Episode 19 - Loving Feminism AND Men with Celeste Davis

Celeste Davis joins Anni for a timely conversation about separating our disdain for the patriarchal system we live in from the men we share our lives with.

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Transcript

Welcome to season two of Barely Christian, Fully Christian. I'm your host, Anni Ponder, and I'm so glad you've stopped by for the conversation about loving Jesus, being repulsed by the un-Christ likeness of so much of what the world sees from Christianity, and my personal favorite, honoring the Holy Spirit as the Divine Mother, or as I call her, Mama God.

I am so thrilled to offer today’s episode to you. One of the concerns I often hear when I talk about wild things like egalitarianism and feminism is how it’s possible to focus on women’s equality without engaging in men’s suppression or demonization. How can we make sure we include everyone while we highlight the needs of women?

Great question. So glad you asked. Join me for a riveting conversation with the incredible Substacker Celeste Davis as we explore loving feminism AND men.

Anni: Well, a very hearty welcome to you, Celeste Davis. I'm so glad to have you join us here to have a conversation today about all things femininity and wherever that takes us, I'm excited to see. I will tell everyone listening how I found you. And I'm just now trying to remember somebody sent me your Substack about maybe a year ago, something like that. And it struck me because you were so bold and so precise in what you were saying. And so I started to follow you. I actually didn't have Substack at that time, but I joined because of you. So I thought your writing was powerful enough that I needed to be here for the conversation weekly. So I joined up for Substack and I have never looked back and I'm so excited to have you here today. So just by way of introduction, would you want to just give us a little bit idea of who you are and what you do in this world?

Celeste: Yeah, thanks, Anni. I'm thrilled to be here talking to you. So I'm Celeste. And yeah, my focus right now, career wise, is my Substack and my writing. I write about my tagline is Catharsis for your feminist awakening. I had myself one of those five years ago, six years ago. And I just need to talk about it all the time. So I like to talk to other people who like to talk about that all the time. And that makes me happy.

And I just like, I feel like I'm still unlearning so much of how I was raised and just the invisible strings that a patriarchy that I'm like, oh, this and then this, oh my gosh, and then this movie and then oh my gosh, this policy and oh my gosh, it's everywhere. So I like to talk about that. So my Substack is called Matriarchal Blessing. And beyond that, I live in Spokane, Washington with my husband and my four children. And yeah, just because I know this is like a religious podcast, I will say my religious background is I was born and raised Mormon in the LDS church and was extremely, very, very devout family from like generations and generations and generations back to the beginning of the church in the 1800s. And all my family is Mormon and all my husband's family is Mormon and had a massive faith crisis around 2018 ish, left the church around 2020. And so at first, I was deconstructing, you know, my deep feminine wound, like just in Mormonism. And then the years passed, I left that I was like, oh my gosh, the feminine wound is so much bigger than Mormonism. It was my whole world, you know, and I was like, wow, this church is like, very patriarchal. I didn't even know any see it. It was just the water that I swam in the air that I breathed. And then I was like, Oh, wait, but it's everywhere, actually everywhere, just like in our society, just ever, I just see it everywhere. I kind of feel like that 80s movie with the glasses, I don't know, we don't know the name of it. But it's like, this guy put finds these glasses and puts it on and he sees like, just companies advertisements everywhere. I'm like, everything these glasses on. I'm like, I see the patriarchy everywhere.

Anni: Oh goodness. Well, there are so many points of convergence in just what you've shared. I also was raised in fundamental Christianity and for the longest time tried to be sort of a light there and like, hey, have we all thought about this? And then just kind of gradually it dawning on me like, oh, this is deeper than I ever imagined. And I don't, I don't know about this. And then The Awakening, little by little 2018 was a big year for me too. And all of a sudden, watching movies that I used to watch, like you mentioned, I am a big fan of The Princess Bride. Love it. My husband and I dress up as Wesley and Buttercup every year for Halloween. It's our recycling old movies. So I took everybody with me, all the girls and their friends and everyone. And oh my goodness, the moment where Wesley almost hits Buttercup, I was like, wait, why is that never infuriated me before? Why, why did you never even notice this, you know, like demonstration of violence against women before the scales continue to fall off my eyeballs.

Celeste: Amen. I could say so many stories of like watching my old favorite movies and then like how did I never notice? Like I showed my daughter's miss congeniality a few years ago and like the scene where an entire room of men like working for the police are like watching on camera like a woman's changing room for their beauty pageant and like just drooling over them on camera and also it's like this sexual harassment, blatant boss employee. Like I was just like, ew, this is the worst. Oh no, I never noticed.

Anni: Did we never notice this stuff before? Why were we so accepting of it?

Celeste: Yeah, it really is. I mean, we've kind of come a long way since the 90s. But like still, even still, I'm just like, everything I watch, I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is so insane that this is just accepted. Like, this is just normal. Like, oh my gosh.

Anni: It's it's really mind-boggling once you start to see it and you can't unsee it and it's like the glasses are on or off depending on the metaphor and all of a sudden you realize absolutely this is the culture that we are so deeply embedded in. And how do we wake up? So I made my daughter, my 14-year-old, watch The Matrix last night and because she had said to me recently, you know this is so weird. I feel like I'm in two places like my mind, my brain is actually somewhere else. I was like oh okay so do you know about Renee Descartes and then the theory of the brain in the jar and have you ever watched The Matrix? And she's like no. So we watched that last night and had a great discussion about it. And just the the process of awakening to the reality of the water we swim in, the air that we breathe. How have you found support as you have kind of had your feminine or feminist awakening? What things have been useful, helpful guides for you?

Celeste: That's a good question. The very first thing that popped my mind was books. I feel such relief when I find books and online people to follow as well where I'm just like, Oh, I'm not crazy. Like other people see this too. Like, Oh, this is, and it's just like, Oh, it feels like so soothing to just be like, yes, like I'm not crazy. And this is how it is. And like, here's another thing that came to mind. Maybe it was too, I don't know how many years ago, but, um, you know, I, I just grew up with such intense, negative stereotyping around specifically feminists and the word feminist, but to me that, that, that connotation was always a whiny attention seeker and just like wrong, like, just like, but she wanted attention and she just very much just what I like. Why would you, there's nothing wrong. It's fine. We're equal. We went through, we can vote. What do you, what's your problem?

Anni: The wage gap is not a real thing. Nevermind.

