionally, accidentally, you'll learn something. And I think we're living in a time of greater than usual obsession with 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 little bit for everyone rather than turning to a lot of bit for one person who is the mom who is Santa. Exactly. And which is also a good business model if you're the kind of person who sells cleaning products. To have everybody at it constantly at like a low to medium simmer. And I guess what I'm trying to figure out and what I believe is maybe like the secret to some kind of happiness is like, how much little bit do you always have to be doing? Because I think in theory, it's like not that much, right? You have to wash dishes and those do pile up if you do anything ambitious, like you have to clean surfaces, you have to sweep. But we're also, I think in this sort of clean

talk social media world being shown a model of existing where, you know, also the people doing the most outrageous things rise to the top. Right. Because they drive engagement. And I think a lot of people are worried, possibly, well, kind of not believing it, but also maybe kind of believing it that everyone is deep cleaning every day. Yes. And so the question that I brought to you 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. That's improved

my life dramatically. And it doesn't cost anything. Okay, you roll it like it's like the way they do in spas. And then you look at your towels, and you're like, look at those towels. And then it's like a little spa day in your bathroom. Exactly. And that's the light side of clean talk of the force, right? Because it's like, it doesn't cost anything. It's a skill. And that's in, you know, as we always come back to who will win the Martha Crown and the Game of Thrones, the one who teaches skills. And Martha, in fact, is the person who taught not me personally, but taught the community of which I am a member, how to fold a fitted sheet. And that is one of the things that I'm actually

extraordinarily good at. I got to get on that. I do not know how to fold a fitted sheet yet. And I guess like looking at clean talk, right? Because there's like, there's, you know, it's a full sided die. And a big side of the die is a terrible metaphor, but one of the sides of the die is very corporation driven. And part of my feeling is like, this is clearly driven to some extent by sort of the corporatization of everything and how, you know, if you are an influencer

and you sell people Amazon gadgets and products, then you are obviously incentivized to teach them how to use the products faster so they can buy more of them and they can buy more different ones. And we can have this sort of cleaning arms race where no one's house is giant or clean enough. But also you look at it and you're like, corporations can, they're very insidious and they can certainly drive culture to an extent. But if something isn't going to take off, it isn't going to take off. And like, it's interesting that so many people, myself included, just want to watch people clean. Isn't it fascinating? It's a little bit too much cleaning. And I have to think that maybe it's connected to the fact that we might be a little freaked out.

But to learn about that, maybe we'd have to go back in time. about that. Maybe we'd have to go back in time. We probably would. I have taken to enjoying power washing videos. Do you watch power washing videos? Very so often. Those are those are very satisfying. Those are great. Yeah. Like here are a couple of matrices things are 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. That darned Invisalign. I don't have a retainer. I have teeth like David Mitchell, but everyone else does. And then there's like, in a way that feels sort of like, again, like some sort of weird balance to it, people who are evidently like microplastics maxing, you know, because again, if you're going to like clean and organize to a certain extent, then like everything

is going in an acrylic container, you have to be able to see your milk, you have to put it in an acrylic thing and write milk on it or not, just trust yourself to remember it's milk. I'm not against freakscaping, but you just, you got to stay on top of expiration dates or else you're going to be confused. And you know, there's that. And then there's also this obsession with cleanliness and cleaning and disinfecting everything and putting bleach on everything and exposing yourself to a lot of caustic chemicals that probably it would be nice to like exposing 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 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 the kitchen where we prepare food and the bed where we sleep and all these other places and the toilet where we put ice. Famously. But we don't know exactly how they're getting it or where they're coming from. And that makes us

feel like we have to just go over the top with absolutely everything maybe. 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 not understanding that you're applying 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. It's impossible to say, for instance, when you read an article about the fact that there's, let's say, certain kinds of cancers are on the rise among younger people. Then you're consuming

TikTok content about people using 10 times the amount of cleanser that they're supposed to for a given toilet, ice bath, and think like, 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. Right. And the idea of sort of fixating on what we feel like we can control when things are out of control feels like part of this too. Yeah. And that's that's why the fixation on the home. Yeah. Well, why don't we unwind by cracking open an 1884 vintage of

housekeeping manual? Well, that sounds like a little slice of heaven. Doesn't that sound like a little good clean fun? It does. Doesn't that sound like a little good clean fun? It does. Uh huh. Okay. So this is a housekeeping manual written aimed as I think historically most housekeeping

manuals are at like the young housewife starting off young ladies and kind of, and you know, implicitly aimed at the middle to upper middle class white woman basically, or the upwardly mobile working class white woman, basically, or the upwardly mobile working class white woman. But there's a lot of fascinating class language in this and also very racist against the Irish. So let's get into that. Not surprising. So this is chapter eight, to clean and keep clean.

