Episode 99 - Breaking Down Patriarchy with Amy McPhie Allebest

In this episode, you’ll hear my conversation with Amy McPhie Allebest, a writer, teacher, and feminist historian whose work has helped shape my understanding of patriarchy and expand my worldview. In her podcast, Breaking Down Patriarchy, Amy offers thought-provoking insights that inspire continued learning about the roots of patriarchy in society. Today, she shares some of those powerful ideas and personal stories, which I hope you find valuable as I have. Here’s what we cover:

• How “good girl” programming contributes to white feminism and upholding patriarchy
• Why feelings of fear, guilt, and shame create barriers to open-mindedness
• Several tools for accepting discomfort in order to effectively engage with learning about patriarchy
• Why working to educate yourself is a valuable first step from silence to speaking up
• How to create a space for yourself where it's safe to learn and change your mind
• Why grieving your past beliefs or harm you’ve caused is essential to moving forward
• The importance of generosity and understanding in growing from what you learn instead of self-blaming

I can't wait for you to listen. 

Check out these reading recommendations from Amy:
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Books by bell hooks
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Find Amy here:
https://breakingdownpatriarchy.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@breakingdownpatriarchy
https://breakingdownpatriarchy.com/podcast/ 

Find Sara here:
https://sarafisk.coach
https://pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
https://www.instagram.com/sarafiskcoach/
https://www.facebook.com/SaraFiskCoaching/
https://www.tiktok.com/@sarafiskcoach
https://www.youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333

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Transcript

00:51

You are listening to The Ex-Good Girl Podcast, episode 99. I love it when I get to have a conversation with someone whose work has really influenced me and been helpful for me, has taught me, has educated me in a way that has just made my worldview bigger, my ability to understand myself and patriarchy in a different, helpful light. And Amy McPhie Allebest is one of those people. She is a writer and a teacher and a feminist historian. And I just think everything that she puts out on her podcast, which is called Breaking Down Patriarchy and her YouTube channel, which has the same name, Breaking Down Patriarchy, is just so interesting. And I hope you enjoy this conversation that we had.

Okay, I feel like I'm having a little Starstruck moment here because Amy, you don't know. That I have listened to so many episodes of your podcast and that it kind of got me through a really intense time of not imposter syndrome. I signed up for a course in feminist coaching. And I was convinced that the instructor was gonna ask me for like feminist theory. And I was like, all the time I spent being a good Mormon, everybody else was learning about feminism. And I'm gonna show up in this class and be totally like ignorant. And so I found your podcast and I listened every single day. And it really felt like not just a whole new world, but the way that you presented the material made me feel like we were learning it together. And that is such a gift because I think in so many spaces that women want to show up. We already feel like we're one down and we should know and we should have learned. And you just had this gift for like opening this world up for me in a way that felt like it's making me a little emotional. Like we were peers and that we were learning together in such a beautiful way. And I'm so grateful for that. And I really just wanna start there. And I think the one thing that I took from your podcast was you talked about, I think it was Gerda Lerner who presented patriarchy as like a play. And the characters are women, but all the charts are written by men. The casting is done by men. The sets are built by men. And that was so powerful for me. And it's like once you see it, you can't unsee it. So that's a very long way of saying thank you so much for your work and for your time to be here today. 

 03:41

Oh, that means so much to me, Sara, and we were learning it together. We were, I think, you know that. I mean, I was reading the book just right one step ahead. I would read the book for the first time with a friend who was reading the book for the first time, and then we would talk about it. So it wasn't like a gimmick of the podcast. I was not, you know, a feminist scholar. And so, yeah, it was completely authentic. And so I'm so glad that that came through, that these were conversations that any of us would be having with our friends, discovering it maybe, and I did hope that it would give that exact hope and validation to anyone who was learning things, maybe even a little later in life and thinking, Oh, why didn't I learn this before? And so it would take exactly as you said, that just is so gratifying to hear that it would take out that feeling of like embarrassment for not knowing the stuff already, embarrassment for having made mistakes in the past. And yeah, I just thought, okay, well, as long as I'm going to learn all this stuff, anybody who wants to come along with me can, so thank you for those kind words. I'm so happy that you found the work as meaningful as I did, as I was discovering those books. 

 04:53

It felt like not just a lifeline, because I had left Mormonism and suddenly discovered that all of the traits and the values and the way I had worked so hard to be a good Mormon, like none of that applied to life outside. And I was just coming face to face with how much pleasing I had done. And I didn't recognize it as people pleasing, which was so interesting because inside of religious cultures, it's often clothed in faithfulness and obedience to God's commandments. And I remember just the day that I realized that, oh, all Mormonism did was take patriarchy and put it in God's mouth. And now God wants me to fulfill these specific gender roles. And God wants me to not think for myself, but kind of outsource that thinking to men who just so happen to be his mouthpieces on earth. And so it was really just, I remember walking my dog and listening to your voice and just like one realization after another. And so I'm so grateful in what I hope that we can do today, because all of that, and if you have not heard Amy's podcast, please go listen now. I'd love to continue the conversation with you and just talk about the work you have done since then, because you've taken that podcasting idea and really run with it. And it's now become something that you've done a master's thesis or I'm sorry, are you still working on the thesis? Is it done? Tell me a little bit more about kind of how you're continuing that. 