Celeste: And like the gender is supposed to be different. We're like sent here with different purposes, so like get over it. Anyway, and then like that I was like, but actually I'm going to get it started in my, in the moment was like, wait, but that's not fair. And that's not fair.

And that's not fair. And actually we're not involved in any of the decisions and we're not in any of the rooms where the decisions are being made. And then also just like the optics of like the men at the front of the pulpit and the women never allowed there and so many different things. And, but then you're kind of doing this dance in your head when you're that indoctrinated as I was of like, okay, well I'll give myself the centimeter, but I'm not, I'm not going to feminist like maybe this one thing, you know, like women should be speaking at church more, whatever it is, but I'm not going to be like burning my bra or, you know,

Anni: Let's not go that far…

Celeste: Right, right, right. And so I kind of just lit like centimeter by centimeter, but then it was always like one step forward, two steps back a little bit in my own head of like, well, I know I don't want to be that. I know I don't want to be a whiny attention seeker. I know I'm so afraid of that camp that I'm going to like guard myself against that. And it was a very hard thing in my own head to not just constantly think I was crazy or like, because I felt really alone.

I was like, does anybody else see this? And then also just very scared about any direction potentially moving. I didn't want to go backwards, but I also felt like I couldn't go forwards. So anyway, I listened at around this time, like I listened to this podcast called Breaking Down Patriarchy by Amy McPhee-Ollivest.

Anni: Love her.

Celeste: That helped so much. And like, it was kind of like a broke open a dam for me because in her podcast, she treats it a little like a woman, like what you should have learned in college, like a woman's study course, like her first season, it just takes one book an episode and it kind of goes throughout time, like starting with the Neolithic period and like the chalice and the blade, and then like moving on to the creation of patriarchy around the turn of the century and then on into the middle ages. And then from there picks up more because there's so little about women's history written down. But then like, I had such a feeling like every episode I just felt like crying. So I was like, oh, I'm not crazy. Oh, I'm not crazy. Like, and when she got to like the yellow wallpaper that was written in like the 1800s and then just descriptions of women writing about how they feel moving around the world as a woman in the yellow wallpaper, she just like feels stuck in the wallpaper. You know, as a mom of four kids with like young kids, I was like, oh my gosh, this is exactly how it feels. And it felt so validating, but also like I couldn't believe that like someone could be writing my exact feelings in, you know, from the 1800s that I'm, this is 2020, whatever. And I'm like, that's, how did I never know that like generations of women have felt this exact same pains and longings and this isn't fairs that I have been and I just didn't know. I had never read them. I had never, I didn't know that's how they felt. I didn't know this was like an ongoing thing. I didn't even know how ignorant it was of women's history. And so that helped so much.

And then since then, yeah, it's just been kind of finding people online mostly that I get that, oh, I'm not crazy feeling from.

Anni: Uh-huh. Right? Uh, that's really important. I think you wrote a Substack a while back about, uh, or maybe it was, it was not that long ago about how women have had to rise up and, and learn this all for ourselves in like every other generation because it keeps getting buried. Yes. And we're like, oh my goodness, I, this is new. And we're like, no, if we understood and talked about women's history, we would know we've had these thoughts and feelings and ideas and desires all along.

Celeste: Yeah. And again, I had that massive epiphany learning about the history of Mormon feminism, which it sounds like an oxymoron, like Mormonism is so conservative. But there's a long history of Mormon feminists that's just people do not know about. And I became a spiritual director to help people transition out of Mormonism.

So I went to the Chaplaincy Institute at Berkeley to get trained. And someone in my cohort, she was like, oh, I'm sorry, I don't know anything about Mormonism, Celeste, but except that I listened to Sonya Johnson in the 80s. And I have her book right here. And she would always talk about Sonya Johnson. I was like, I'm so sorry, Irene. I don't know who you're talking about. And she was just flabbergasted. She was like, what do you mean? You're a feminist. You're like someone leading Mormonism, a feminist, and you've never heard of Sonya Johnson. And I was like, the name doesn't even ring a bell. And she was like, she literally ran for president. Like Sonya Johnson was this ex-Mormon ERA, like she did the hunger strikes on the Capitol steps of the Capitol when they're trying to pass the ERA. She spoke in front of Congress, and she got very publicly excommunicated from the Mormon church, like all of the ABC news, CBS news, everyone was like there are the steps of the, her chapel, her chapel when she got excommunicated. I had never heard of her. It's like reading her book was so crazy because she wrote it in 1980. And the Mormon feminists are having these conversations about Heavenly Mother and the divine feminine, and they are literally thinking they are the first generation to wake up to this, that this is just a modern movement of art and poetry and like longing for the divine feminine. And I was like, Sonya Johnson is literally having these exact conversations with her girlfriends, being like, we're the first ones to wake up in Mormonism and seek for the divine feminine, the first ones. And then like, there's this crazy story of this like Mormon feminist group in the 70s. And they lived in Boston. And one of them just stumbled across this archive of a feminist Mormon newspaper from the 1800s. And she had never heard, it's called The Exponent, all of these newspapers at the Harvard Library. And she was like, they were talking about Heavenly Mother, and they were having these exact conversations in the 1800s. And like, we didn't know. So I wrote this article about the Bevrennic story of Mormon feminism, and people were just stunned, had never heard of these women. And then I wrote this like thing, I was like, because we're kept from our history, just kept having to reinvent the wheel. And then someone commented this like quote of like, it was almost my exact quote, but it was from Gerta Lerner, this like feminist icon historian. And it was like, women are kept from their history. So they kept, they keep having to reinvent the wheel, like every generation. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm like, I like reinventing the wheel of the quote about reinventing the wheel. Like, I didn't know that. And then like, but I was like, that was Mormonism. I had no idea that it extended to all of society.

Because I was like, wait, I know women's history, don't I? I've heard of Rosa Parks and Joan of Arc.

And then you realize like, oh my gosh, like the percentage you learn in school of men, then the percentage of women, especially like women's history. Like there's something like in the, I don't know, there was in someone who wrote for the Washington Post, a senior who's taking all these AP classes in her AP history book, every war had at least 20 pages, and full of men. And women's history literally was a paragraph saying that women can vote. That was it. No names, no nothing. And you know, I mean, you don't even realize the extent of it until you really get your hands dirty digging in. You're like, oh, we're taught nothing. Like, we don't know anything. So we are constantly reinventing the wheel. It's so frustrating.