And what is this book? What is the title of the book? Oh, this is called Anna Maria's House housekeeping. And it's the character of Anna Maria telling you how to keep your house clean. It was written by some other lady. Wow. I don't think I've ever seen this before. That's amazing. This is by an author named Susan Dunning Power, who's writing in character as Anna Maria. Wow 8 To Clean and Keep Clean The neighbors who remember her speak of my grandmother as a patterned 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. You know what it reminds me of? It's very like how to write your dissertation in 10 minutes a day. Like it's that you should it's like, don't do it all the night before do it, you know, in little pieces every single day, like a discipline, which is so irritating.

And you're like, you know, if I hadn't waited until the night before, I wouldn't be reading this book, would I? Here we go. Still, one must make clean before she can keep clean, and Irish Katie has not left the kitchen in the glorious neatness we were talking about last time. I don't envy you the house cleaning, but if bringing purity, order, and safety into the dark corners of the world is a heavenly mission, yours is one. And where should such purity and safety begin if not in one's own home? You have read of Miss Octavia Hill, the English lady who rented tenement houses in the worst

part of London and had them cleaned, taking part, I believe, in the scrubbing and whitewashing with her own hands to give the wretched poor a glimpse of that 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 in 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, Tennyson clubs, and socials, to see that their houses are pleasantly or wholesomely kept.

They let the poisonous dust gather under the beds and in corners, allow contagion to breed in vile, damp places left by slops, and food becomes tainted in their close closets, their very garments gather musty odors while they are taken up with finer things, as they suppose, as if one read poetry with a face unwashed. 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, then in fine houses where everything is attended to save the cardinal virtues of health and neatness." Wow. Holy mackerel. So this is fascinating because it's actually, when was it published,

did you say? 1884. 1884. Okay. Would you like to guess to guess just for fun the year that physician and scientist Robert Koch discovered the tuberculous bacillus? Oh, 1884? It was 1882! Oh my god, Anna Maria is on top of it. Totally on top of it. And this 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 big push to all of what you were talking about, sunlight, space, big windows, no dark corners. There were a lot of sanatoriums built and

architects like Le Corbusier and Peter Barron and Bruno Todd, one of the big really influential early modernists, Oliver Alto designed sanatoriums in Europe. The chicness of flat surfaces. This was another big thing. In the Victorian era, you wanted to show your abundance and kind of cultivation by having lots of stuff, and upholstery, and fringe, and lots of carved wood. It was like a real knickknack era. Yeah. And hair art made by young lesbians. Totally hair art. art made by young lesbians. Totally. Look into it. Look into it. 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- I feel like I effed up in a classic Victorian way, actually, because I'm looking around my house and it's like a lot of velvets and sort of like high nap.

You had a lot of stuff. Yeah, a lot of a lot of knickknacks. Well, you're very 19th century. And that's what happens. That's, you know, but everything is covered in cat hair. That's the thing. I had more. 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? I think people still sort of find it chilly. It's not cozy. It's not homey. It's not, you know, the sort of sanatorium chic. It's a little museum-y. It's a little museum-y. It's clinical. And it was meant to be because this was really kind of like in an era when people were, you know, between that and the flu pandemic. I mean, it was a terrifying, like bacterial era, right? If you were, you know, the 1880s to around World War I. And that was really what modernism grew out of, at least in a technical sense. So of course, the fact that it was also utopian, you know,

designed to be sort of accessible to the common person. That's what brutalism is all about. You know, everybody get it for concrete. It was also really, you know, kind of people were spooked by germs. And so one of the things that I find really interesting about like MAGA aesthetics, which is not an interesting topic. I hate the fact that I have to be interested, but it's like- It's forced itself to become interesting, I think, over time. Yeah. It has forced itself on us. It's not minimalist It's really maximalist is a lot going on It's kind of like chock-a-block and there's something kind of Victorian about it or perhaps even rococo

Let's go crazy, let's say it might even be I mean you look at Mar-a-Lago. It's certainly an attempt at rococo Absolutely, it's where it's rococo. Absolutely, it's Rococo Revival, and it's also kind of Spanish. But then there's the parts where they ran out of money and they, yeah, there's gaps. And it's kind of that South Florida sort of fantasia of Spanish architecture thing that was happening, the red tile and all that stuff.

