Martha Stewart Makes Me Consider Grad School
I'm Mostly Kidding
It seems fitting, mere days after she graced the infamous Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover, I would finally write about (or perhaps more so write around) Martha Stewart. Gotta strike while the iron’s hot in the cultural zeitgeist, right? God, it so rarely feels like the zeitgeist cultural iron is hot in an interesting way anymore. Always seems like it’s just a big rage machine of things that don’t matter or seem insurmountable.
I’m in a mood lately if you can’t tell.
I’ve been thinking about this episode of You’re Wrong About that discusses Martha Stewart since it was released last summer. It features Sarah Marshall of course, with special guest Sarah Archer, who describes herself as a domestic historian, a title that almost makes me want to think about graduate school and academia again.
Emphasis on almost.
You can listen to the episode here, and I encourage you to do so, because I’ll definitely miss some of the nuance and what makes this episode so interesting in this newsletter:
Really good episodes of You’re Wrong About, for me at least, exist in two veins: a really good story I’ve never heard of with a complicated, maligned character, or a discussion of one thing that ends up opening doors into understanding of human behavior and the cultural moment. This episode falls into the second category by expanding on a simple question: why do people have such strong reactions to Martha Stewart?
Martha Stewart embodies a lifestyle we have all become familiar with in recent years (or I have, at least): a homemade sort of decadence where, as the episode states, you press your vintage linens, you raise your chickens and your rose and vegetable garden, you turn your nose up at plastic and only use glass jars. It’s a kind of WASP quasi-environmentalism where everything is blue and white or made of old oak. The practice of domesticity isn’t something you undertake to maintain a home and feed your family. In the Martha Stewart world, the practice isn’t even really work, though it absolutely is a lot of work. Instead, it’s leisure. The sun always shines, the food is always fresh, and you have all the time in the world when you’re Martha Stewart.
Yes it’s infuriating, but it’s also inspiring in a way? In a world where domestic labor, women’s work, is unpaid, dismissed and looked down upon, Martha Stewart has managed to take the acts of domesticity she most enjoys and profit off of them. The idea is that you only do the work that you like, with someone else to help you out with everything else. It is, the episode posits, much like a man’s relationship to domestic labor.
“That’s why it seems so fun!” Sarah Marshall says.
“And it’s why people are so angry,” Sarah Archer responds.
This episode is both illuminating and shattering for me. For the past year alone in my apartment, I’ve been on a quest for domesticity, to become an entertainer, much of it chronicled in this newsletter. I’ve come back to the idea that I’ve had before, that all this just isn’t possible alone. I look at my friends with partners they live with and roommates, and it seems so obvious how they get it all done: they have someone to help them. But somehow, I have trouble bringing that revolution back onto myself. “Why is this so hard?” I wonder. “What is it that’s making this all so hard?”
I’ve never thought of myself as someone who’s pursued perfection in my life. I actually think, in most areas, I could stand to pursue a little more perfection. But this discussion of Martha Stewart shows me that, when it comes to the home, I am often chasing an impossibility. The sun doesn’t always shine. The food isn’t always fresh. I am not Martha Stewart. I am going at this alone.
And that’s fine.
Well, not the going it alone part. I wish I wasn’t doing that. But the rest of it? That’s fine.
There’s something inherently complicated about homemaking and the domestic sphere that I don’t think anyone truly understands. Re-listening to this episode, I find thoughts that I have been swirling around in my head for the past year, concepts that I am just this close to grasping how they connect and what it all means, this space we try to make ad nauseam. And so many people think it’s unimportant! Or simplistic! Or even ridiculous and stupid!
But it isn’t. It’s labor and leisure at the same time. It’s repetition and reinvention and obsession. It’s fascinating and complicated and contradictory and something that should be studied and respected and dissected. In writing this newsletter, I feel as though I am just sliding past many of these ideas, barely digging in. I was hoping to strike at some understanding to make it all make sense, but of course, there’s too much here to really reach conclusions without long, careful study and writing that builds and is not cyclical, like mine always seems to be.
Shit. I’ve written myself into grad school sounding appealing again.
Thanks Martha.
Love this.