Oh, when I learned about that particular thing, it just floored and angered me because the right to vote was a huge generation long struggle. And then we get a paragraph about it and nobody is named. Nobody who like lost life and limb in that struggle even gets brought to the surface. It's just, oh, and then women got the right vote as if it just happened like on its own and, and it's normal and it's fine. Like, it's not fine.

Anni: We had to fight.

Celeste: Yeah. I mean, more than one generation started like in the 1860s, they started having suffrage movements in meetings. And that was 60 years until it finally passed.

I mean, like, so much organizing, so much protesting, so many women just like, metaphorically burned at the stake. Yes. Like, really, for speaking out against it.

Anni: And receiving all kinds of ridicule from their families, their friends, their religious circles. Why can't you just fall in line and having to decide, no, this is more important than myself? So I have to jump in here and push for this to happen. And then now to think that there are those currently right now arguing to remove that right. Like, I don't even know what to say. I am gobsmacked.

Celeste: Absolutely. I know it is. And it's really frustrating to watch too, like this always happens where in the moment people will have no support, like pushing for change will be ridiculed. Their name drags through the mud, censored, you know, called a whore and a liar and attention seeker.

And then you get 30, 40 years out, a few more generations and then they're honored, like, which she's problematic, but she was demonized. Well, this happened to Martin Luther King. He had 30% of the popularity of the people approving of him when he died. Like the vast majority of Americans did not like him or approve his message, or like they saw him as a huge problem and a troublemaker, 70% of Americans when he died. And now, you know, we honor it, like rightly so, Luther King Day. And all of my kids absolutely know who he is. But at the time, we never mention, you know, that he was not approved of. And so every woman, I honestly feel like with confidence, I can say, like women who have pushed for change and have been at the forefront of those movements, absolutely demonized, feared, their name's dragged through the mud, called witches, called bitches, called ugly, called everything. And then generations later, it's like, oh, yay, Susan D. Anthony. Actually, Gloria Steinem is not through the mud yet.

Anni: No, that's true. That's true. She's still like a dirty word in many households.

Celeste: Yeah, for sure. But I was listening to this podcast the other day of there was a conservative woman on there and she was saying, well, we're really thankful. It's obviously a good thing that the women's liberation movement in the 60s, we needed some change and we needed to get in the workforce and that's great, but we've done it. We're there and now we've gone way too far.

And now we're just being obnoxiously like we're just whining for whining's sake and we're equal and like that needed to happen. It was frustrating even to hear her say like that needed to happen because I don't know, just the little that I'd even done of the research of the pushback to the women's liberation movement in the 60s was so intense. And these women really, really were just rakes through the mud. So then to be like, well, yeah, that's fine, but that's enough. And that just keeps happening.

Anni: Because we'll just stay in our little boxes. And something that's been so frustrating for me as I have begun my feminist awakening is the pushback that I've gotten from other women. More, almost more than men.

And I had this one particular woman say to me like, oh, I keep hearing you talk about patriarchy, but the struggles in my life really don't come from the men, they come from the women. So I don't think patriarchy is really that much of a problem. And I was like, I don't even know how to start. I don't even know what to say. Have you ever heard about internalized oppression? Please Google that. Wow.

So here's a question for you. For anyone that you're conversing with who's starting there and like maybe has one tiny inkling that something's not right, and then has all of this internalized oppression that they've agreed with because it's kept them safe and protected and all of these things, what would you say, where could we even start to begin to realize how much of that we've agreed with as women?

Celeste: Oh, gosh. Yeah, where to start. The first thing that came to mind, I mean, consciousness raising groups are top of mind, because I'm starting one. Yeah, reading about the history of these groups in the in the 60s and in the 70s. And that started with just these five women in New York. And they were just talking about their lives as women. And what they what they kind of just realized in really being really honest and open with each other in a safe place about their experiences, they started to recognize patterns. And like that, the things that they had been told that were just their own personal problems, were actually societal patterns. And in the course of all talking about that, oh, my husband says that too. Oh, this has happened to me too. Oh, I've experienced that at work too. Oh, oh, maybe there's like, bigger forces behind this.

And just like, that's just a that's just a one off, right? Like your experience with your boss, that's just your boss, your experience with your husband, that's just him, like, that's not a pattern. Then you get to talk with other groups of women, small groups, bigger groups, bigger groups, and you're like, Oh, this is actually a pattern. So like, I have a friend who is self defined, not a feminist, right? And I don't think that this is like, helping her necessarily. I don't know. I mean, I don't want to like change anybody's mind. But I do try to be like when when she like she'll say something like, Oh, well, I just I just clean because my husband's just bad at cleaning. I just do the cooking. It's not because it's not because he's patriarchal. It's just because he's bad at cooking. So I just do the cooking. It's not because he's he's bad. He's not because it's like he's a jerk that he doesn't wash the toilets. He's just I'm better at it. So I do that. I'm like, actually, that has a name that's called weaponized incompetence. And it's not just your husband, it is actually a worldwide pattern that can happen. And it's not to say your husband's a jerk. He's not I know him. He's great. But it is a pattern that it's helpful to put a word to because when you see it, you can be like, Oh, this is a this is emblematic of something bigger at play.

And it's not just like, Oh, well, he just one person is bad. Right? You know, it's like this is how women have stayed doing the majority of the household labor. It's a major reason why. And it's, you know, you can you can challenge that. And then there's just there's so many examples of that where she was just like, or, you know, speaking of internalized misogyny. Oh, gosh, so many examples of just like, oh, I don't really like girly things. I don't I don't like celebrity gossip. I don't really like I don't like rom coms. Or I don't like romance books. I like more like thrillers. I like more like, you know, just happened to be like things starring men produced by men written by men just happen to be coincidentally demonizing things written by women that women like.

Imagine that. Like that's a pattern as well. Just something to be aware of.

Anyway, I think just getting together and like speaking your own experience and realizing that it's not just you and that a lot of times the things we're told are just our personal problems are actually patterns.

Anni: Yeah, that really, that makes me think about, did you read or watch Women Talking?

Celeste: Yes.

Anni: Wow. I mean, if anybody's listening and they don't know what this is, please pod this podcast. Pause the podcast, order that, either the movie or the book, and then come back and finish.

Yeah, it reminds me exactly what you're saying, like one woman might have, if she weren't in community with other women, she might have thought, oh, these, you know, weird physical experiences that I'm having, strange, it's a one-off, whatever. But then in community, hearing other women go, I wake up with these weird bruises. What's going on? Hearing other people's experiences helps to validate ours and to connect our experience to the larger narrative that we're in the middle of.