But I mean, you look at Mar-a-Lago and it's gotta be a germ factory, right? Cause it's like all of these upholstered surfaces, you know, there's a lot of antiques. Because it's the name, my favorite subreddit, impossible to clean or is it horrible to clean? Yes. And so all of which is to say, as a long-winded way of saying, that aesthetics and cleanliness have a long history together. They have been in tension and gone together for many, many, many years. It also strikes me that the early days of our most recent pandemic were

interesting because there was a period when we all believed, and I think that, you know, the data was kind of supporting this, but we also were just, I think maybe trying to control what we could, that it was spreading through surfaces. Right. And we all were like cleaning the mail and stuff. Yes. Cleaning mail and cleaning. I remember doing this. I remember going to get a bunch of canned goods and like Lysoling with like wipes, like all the cans. Very earnestly, I thought this was a great idea. And the thing is like, 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. CB 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, etc., all of these mysterious things that are seeping into our world unbidden. We don't know what the effects are. It's been a lot of seeping the last 100 years or so. There's a lot of seeping. Yeah. We're exposed to a lot of stuff.

And also roughly this time period, the late 70s, we had all the news around Love Canal where basically toxic waste was seeping into the groundwater underneath an elementary school and a residential neighborhood and only area moms dared to fight back. And you know, that's the kind of the birth of the Superfund site is around that time. So it's yeah. And the 80s we had kind of done 70s and 80s. We were seeing the effects of having done all the damage that we did with these marvelous inventions that we came up with during and after World War II. Dow Chemical.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. And that to me is part of the picture too, right? Because we have one of the Clean Talk people who I delight in following, who is very over the top, like has these huge racks of cleaning supplies just like in her bedroom. Wow. Just, you know, I think it's because she likes them or because 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've seen people comment like, I don't know if you should be sleeping with all those cleaning supplies in your room. And like, I think it's probably fine if they're in their containers. But like, but also there's, you know, you don't want to be like inhaling that stuff. Yeah, but there's a level of daily cleaning, especially in an

enclosed space, where if we're following the guidelines of sort of what marketing wants us to believe versus what the sort of minimum that we need to actually get something done, then it feels like we're at risk of inevitably like some amount of overkill. It does. It does. I think and sort of lack of ventilation and, you know, kind of using more products than necessary and kind of, you know, it's also your home doesn't need to be, let's say, as sterile as like an operating room, right? It doesn't you to be, let's say, as sterile as an operating room. You know what I mean?

Nicole Zicko Hopefully, I mean, until we have to start doing surgery at our houses. Nicole Zicko As of currently. Nicole Zicko Well, but only part of the house. Only a big bathroom or something. Nicole Zicko So it's like, if you're going to do a counter wipe down, you don't have to take out the big guns every time you need to wipe off your countertop. I've definitely had experiences when I was cleaning and didn't open a window and maybe using something that was on the stronger side and feeling it. That feeling, you breathe in and it's like if you're cleaning with bleach or something, it doesn't feel great. Oh, no. I am not at all comfortable with using bleach. I should use more of it because I don't

really cook meat very much and part of the reason is because I don't feel secure that I know how to properly disinfect things and I don't have a whole other cutting board for it and I don't feel like buying another cutting board and I've been in a detente. But right, it feels like we have pretty much the information we need, I think, to know how to keep our houses from getting us sick at this point. Which we didn't always. 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 avoiding mold, keeping things dry. And it's not hugely overwhelming, I think. It's basically about places where you eat And, you know, like it's not hugely overwhelming, I think it's basically about like places where you eat and go to the bathroom are kind of the main focus, you know?