Celeste: Totally, totally. Because, and again, it goes back to that, like, oh, I'm not crazy. Like we have to keep talking. Because even with the people around us with the best of intentions, they can make you feel crazy or like that that's just a you thing. And you need, we just need to keep talking about it and realizing, oh, it's not just me and I'm not crazy.

And I'm not asking too much, not asking too much to have asked my dad to help with the dishes or my brother to plan the family reunion or to, you know, I'm not a crazy bitch for sorry No, that's fine. Let it go. You know, like you'll be called that maybe because it's going against the status quo. And anytime you go against the status quo, people will kind of heckle, like, you know, just might be most defensive this a lot of time, but you kind of need to keep talking about it. Be like, Oh, no, I'm not, I'm not asking too much. And I'm not crazy.

Anni: Okay, so here's a question, because I have conversations quite often with men about what I write about and talk about. And if they haven't gone through this sort of like, oh my goodness, I see what, I see the meta narrative, I see all of this, they don't quite understand.

I'm having a hard time finding an entry point, especially, you know, men at the very top of the pyramid, they're, you know, white and straight and Christian and all of the things that give them privilege and status here in this time and place. I have yet to find a great on-ramp in these conversations, like, well, have you ever felt that, you know, you're less than because of a certain characteristic that with women, it's often a different conversation because most of us have whether we can voice it or not some idea that like, wait a minute, there's some inequity here, this isn't fair.

Why are we expected to do all of these things? Oh, well, and then we respond with, oh, well, I just, I'm better at the dishes, so I do the dishes or I'm just better with the kids naturally. And so, you know, he babysits twice a week to give me some time or whatever. Have you found anything for in conversations with men to help them kind of begin the same process of wondering, paying attention, looking for something that is a pattern, if they are at the top of the apex?

Celeste: Yeah, well, I'll be honest. I'm not great in real life IRL conversations because I get a whole antsy. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I have been in arguments, but I have had some luck online.

And I will say this, that I think, you know, I can see where they're coming from because a lot of the time colloquially, we make the patriarchy and men seem so synonymous that like, like their synonyms, like any discussion of the patriarchy, any attack of the patriarchy, they're going to think is an attack on on them. Like smash the patriarchy means smash men, it doesn't. But that's a lot of the time, the impression and so immediately, the defenses go up, the brain shuts down and it helps to kind of I don't know, like how the brain works. Like, I'm thinking of the book, The Righteous Mind that like talks about like the mind is like a door. And we decide whether the door of our mind is opened or closed before the person even starts talking. Just, and it's like an efficiency thing with our brain, right? You don't have so much input, we don't always open it. But if we if we know if a man knows like we're talking about the patriarchy, and that's a trigger for him, or that's just like, oh gosh, an eye roll for him, that door will be shut, right? Right. And so anyway, to open it, I think in real life, you have to use a lot of curiosity on your end, a lot of empathy, that's like how doors open. But anyway, so in my on my articles, where I've had some inroads, is like, for instance, we're talking about like the male loneliness epidemic, a lot of men can pinpoint without using the words, the patriarchy, right? But the a lot of men will notice like, oh, I can't cry in public without being reprimanded, or thinking about back through childhood. Oh, I was never allowed to girly in any way, or, quote unquote, gay, or, you know, I couldn't wear pink, I couldn't watch My Little Pony, I couldn't, I would be reprimanded, sometimes pretty intensely by my peers or teacher or parents or siblings, or whoever, for crossing this masculinity line. And when you can talk about that, and be like, and why is that? And like, yeah, you've noticed that that's how the patriarchy boxes in men, they, it gives them power, but at the cost of connection. And, you know, if you can kind of, and definitely always make it very, very clear that the patriarchy doesn't mean men, the patriarchy is a system that allows the most selfish and greedy men to rise at the cost of everybody else, including most men. And you are not responsible for the patriarchy, unless you wrote the book of Genesis and the code of Hamurabi and like, you know, the third century BC. Congratulations, you didn't start the patriarchy, but it is all of our responsibility to understand how this invisible system is pulling the strings of our lives. And it's pulling it on men, big time. Like I really, I say, I really, truly believe this, that I think that the box to be a man is much, much smaller than the box to be a woman. And a lot of feminists will raise their hackles at, at that, like, because men are at the top of the pyramid, the pyramid, you know, it gets wider at the base, men are at the base.

And because we are in a patriarchy, we value masculinity over like, typical masculine traits, books, acceptability things over feminine things. And so like, women can wear blue, but men can't wear pink and girls can have boys names, but boys can't have girls names. And, you know, girls can like basketball and boxing, but boys can't do Pilates. And like, you know, it's just like the box to be masculine is so much smaller than the box to be feminine, because it sits at the top of the pyramid. And it's, it can be extremely stifling, so stifling to have to live in that, in that socially approved box.

So if you can start with a lot of empathy, yeah, that's because of the patriarchy and yet sucks, sucks to be a man, it's hard to be a man. It's so confining it to be a boy, you know, our society, the box is so small.

Anni: Well, I think you wrote an article about that recently, I lose track of who is the writer now because I follow so many wonderful writers. But it made me think about the emotions that are available to men, what are acceptable emotions in our culture, where you can have anger, you can have stoicism, you can have some lighthearted humor. But that's like, I can't think of any more that are really acceptable.

Like, you just can't express sadness or disappointment or grief or loss or anything. And you're right, women are expected to be emotional creatures. And so of course, it makes sense if we're in our feelings.

Celeste: Yep, yep, yep, we can cry. There's a great book called Amateur. It's written by Thomas, I think his name is Thomas McPhee. He's a trans man and I think the trans community is so vital to understanding our current gender roles right now, like so important to listen to like, I don't know, otherwise it's like the men are like, oh, if only we could understand women and women are like this, and then we're like, if only we could understand men, like this, like, oh, if only we had a community of people have the experience of walking through the world as anyway.

Anni: Yep, yep. It's only that we're a thing where they wanted to talk about their experiences and share with us their knowledge like how it is to walk through the world as a woman and how it is to what how they are responded to as a man and how that's different.

Celeste: Anyway, but so Thomas's book talks about this and like he says like wow I had no idea how good men have it at work like when I talk people stop talking like I'm not interrupted and I my opinion is valued and like I am listened to like it's bananas I didn't realize how much I had to really prove myself as a woman at work and then he says but it comes at such a cost a loneliness cost because like he lost his mother and people were so uncomfortable when he would cry like they couldn't handle it and like the men in the room would want to change the subject and just talk about logistics and like okay so you're going to do this with the will and this and he just wanted to be held like he just wanted a hug and um but and even though the women in his life would be really uncomfortable when he would cry and um you know and he says he went like months without human contact because girls you can just kind of snuggle with your girlfriends you can hug each other you can just like be more physical but like people don't just hug men like just to you know yep anyway so it's like you have power of it at the cost of so much

Anni: Oh, my heart goes out to him and the other men experiencing that because I just see how it has crippled their ability to connect with their own feelings and then to connect with other men and then to offer connection to women and then there's a whole like, well, men can't be friends with women because it's always going to be sexual in undertone. And so there is this just isolation and how sad and we're not meant to be isolated creatures.

Celeste: We're meant to be. We're meant to be.

Anni: So isolating.

Celeste: Ah. It's all isolating.

Anni: Well, I think that's really helpful, and I'm going to be mulling that over. That's good wisdom. And I do think empathy is a fun word this week. Just let it be known, we're recording this podcast right now two weeks into the new administration. And the word empathy is now being called into question and demonized, so that's fun. But I think that in our conversations where we are, like you say, we're not here to change minds but maybe help people connect the dots and find patterns and experience liberation then, starting with the empathy of, like, I know what it's like to feel really lonely and isolated and, you know, can you tell me about feeling that way yourself?

Celeste: Yeah. It's really frustrating to see how divisive this conversation has become along political lines, along conservative liberal lines, along men-women lines, and how the camps are both kind of saying the same thing, like on the, you know, really conservative man side, you know, podcasts like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, and that kind of thing is like men are struggling. They're struggling. We are the victims and we have got to like, and we are, you know, all of these things about, yeah, the male loneliness epidemic and all of this stuff and like the other side, and then so they're like, and that's because of feminism and that's because like, so the conclusion they draw is different, but like I feel at least for, I won't speak for all of feminism, but I will speak for myself and I'm like, yes, no, this is a problem. You are right. Men are struggling. Men are struggling. And they're not okay. There is a male loneliness epidemic, but it is not feminism's fault. And so the conclusions we're coming to are different, so we're just like butting heads. And it's really frustrating that it's like, no, I like maybe to the earlier question, like what's an inroad? Like that's the inroad is like, I agree. We agree. You're struggling. We agree. Our conclusions are different.

But okay, let's start here. Let's start here and really unpack this and why would this be The case and maybe we'll maybe you have different ideas about the reasons but like who else is feeling this and what are they expressing and experiencing and Yeah, I think that's really helpful.

Anni: Actually. I hadn't even thought about that. Thank you So here's a question in light of what's going on right now Currently at this moment in time. I Change just daily hourly Do you have hope for the United States of America for what's going on in our larger world Tell me about hope

Celeste: That's a good question. It's a very good question. It is a very interesting time in history for gender roles, because I do think we are living in an unprecedented era, like if we zoom way, way out, right? Yeah. Like centuries out. Yeah. Birds eye view. Um, the changes that have come since the women's liberation movement of the sixties, and I'm specifically speaking for America, I won't generalize the entire world, um, have been mammoth, like really, really big, important changes because throughout, you know, I talked about the code of Hammurami before, but like since early, early, early BC centuries, millennia ago, um, women have been beholden to men for basically for their physical survival, right? Because when the system that we live in was set up, it was like, okay, we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. We can't just live off the land. Now you have to pay for your food. And oh, by the way, women can't have jobs. So your husband, you must pair yourself with a man and he will make the money. So you can't have food and shelter. So really like for centuries, women have been extremely, uh, like their physical survival attached to him. And obviously there's exceptions, but by and large, for most of the last many centuries, a woman would be born and her, she would need to find a husband to provide for her. And in fact, for years from before the middle ages onward, there was these things called coverture laws where literally a woman had no legal identity. When she was born, she was the property of her husband, of her father. And then when she got married, she became, she was covered by her husband. And that's why the husband has to ask permission from the father because the father owned her. And now the husband is like, may I take your possession, please? And now she will have my last name, you know, she will be covered by me.

Anni: Gross.

Celeste: And so up until the 1960s, even in some states, women had no legal access to their own money, to their own kids, if they got divorced, literally their physical survival was massively at stake. They could, they could be left with nothing. And so anyway, that's changing is, I don't think we even realize how big of a change, a societal shift it is for women to be able to be financially independent to, for their physical survival, not to be dependent on a man is a massive shift that just in this past century. Yeah. So in the grand scheme of like the world, I would say it's a very hopeful time for equality, like, because it's so important for us to, and I'm not demonizing merit, I'm married, I'm happily married, I'm going to stay married. That's the plan. So I'm not demonizing marriage, but I am saying it's very, very, very, very important that we at least have access to be able to provide for ourselves. So we're not left destitute if we are divorced. So we're not, you know, so we are able to not be discriminated in the workplace. So that we're able to have our own homes and get our own mortgages. That was just in the 19 in 1974, right? That we were able to have our own mortgage without a male cosigner, we were able to have our own credit card without a male cosigner.

So very recent, very, very recent. And so in some ways I'm like, wow, we're just on the cusp of this thing. It makes sense. We're going to have some backsliding, because that's always how progress works. One step forward, two steps back.

And then the other reason I have a lot of hope actually, which I just read the Chalice and the Blade with our, my Substack has called Matriarchal Blessing. We have a Matriarchal Blessing book club. We just read the Chalice and the Blade all about how there are such things as dominator societies and partnership societies. And we've been living, patriarchy is a dominator society. And so in order to have a partnership society, we need equality, right?

We need equal rights. But Riane Eisler, the author says that the place that starts, well, first off, when we went initially way back in the Neolithic period from a period of a partnership society into a dominator society, which is evidenced by things like people getting buried with weapons or like just the prevalence of weapons. Art used to not have battle and war depictions. And then it moved into like almost all arts, hundreds of arts was about battles and wars before it was just about nature and love. And there's lots of evidence of that we were living in a, uh, partnership society before the, in the Neolithic period and not anyways. And then we shift, hard shift to a dominated society, which we are still in depicted by war, depicted by the blade, the chalice of the blade, the chalice's partnership blade is domination.