Pretty much, yeah. But I feel like when we look at sort of the culture of Clean Talk, like, or the cleaning culture that you can sort of see some people exhibiting or at least enjoying a viewership of it's like, it feels like there's a contradiction, but I think there isn't as much of a contradiction as I think there is when I get closer to it because part of me wants to be like, well, some people don't believe in germs and some people believe in germs so much that they're sanitizing

everything all day long. So that's different. But really, it's I think there's a lot more kind of superstition at play and over cleaning, right? Because, you know, past a certain point, it can't really get any cleaner. It doesn't need to be deep cleaned again. You're just doing it because you feel like it or because you're under contract. You're you're compelled. Yes. And if you're compelled, and it's something that you're aware is a compulsion, but that you're managing and that's not negatively affecting your life, then I don't know. That's

probably fine. I mean, if you're using relatively mild products, then that's probably fine. That's maybe the main thing. Yeah. If we're going to pour too much of something all over everywhere, then let's use some Dr. Bronner's. Exactly. Mrs. Myers. I have never seen someone theatrically pour a whole thing of Dr. Bronner's on something. And I would love to see that happen. And then a dramatic reading of the label.

It's time. It's high time. Yeah. But yeah, that it's like, there's a certain minimum amount of just like hygienic cleanliness that it's not 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 reach. 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? Right. So my understanding, although the early modern period is not my speciality, but let's say just in general, my understanding is that there was an early sense – the word quarantine

comes from the Italian word for 40, meaning 40 days. You separate a patient for 40 days. They learned that, I think, from a patient for 40 days. They learned that from physicians from the Islamic world. They kind of like germ theory in its very earliest – nobody knew what a germ was, but there was an observation – They stole their ideas and then took credit. Yeah. Exactly. This kind of seeped into, since things were seeping, Renaissance Italy. There was a kind of general understanding that not what we would consider scientific, that you would need to isolate a patient who had

something that appeared to be communicable. What the vector of contagion was that maybe didn't know. This idea that it was like a fog or a smell or a bad odor that would descend on an area and then everyone would get the sweating sickness or something. LS. Right. And weirdly, it happens a lot in poorer neighborhoods. KW. Oddly enough. I'm thinking back to those wild plague masks with the beaks that are kind of like during the Great Plague. But there was this belief that you could sort of protect yourself from

the miasma by wearing this getup. And you would put something nice smelling in it, right? Yes. Like something like a posy, a sort of floral or something sweet that would kind of disinfect. And so they were in a strange way, they were kind of, it was a stab at something real. Like they got that there was something in the air. They just didn't know what it was. I think that what this speaks to is this generalized awareness and understandable fear of chemicals in the groundwater, superfund sites, microplastics, et cetera, that we cannot control. There is just absolutely no way. Frankly, if we had

all the resources, money and time and manpower in the world, probably still couldn't control. 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. 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. Rather than the reality, which is probably there isn't a way to detoxify all the stuff

that's floating around and that may or may not be harmful. It's beyond your control. So putting your faith in something that's a little bit superstitious, I can see where you can't measure the results. There are no results. So why not kind of say, oh, I'm going to kind of like ritually do this thing. It helps. And then I think the answer to that is and to the like, how clean does your house need to be question is like as clean as you need it to be, right? Because it's for you. You're the one who lives there. It's yours. And you deserve to be able to feel comfortable with people coming over.

But like there's in Peg Bracken's, I hate to house keep book. One of the things she talks about in that book is that no one has ever said, oh, I love so and so. She has such a perfectly kept house. I just love that about her. Exactly. And if your house is a little bit ratty, it'll make the neighbors feel better and it'll make your friends feel better. And as long as it's not, you know, unhygienic, then I think that's

basically true. You know, 100% I think that yeah, I have never in my entire life gone over to someone's house and thought, you know, like, well, have you seen the top of the refrigerator? Because I just went in there. I mean, nobody cares. I'm pretty fastidious about stuff like this, and I don't care. I think that there are things like when people are coming over, I'll do – I have a 10-15-minute supermarket sweep that I'll do to just hit a few surfaces and areas and tidy up. But I think honestly, if you want to make somebody feel welcome, like flowers or something to eat, you want somebody to feel like you're happy to have them in your house. If they're not going to take a magnifying glass to your baseboards or upholstery or something to say, well, there's

cat hair. Of course, 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- They're going to think you're Irish, which is true. Which is accurate. And they're going to be right. This also makes me think of just speaking of speaking of anti-Irish sentiment that famously

typhoid Mary's full name was Mary Mallon. And it does seem interesting that she 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 more general way. I think that's kind of fast and loose. Yeah. But I think it's, you know, it certainly is, she's not, she certainly is not endured as a sympathetic figure. And to be honest, I don't think she really was because she apparently like threatened

with a piece of kitchenware. The first guy who came to tell her that he thought she had typhoid. Really? I didn't know that. Oh my gosh. You know, you gotta, you gotta do what you gotta do. She's a working woman. You gotta defend yourself.