Anyways. Um, she said that, that shift, where it happened first is in the home, in the home dynamic of, um, suddenly it was, it was equal. And in fact, there was matrilineal societies, matrifocal societies, societies where like the husband would come from his family to join the wife's household rather than the other way around. And there was a lot more partnership, a lot more equality. And then the way that a dominant society started taking over was an, okay, now it's a patrilineal, patrocentric society. And now the man is the head of the household, whereas before it was equal, it was egalitarian, um, and now it's domination, but it happened in the home first.

And she says that the shift out from a dominant society, if you want to go back into a partnership society, it's going to start in the home. And I see that shift happening. I do. Like when I think about my mother, when I think about my grandmother, when I think of my great grandmother, the differences in the egalitarianism in those marriages, who, who I have access to some journals of like my great mother, like the dominator society was strong in that generation. Even like there was a Tik TOK trend like last year that was like, Grandma, you little victim and people would use that audio to tell the story of how their grandma met their grandpa. And it was horrifying. Not hundreds of people that were like, Oh yeah, he stalked her and then forced her to marry him. She was 16. You have so many stories of just like from the jump, he was the dominator and she was a dominated and that was the norm.

And she had no money and no say and no access to resources and no access to, you know, um, and I'm I guess I'm speaking for white culture specifically because black women have always had to work. But, um, anyways, and indigenous cultures are modeled differently.

I'm trying to say that. Yeah. Anyway, I do have hope. And I also, I frankly have hope with movements like the four B movement. Like I think that's an accountability movement. I don't think it's a really good end goal. The four B movement, if you're not familiar, it's like started in South Korea, um, because of a ton of oppression of women in marriages and domestic violence of really high prevalence of domestic violence. And it's women saying, no, no, we will not partner with you. No sex, no marriage, no children, no children. And it's them saying like, until we can be treated equally until we can be respected, we will be using the resource that we have our own body to set some boundaries. And you know, it's contentious movement, but I think it's an important one because I think things need to change. And I think they're going to change from, they're not going to change from the top down. It's going to change from the bottom up. And where that starts is romantic relationships. And if we're able to say, and I think for the first time, because we have financial independence, we are able to say, no, I actually, I don't have to put up with this anymore. My physical survival is not dependent on marriage anymore. And so I'm not going to subject myself to domination. I'm not going to subject myself to domestic violence. I'm not going to subject to myself to being treated like a servant because I don't have to. And I think that's so important. And I, again, I'm hoping we circle back around to partnership, but right now the inequality is still so vast that we need the men to step up into an equal partnership role. And I do think that it's going to get worse before it gets better. I think there'll be a pulling apart before coming together, but I do have hope that it'll be coming together and it will be all, everyone will be better for.

Anni: I love that. It is really helpful to ground ourselves in where we are in the great story of humanity, so that we can really look back and say, okay, you're right. We do have so many gains under our belt already.

And we have come so, so, so far since, and pick a point on the timeline, you're right. And also, we have a lot of work ahead of us. And so, that is both hopeful and gratifying to look at from the larger perspective, and then also allows us to draw from that, okay, we've done so much so far. There is an uphill battle here, and we know that we can do it, especially when we are circling up together.

Celeste: Yeah, because I really don't think this change, I know, this change is not going to come from the men. Bless them. Bless them. It's going to come from the women, and I think that the empowerment, the work that a lot of women are doing, which is hard work, is that work of, okay, how have I colluded to create this dynamic, speaking specifically of maybe married women? What have been, what, how have I colluded to my own subjection or, you know, this dynamic that we have, if you have an unequal dynamic, owning that, changing that. I always think of like Renee Brown's quote, like, don't puff up, don't shrink, stand your sacred ground, like recognizing like you can stand with your head held high with your shoulders back and be like, no, something needs to change. This behavior is unacceptable. The inequality in our home is unacceptable, and I will no longer be colluding in that.

I will no longer be participating in that, like

Anni: Enabling that.

Celeste: Enabling that. Exactly. Like you teach people how you treat you to treat you. And I will now be treated with respect because I respect myself and I know this isn't fair. And so I'm not actually going to be doing your laundry anymore. Sorry, I love you. But no, I'm not actually going to be doing that anymore. No, I will be expecting whatever. Like knowing that is sacred ground. And you can do that without being a witch, without being a witch, and you can do that knowing you're standing on sacred ground. And I think the micro is going to be reflective of the macro in that and being like, no, we're not crazy for demanding that we aren't domestically abused. Asking too much to like to stand up and like to ask that there not be sexual harassment in the workplace. That's not asking for too much, right? That's not just being woke and being annoying, like this needs to be happening.

And the ground we're standing on is sacred and we can stand with our head held high, our shoulders back without demonizing you, without, you know, like hating all men, whatever, right? We can stand our sacred ground of being like, I love you and I'm not going to put up with this anymore. And that will change. I think we will do that work.

Anni: And it's very important to me to highlight what you said about differentiating between it is not men that we are saying need to go. It is the system of domination that men have benefited from, maybe not entirely been aware of, or maybe they have. And that's a different conversation.

But to respect who they are and what they can do is a really important part of this. And also, like we've said, to have some empathy for how hard this has been for them too.

Celeste: Well, amen. And I think the question is so, so important isn't like, okay, they're like this, they're monsters, they're demons cut out on men, men are scum. Not that, but it's like, why? Why are they acting this way? What messages would they have to have gotten from the time they were a toddler to treat women this way? If they're, you know, for the men who maybe abused women, what would have to happen? Like, how did we get here? What messages are we giving to young boys and men? And like, there's a reason they don't come out of the womb, like, swashbuckling and like, you know, disrespecting women, like, how did we get here?

Oh, okay. You want to look at cultural messages? Yes, that's exactly what we want to look at. You want to know how men are indoctrinated into domination messages from the time they are toddlers, what messages we send them, we send them, you need to be a hero. Yeah, you like Skywalker, you like Harry Potter, be like, you know, Lord of the Rings, what are all of our, like, I don't know, stories, they're all individual success, individual heroism, you need to be a hero, be a protector. It's not like there was a phenomenal stuff stuck by Garrett bucks recently, it was like what happens when men are trained to be heroes rather than neighbors.

Anni: I read that. I think you you restacked that and I was like, oh my goodness. Thank you that. Yeah

Celeste: So it is basically this question of like, how did we get here? And it's not their fault. That's the thing. It's literally indoctrination. And you sound like a crazy person when you say that.