And but she had been up here, I think spreading typhoid for like six or seven years in these different households she works in. And she was just asymptomatic herself. She was asymptomatic and she also apparently believed for her entire life, at least according to her, that she never believed that she had typhoid. And at a certain point, there was enough evidence that she really probably needed to accept that she did. But I mean, there's some interesting complexity to that. 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 where there was more of a sense of, oh, we're going to look really bad if there's typhoid unchecked. Right. That people kind of brought out the big guns and figured out what was going on because she would always just kind of move on to her next job. Wow. She'd just kind of go to the next house and, wow. And spread a little typhoid and make her famous peach ice cream dessert, which is ice cream with frozen peaches with a little typhoid on top.

Which apart from that last part actually sounds incredible. Yeah, it sounds great. Yeah, we should all have that. But like she was not the only person spreading typhoid, you know, but it was just like it was an interesting story. It was an interesting case study. And it was also coming in through an Irish kitchen servant or through an Irish cook specifically. And so that speaks to this kind of like evergreen anxiety about sort of immigrants as being unclean, which goes back as far as you know, I mean, as far as people have had immigrants to be racist about probably. Exactly. Yeah. Let me read you a little bit more of Anna Maria's housekeeping again, because there's just I mean, part of this is actually somewhat useful information, but also is just the language

of it is really just kind of fascinating. Her writing style is incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Like blown away. Okay. House dust is minute particles of soil from the streets brought in 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 in 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 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 dingy look of frowsy kitchens. You don't want a frowsy kitchen. Begin to wash doors and baseboards, and you will see the annoyance dust harbors. In the moldings of doors and windows run the dust lice, which knob books, paint, and wood, and are ready to fall into food. Smeary paint invites that ugly moth, which delights in nothing so much as a greasy spot in a warm room in which will lay its eggs next in the dining room carpet. In that dusty corner behind the wood box, a venturous aunt has made her nest, and some

July morning you will be surprised by her emigrant family in the storeroom, especially if spilt sugar and meal are left to tempt them there. Under the sink, in dampness and greets, water beetles and roaches increase like wharf rats. All these and more, in swarms, I have found in the melancholy process of clearing after a kitchen girl who could not be at the trouble of keeping things entirely clean. These insects thrive on refuse, and they cannot be regarded as safe or agreeable things in a kitchen running over food and leaving corners offensive with their traces." Wow.

Which is like, I guess basically true, but like, boy, was that a scary way to say that. And also, again, like some like, ants immigrants. Yeah. 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, right? And there's like the dirt and grime of the Shire. Right. And then there's the mysterious seepage of like industrial byproducts, which is something that doesn't begin until at the earliest, the first industrial revolution, which probably if you're worried about that being dangerous, you probably also shouldn't be burning it in a barrel. But again, she tried.

You know, by the 1880s, it's, yous, we're in industrialization. So there's both. And there is not a good handle on either one. I'm not going to say that I can sympathize with her character as the sort of insect immigrant analogy is not super great, but I do understand that sense that you're under siege. Something's in the walls. It takes so much effort and time to mitigate any of that. Nothing is automated. Everything is hard to do. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I think it is like the sense of infestation by a new kind of dirt is true and real, but then it's as today, mixing with a sense of anxiety and racism aimed at other human beings and classes and crucially, because also in 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. It needs to be visited by a social worker. Yeah. And let me also read to you just a little bit here about from this insane book about the tools that you're going to use. Because here we are in a time of anxiety, racially describing cleaning a kitchen and cleaning, you know, everything because we don't know where the threat is coming from. And it doesn't cost that much. So I'll read you what we're supposed to do. Okay. Have everything eatable, covered closely and put away, tables and sink cleared, plenty of hot water, two pails, an old broom and a clean new one, two scrubbing brushes, a stumpy whisk broom for cleaning windows,

a stout nut picker or sharp skewer of hard wood to get the dirt out of cracks, plenty of cloths for wiping glass and paint. Old flannel or merino underwear makes soft mop cloths, which ring easily. You must have good tools to work with and a well-set mop and large cloths will do the cleaning in half the time of poor ones. If you have an old cloths enough, it pays to buy a yard or two of coarse toweling for floor cloths and six penny unbleached cotton for wiping paint. For your cleaning outfit you will want a bath brick which will cost five cents, a pack of clean sand, ten cents, 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 tiling, twenty, two yards of tallying 22 yards of cotton 13 and all 416 say $5 to allow for difference in prices. You would pay this for the poorest servant one fortnight or for a char woman half a day each week and two months who would not do your work merely as well and who would waste twice the supplies you will want in the time. So again, great advice paired with the idea that you're doing this to prove that you're

better than working class women, I guess. That you would hire. There's virtue in doing it yourself because you've got skills. Because you're proving and also again, this kind of sense of moral superiority of like, I can clean better than someone whose job it is to clean. I don't even make a living doing it, but I'm still better at it and I'm better than everything and the ants are emigrating into my kitchen. You've stopped the wave of emigration to the kitchen. Also, what's super interesting is that it's classifying, it's denigrating the profession of cleaning and valorizing

cleaning as a kind of calling. So you're not being paid to clean your own house. You're kind of doing that because it's good for the health of your family. Yeah, and kind of enforcing this idea of a holy bond between the woman in the home, which is also interesting because this is really, we have all this new dangerous dirt, or some of it is. I mean mean there's like soot everywhere if you're living in a city you know I mean right right 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. Exactly. Which wasn't possible before. Yeah. Because either you had, you know, you were just kind of getting by and you were doing what you could and taking care of your own house and your own stuff, or you were rich and you had a house that other people could take care of. And now this sort of era of the servantless virtue signaling housewife or the housewife who has a cleaning lady, but who's not good enough and who she always complains about, which certainly is a type that has endured and who she says veiled

racist things about also. OK, I'm just looking at how much $5 in 1884 is today. Are you on the inflation calculator? Mm-hmm. So about $160, but that's like for the rest of your life. Yeah, it's pretty good. He's also advocating for using steam heat to loosen stuff up, which again is like exactly what we're doing now.

So it feels like looking at our Victorian forbearers, 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 over consume 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 sort of fixated on the performance of hygiene, perhaps more than actual hygiene.

And that also seems linked to the fact that we're being very, at least there's a lot of social media culture that is pushing us to be very over the top about how much we consume and then all of the storage space that we need to house it and organize it and reconfigure it and put it in clear containers and organize it by color and all that. And I think home organizing is honestly one of the most important things that a person can do, but only if they do it to the level of their own happiness because anything more than that is unnecessary. It's not for you. If when it stops being for you, there's no point to it or when it stops being for the people who live in the house. And this is, you know, I think a big driving idea behind

everyone's big Marie Kondo phase, which I still haven't read that book, but I feel like I probably absorbed it through seepage into everybody else's stuff. Right. But this basic idea that doesn't have to be minimalism, I think so much as just having your your object serve you that like everything you bring into your home takes up a finite amount of space and energy that you have. And so you have to make sure that the things you have are things that you really like, because everything you own

is something that has to live somewhere. You have to clean it, you have to pick it up and clean under it, you have to move it around, you have to find a place for it to go. And part of the aesthetic, I think, that we're seeing with over-the-top cleaning and also big open plan houses is getting a big house and then needing to get a lot of stuff to put in it so that it feels complete and then needing greater systems of organization in order to

make it all seem cohesive as an aesthetic. 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 over consumption? I think the answer we've come up with culturally partly is like, well, it's fine if people can afford it. But it's like, hey, you know,

there's a lot 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 plenty into your life. Like can I afford this in terms of time?