But when you look at this, it is like, they're indoctrinated in a million ways every day into being heroes and dominators. Like it's not their fault. But like, what would have to change? Like, how did we get here? And anyway, that I think is such an important conversation.

Anni: Exactly.

Celeste: Like you said, separating the men from the patriarchy because their messages that they got from the time they were toddlers, and this also the reprimanding of the worst thing you could be as a girl, walk a girl, act like a girl, talk a girl. That's not their fault either. But they're not crazy for wanting to avoid the feminine. There was real repercussions, real social punishments. They're not making that up, right? Anyone would want to avoid the feminine if those were the consequences. If you face not having friends, if you face being called a wuss, and you know.

Anni: Punched in the face or dunked in the toilet.

Celeste: Exactly or your dad telling you to man up if you're crying like you're not making that up and it's not your fault that that was your that's what you grew up with and I get it I'm not saying all men grew up like that but there's patterns

Anni: Well, it's in the culture and like, I would like to do a word cloud of all the words that have ever been spoken in the United States of America and just be able to see how many more times we have referenced masculine imagery in our culture and we've highlighted it and brought it to the surface.

I mean, you can do this with any movie, you can do this with any book just, and particularly within like the Abrahamic faiths and others, this emphasis, this like sordid emphasis on the masculine deity, just like continuously surround us with the idea that masculine is good and God, depending on where you're at, and that feminine is to be sort of downtrodden, not sort of actually downtrodden.

Celeste: Yeah, and exclusive and second-class citizen. Yeah, I just, I'm like, this blew my mind. I think it was just last year and I read Liz Plank's For the Love of Men. And she has this part in there of like, oh, it's so, this is like what radicalized me. Basically, like, when you think about how many of the world's problems are, okay, the men are gonna hate this. Men, remember what I just said about it not being your fault, we'll keep that. And you're not the pizza, okay. How many of the world's problems are directly tied to the domination thing and masculine ideals? And it is like, you can make a case for literally every single one. I read an article that like, how environmental problems are tied with masculinity because men need to eat red meat and they have meat at every meal. They need to drive these gas-guzzling cars and how much more the average man's carbon footprint is than the average woman because they're not gonna drive a sissy electric car and like eat vegetarian. Anyways, but like, Liz Plank's point, like she goes into different areas of, you know, war and global conflict and capitalistic, like success at all costs, money, money, money, and all of that, like, individual accumulation and not communal thriving, basically.

Anni: Everybody thriving.

Celeste: We really wanted to deal with these problems, which we've been trying to deal with in the UN and in America, all across the world, there's like peace promotion things. We would go to the heart, we would be talking about masculinity every freaking day in Congress, in speeches, in like the Senate, in the Supreme Court. We would literally be talking about masculinity every day if we actually wanted more peace in the world. And that blew my mind. And she was like, instead, we never say the word masculine in the Senate, in the Supreme Court, ever. We never discuss masculinity. If you do your eye roller, you're like, oh, you're a man hater. And instead, if we ever talk about masculine femininity, we're only talking about women's issues. We only talk about like, okay, let's give women the pay, let's end the pay gap. And it's like, no, this goes so much deeper than this. Like, it goes so deep, but we never talk about it. And it's more important than ever that we talk about it because you hear freaking Zuckerberg last week, like on Rogan's podcast being like, let's bring masculinity back, like Elon Musk, all of these men that are running our world. Literally the machine that's running their head is called masculinity. So it's more important than ever that we understand what that machine is, that we understand the damage that it can cause that we push back against it.

Anni: And that we're not trying to eradicate masculinity. I loved your article about like, here's what some people are afraid of and it's got these like sex kitten women beating the men slaves, right? Like, no, we are looking for balance. We're not asking for matriarchy.

And in fact, we've never made a matriarchy. I love how that's been brought up lately. Like we've only, when we have had power, we've only shared it. So we've never had a dominator society that was instigated by women. Fascinating information. And we're not trying to get rid of men. We love men. Like you said, for the love of men. Yes, let's please understand. We don't want a world without men. We just want a world without domination and we want a world of equality.

Celeste: Right. And it's very important, I haven't done this yet, but it is really important that we separate out and define maleness, and then separate from masculinity, separate from patriarchal masculinity. And what I've been, I've been using the word masculinity, but what I've actually been meaning is patriarchal masculinity, which maleness is wonderful. Maleness is to be celebrated.

Like, it's not a boy's father was born male, and I hate that they feel like by the time they get to be teenagers, that there's something to be, there's something wrong with their maleness, they're to be feared or bad, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then also there's something wrong with masculinity, like how we define it. I actually take issue with that this is biological, but in our society right now, the way we define masculinity, like the positive part is like strength and assertiveness and confidence and, you know, these like kind of power, like those are good things.

Anni: Yes.

Celeste: The problem is patriarchal masculinity that says you can only assert those qualities and never assert feminine qualities like softness and tenderness. And again, how our society defines that defines femininity currently, right? It has changed throughout history, but currently submissiveness, humility, meekness, beauty, whatever all of these things like patriarchal masculinity says you can only have the blue and none of the pink.

That's the problem. That's the problem. We need to balance and we need to have men be able to be soft and tender and humble and compassionate.

problem.

Anni: Yes, agreed! And don't you think you know I've heard for a long time the metaphor of the pendulum and like oh well you feminists just want to swing the pendulum all the other side okay I think a better metaphor that came to me recently through a friend was if you look at a seesaw that is off you know it's one side is down you don't balance it by sitting on the middle you balance it by putting weight on the other side and then you can bring it to balance

Celeste: Great.