You know, right? Because the stuff you own costs time and the cleaning technology that you own and the things that you decide you have to clean in order to be, you know, maybe not necessarily happy, but keeping up with everybody else, no matter what it costs time. Your characterization of Marie Kondo seems right on to me because I remember watching her show and kind of reading up on her. and I think I wrote something about her when the show was on Netflix. She's actually not anti-maximalism per se. Her philosophy essentially

is she doesn't care if what you really want is to have your collection of 800 China dolls on display in your living room. That's what makes you happy. The way to make room for that is to deaccession some other stuff, then make that work. Make it work for you. It isn't necessarily what somebody else would want. It doesn't necessarily look decluttered per se, but it's about exactly what you're saying, essentially making your house work for you because you're the one who lives there. Which is a great idea to keep in mind, you know, that I accidentally learned without having to read a whole book. But you know that like, because as you're saying, like, it feels like everybody is looking into each other's houses. Now there's more of a sense of like the home as performance. And 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. CB' Right. And you have to be there all the time. 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 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. 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. There's nothing wrong with collecting stuff. It's cool to have stuff on display, but let's find smart ways to display that stuff that doesn't feel like it's a problem to solve. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think it's one of those things where cleaning and eating are two things that basically everybody has to do or they should be doing. And so they inevitably become expressions of sort of how people feel about the world. And then you'll see people, you know, this is another big use for social media, people telling you with absolute certainty something that you must be doing in your house

or else you will die very soon, you know, or that you must be doing or else you're gross and nobody wants to be gross. Yeah, I think that what maybe feels a little bit radical at this moment is the idea that it's all personal and you get to above the level of hygiene where your house isn't dangerous to you. If it doesn't make you uncomfortable, then it just doesn't matter what you do. G. I love going into somebody's house and finding that it's really unusual or just seems very them. That's so much more interesting than going into a house that's 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. I like going into a house that's full of stories. If you declutter the bejesus out of it, then you're missing all of that

narrative. It's a way to learn about a person. LS. Great. Also, decluttering isn't something that you do once and be done with. You just 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. Well, maybe seven is the perfect number of measuring tapes. Like one for every room. Like you can just have like a... One for me and my six roommates someday.

We all have to measure things simultaneously. A certain amount of ritual is helpful in terms of just, you know, however much it is helpful to implement into your life. But the answer, I guess, is just that everybody, people know individually how much they do or don't need and what does or doesn't work for them. And I think it's just that so much of capitalism is being driven now, or 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? Nicole Zwaard Exactly. Right. I mean, they're always looking

for a new problem to solve. Adrienne Hodge Yeah, but also, if you like me, thought that acrylic fridge bins would make you happy, it's okay. And also they did kind of make me happy because it's easier to get stuff from the back. Yeah, I'm right in the middle on fridge organizing. Like I think that you can take it too far. Do you still use them? Oh no, I do. I'm very impressed by that. That's very fancy.

The back of the fridge is a problem area, right? It's a no man's land. Yeah. Another thing that occurs to me is that I have never seen a clean talk video sponsored by Barkeepers 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 Barkeepers friend is the perfect product because you buy one thing of it. I have like the thing of Barkeepers friend I have will be like a third full when I'm dead. Because you don't need it. I mean, it's not like Windex.

Yeah. You don't use that much of it. You don't need very much of it. It doesn't look cool when you use it. It's not an interesting color. It doesn't smell that good. Uh, it doesn't show up on video. All it does is what it says it's supposed to do.

And it does. So I guess it 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. Right, that it's not inherently disposable. Yeah. So the stuff you really need, you're maybe not gonna be encountering

in the most spectacular visual way. And that's okay too. And also it's okay that we wanna watch toilets filled with ice, you know? I'm not gonna tell anyone not to. After we finish this conversation, I'm gonna 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. Okay. So this is called, and I don't know what year it's from, but this is called The Lady's Dressing Room by Jonathan Swift. 1732. Oh, wow. It's about Strephon and Celia. Not enough Strephon is running around. It's about Strephon and Celia. I don't know if Strephon is running around. Five hours and who can do it less in by haughty Celia spent in dressing that got us from her chamber issues, arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues. Strephon, who found the room was void

and Betty otherwise employed, stole in and took a strict survey of all the litter as it lay, whereof to make the matter clear an inventory follows here. And first a dirty smock appeared, beneath the armpits well besmeared, Strephon the rogue displayed it wide and turned it round on every side. On such a point few words are best, and Strephon bids us guess the rest, but swears how damnably the men lie in calling Celia sweet and cleanly. Is that meant to be clean lie? Is it meant to rhyme with men lie? 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 a way betwixt.