Anni: Isn't that awesome? So please like that and run with that and put that everywhere. I'm doing the same. I thought that was brilliant because there is this fear, this like knee jerk response of like, Oh no, well, if I'm a man and you're asking me now to throw out all my masculinity and just become feminine and have empathy and compassion and cry all the time and like, no, we're not right. We don't want you to get rid of your, you know, your stalwart strength and that drive that you have that allows you to do really hard things. Um, but just maybe sit on the other side of the seesaw a little bit until it comes

Celeste: Open that up. Right now, it's barricaded from them. Someone made such a good point in a discussion group I was in recently. I'm in Ruth Whitman's discussion group on Substack. She wrote, Boy Mom. Anyways, someone in that discussion was saying that she was explaining this to her husband and she was having a hard time with it. He's like, what? So I'm half a human. You're a whole human and I'm half a human because the feminine has access to both and the masculine only has access to the masculine. He's like, I don't feel like half a human. He's like, I get sad. He's like, that's incredibly insulting to me. I feel like, oh, I get to be so like an access to my whole humanity and you and me. Anyway, the way we came around the discussion group, someone was like, okay, it's not that you come out of the womb half cut off from your emotions. It's that in our current society, and she used this example of a box of crayons. In our society, if you're all handed a box of crayons, the girls do get the full, and right now it's changed too. It's a lot because of the women's liberation movement, but it's also because we live in a patriarchy and masculinity is valued that women are rewarded often for being assertive and confident and being that CEO and get a girl and girl boss, whatever. So we have access more to the whole, all the colors in the box. It used to be that we only had access to half and you had to be submissive and feminine and it's changing more. Like with the women's movement, we have added crayons to our box, but men have not had an equivalent where like women now get to be CEOs. We have not had a movement where men get to be housewives. They get to be like the stay at home dad to the degree, obviously that does happen and it is happening, but not to the degree that women have entered the workforce, have men entered domestic labor, not at all.

Anni: Mmhmm.

Celeste: And so you're born, and men are handed this crayon box with half the crayons barricaded from them. And we just want a movement where everyone has access to every crayon.

Anni: Everybody gets a whole box. At birth and all the way through you can color with it whatever color.

Celeste: They have them, it's just that they are punished yeah when they use those crayons and we just want them not to be punished right when they act feminine

Anni: I love that. I'm going to think on that for a long time. Thank you.

Thank you.

What would you say if there is a woman listening who's like, I don't know about this feminist stuff, but I see a little bit of what they're talking about the patterns. I do. There is some inequality someplace in my life I can pinpoint. Okay, what would you say? Step one? What do we do?

Celeste: You're not crazy. You're not crazy. The things you are noticing, even if the really well-intentioned, I'm sure, lovely men in your life, maybe who are dismissing your concerns or not listening. I would say two things can be true because it's so dichotomizing sometimes, especially this is how I used to think about feminists. It was like you're either team women or team men. I'm like, oh, I'm team both. That's great. I also thought like, okay, does this mean I have to hate my husband? I love my husband. Two things can be true. You can love your husband, your father, your brothers and recognize that they have been handed a patriarchal script that you don't have to love and that they're often blinded to the script they've been handed for lots of reasons. But even if they don't see that script, you're not crazy for seeing it and you can both love them fiercely and stand up for yourself and set some boundaries. If you're doing that, that doesn't mean that you are out of line or selfish or mean, or that doesn't mean you have to lose the core of who you are and your humility, maybe meek attributes that you love about yourself. You don't have to lose those. You just can do both and find this middle ground of both, doing it with love, but knowing that those things that you've noticed, those are real. Those are real and they can change.

Anni: Brilliant. Yeah, that hope right there at the end, those things are real, you're not crazy. And that can change. Ooh, that's powerful. And isn't that what all the women who have gone before us asking for liberation have known? Things can be different for us. They've had a vision, they've circled up, they've done their own work, they've sacrificed a lot.

Celeste: Yeah. And if we're, I mean, if it's helpful for anyone listening who's finding themselves in a position in their marriage or long-time partnership, I've been there and I, we had the most patriarchal script in Mormonism that you could have. And it wasn't our fault. It wasn't his fault. We both just fell into, we played our parts. We played our parts according to the scripts we were given. And for the first 10 years of my marriage, it was incredibly, we followed the scripts. And I was doing everything, four kids, I stayed at home, a good stay at home, Mormon mom. And with Through the Feminist Awakening, a lot has changed in the last seven years. It hasn't always been easy. And I, I maintain like it's not my husband's fault. He's a wonderful man and I love him and I want to stay with him. But it was, I had to do so much internal growth where I had to do this work of standing my sacred ground and knowing I wasn't crazy and knowing I wasn't asking too much, which is freaking hard, and going to therapy and going to couples therapy and inch by inch doing that work of like, it's not too much to ask to ask for equality. And I'm not going to ask for it in the like drama triangle of being a blamer, a perpetrator or a victim or a savior. I'm going to ask it from my sacred ground position of I love you and things need to change. It's freaking hard and it's not a linear path, but it is possible because now my husband and I split everything that we possibly can. Like he cooks dinner three nights a week. I cook dinner three nights a week. We order out in a second. When I go grocery shopping every other week, he goes grocery shopping every other week. We have meetings every other week where we make all of the medical appointments together and go through all the bills together and the mail together like, and I, we have changed a lot. It's possible. Change is possible, but you can't do it if you don't do that internal work of knowing you're not crazy. You will never do it.

Anni: Right. I think that comes first.

Celeste: If you don't internalize like really like, Oh, I have sacred ground to stand here. If you never get to that point, you'll just be complaining the rest of your life.

Anni: Because that weaponized insanity that has been used against us for so long, just, nope, you just can't be trusted, don't, don't listen it. Oh, you're just crazy. That word has, yeah.

Celeste: You're being selfish. You're asking too much. Why are you causing contention? Keep the peace.

Anni: Yeah. Just follow the script. Yeah. And okay. So in closing, then I would also ask if there, if there was a man listening, who's like, I don't know about this, but I want to do better. If I can, this is really hard and scary. What would you say to him?

Celeste: Read Terrence Reel. Terrence Reel. It's both on men, I don't want to talk about it. Read bell hooks, the will to change. Those are two wonderful places to start. Awesome.

Anni: I have at least bell hooks' book sitting on my floor right over there. Terrence Reel will be in the mail shortly.

Celeste: I mean, bell hooks quotes Terrence Reel more than anyone else. Good. Sometimes it's easier to hear coming from a man.

Anni: Well, yes, somebody who has been there, understands it, uses the same language, can empathize with how hard this is and what it feels like and what obstacles you're probably going to face or already facing, and here's how I survived, and here's where I am now. It's really helpful to hear.

Okay, good. Celeste, thank you so much first for just all of the work that you have done yourself from emerging out of your Mormon experience into your understanding now, for the hard work that you did on yourself, in your marriage, in your family, in your community, and then how you so graciously share that with the world. I am so glad to know that you're out there doing the things and I will continue to read and support and follow along. Thank you. And thank you for joining me here today. It's been a pleasure.

Celeste: It's been my pleasure.