A paste of composition rare. Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair. A forehead cloth with oil upon it, to smooth the wrinkles on her front. Here alum flower to stop the steams, exhaled from sour, unsavory streams. Hard by a filthy basin stands, fouled with the scouring of her hands. The basin takes whatever comes, the scrapings of her teeth and gums. a nasty compound of all hues, for here she spits and here she spews. But oh, it turned poor Strephon's bowels when he beheld and smelled the towels, begummed, bematted, and beslimed, with dirt, with sweat, and earwax grime. Why, Strephon, will you tell the rest? And must you needs describe the chest? That careless wench, no creature warned her

to move it out from yonder corner. All the time before, as from within Pandora's box, when Epimetheus opened the locks, a sudden universal crew of human evils upward flew. He still was comforted to find that hope at last remained behind. So Stefan, lifting up the lid to view what in the chest was hid, the vapors flew from out the vent. But Stefan, cautious, never meant the bottom of the pan to grope and foul his hands in search of hope. Oh, never may such vile machine be once in Celia's chamber scene. Oh, may she better learn to keep those secrets of the hoary deep. The petticoats, the gown perfume, which wafted stink round every room, thus finishing his grand survey, disgusted Strephon stole away, repeating in his amorous fits, when Celia in her glory

shows if Strephon would but stop his nose, who now so impiously blasphemes, her ointments, daubs, and paints and creams, her washes, slops, and every clout, with which he makes so foul a rout. He soon would learn to think like me, and bless his ravaged sight to see. Such order from confusion sprung, Such gaudy tulips raised from dung. Wow. I've been thinking about that for a long time. Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia shits. This shits. Does she ever. And don't we all? Yeah, tell me your thoughts. When you're intimate with somebody and you're attracted to them and want to be

as close to them as you possibly can, that they're also still a human being who does things that you don't want to be all up in. And that you need to navigate those boundaries in whatever way you can. And it's that the edifice of this idealized person 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. 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. Different chamber pots or different. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. 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.

Part of, I think, what the sort of cleanliness theater that we're watching people go through with kind of, you know, whether we're actually doing it or doing it sincerely or just watching it as a spectator sport, that so much of what women are doing online lately is basically like obsessively cleaning ourselves in the spaces we live in so that not a single flake of skin can exist as evidence that we were there, even on our own skin. We have to take that off too. And just the idea that like, I don't know, to be a person is to be gross.

It's fine. You can be gross. Yeah. I mean, it's you can't get away from that. And I think to be kind of continually gross is to be alive. Yeah, that's true. To survive is to just keep finding new ways to be gross. And also it's like, as you age, like your butt, 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. Welcome. It's good to have you here. And what if the wind comes up and blows them in again? And it is only the beginning, I know.

It's only the beginning, yes. You have such a long adventure awaiting you. It's also kind of I think there's like a generative AI slop aesthetic. Now that now I have the word slop on the brain because of the poem, but it's also a 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 constantly shedding in our domestic spaces and all around the world. And kind of wanting to be free of that messiness. All the stuff that we like birth and death, all the stuff that we kind of push to one side and don't focus on. Things

that used to be much more common to see in real life that nowadays are much less so. Yeah. And this idea of 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. Yeah, exactly. Raising beautiful cats. Exactly. Yeah.

If you want a real depressing deep dive, go into the history of advertising for products to make women less odiferous. Oh, yes. The vaginal odor industry. The vaginal odor industry is yeah, it's just, it's so, I wish they would just leave everybody alone. I mean, who decided that vagina wasn't a perfectly nice smell is what I would like to know. It's perfectly pleasant and people need to just, yeah, just let us live. If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas. And with that, I will see myself out. It was great to have you here.

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for journeying into the future with us. Thank you to Sarah Archer for being such a delightful guest as always. Sarah Archer has written books that you should check out, including The Mid-Sanctuary Kitchen, Mid-Sanctuary Christmas, and Catland, the soft power of cat culture in Japan. You can visit Sarah Archer's website at sarah-archer.com and you can find her on

Instagram at Sarxurize. Thank you to Miranda Zichler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. We will see you in two weeks. Music