 06:40

Oh, yeah. So the master's thesis I was working on while I was starting the podcast. So that's done.I got my master's already a couple of years ago. I'm now working on a PhD. So yeah, the thesis was completed in 2022. So those were kind of running parallel and they were informing each other, but they weren't part of the same project. I was doing double duty. But a lot of the stuff that I was learning for the podcast, like the books that I was reading were, you know, informing the thesis that I was writing on a very specific topic. So yeah. 

 07:14

I'd love to hear more about that topic. Tell me about it. 

 07:17

Sure. Yeah. So I was doing my masters at Stanford in liberal arts. So it's a very broad, like humanities degree. So you take some history, some philosophy, some psychology, even literature classes, just all of the humanities. And then you get to in that specific program, you can choose to narrow in really narrow in on one specific topic.And there's a whole thing about getting your idea approved and whatever. But I had taken a class, a history class on the history of the civil rights movement. And I learned about an organization called SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and never even heard of SNCC before. But I mean, everybody's heard of SNCC, you just don't know it's SNCC, like the lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, voter registration, freedom summer, the people, the students, the young people, and then some of their adult advisors also, that was SNCC. But I'd never heard of them before. And as part of that class, I discovered some gender dynamics between women and men in SNCC. And I wrote a paper on that. And at the end of that paper, like just a term paper at the end of the semester. And so analyzing like, oh my gosh, was there sexism in SNCC? And like, oh, wow, this is now a rabbit hole into like sexism within the civil rights movement. And there were some women who called out the sexism in SNCC. Well, that's where I kind of ended the paper and had the kind of the surface level sources that everybody goes to to learn about sexism in the civil rights movement and whatever. And as I started digging deeper, already having turned the paper and I was like, Oh, wait a second, like, these women were calling out the sexism of the men, but the black women and the white women were doing it in really different ways in SNCC. And I discovered that the way they called out sexism, each of them differently, and then narrowing into a point of a specific moment, caused a rift between the women between black and white women, where they didn't even speak to each other afterwards. And so as I turned in the paper and ended that class, it launched this whole other series of questions of like, Oh, what happened between the women? Oh, no. And then that launched me within the context of my master's degree. So completely separately from the podcast, like doing research on like, Oh, no, and discovering white women have done this to black women always they did this in the first wave of feminism, they did it. Again, here in the civil rights movement, they did it again, in the second wave, there's still a huge rift. And then separately, on the podcast, I had started my research as a chronological timeline, as you know, because you listened to it. So we started in like, the earliest archaeological remains of human settlements, right before there's even written records. And it took months to get to the 1960s and 70s. But then I was starting to read Audre Lorde, and Shuri Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua, and Frances Beal. 

 10:29

Frances Beal was in SNCC. And so suddenly these two things where I'm doing these two massive research projects at the same time, and then bell hooks, I'm reading bell hooks for both projects. And that was maybe a long way of describing what was happening. But the critiques of white feminism from women of color in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and on through today, had then became a super important personal journey that I went on as a white woman. And then it also, like I said earlier, informed my scholarship for my thesis, and then just has been an ongoing project for the podcast as well. 

 11:12

I'm so fascinated by that, just in the context of some of the thoughts that I've been having and how I am seeing that so much of my past good girl-ness really was in service to these structures of power that, and power, you know, mostly inside of a religious organization, you know, that's something that you and I share kind of our knowledge of what it's like to be a woman inside of a structure, a religion like Mormonism. And I'm seeing in retrospect now how often I didn't even know that I was calculating, like, how much can I speak out without getting in trouble? What can I say that is still going to allow me to think of myself as a quote-unquote good person, but still not overstep the mark where I lose the little bit of currency that I have inside of this, you know, mostly male or all male-led, like there's no women making any kind of, you know, decision of consequence inside of Mormonism. And it's something that I've had to grapple with.

 12:33

And I wonder just about your thoughts there on the needing to be a good girl and how that contributes to the white feminism. Yes, yeah. I think one, and I'm still learning, I'm still learning this, but I can think of even some personal anecdotes that might illustrate some of this. I will say first, before I start this, I wanna mention too that we have a YouTube channel right now and the whole story of black and white women in SNCC and what happened there, which is a fascinating story so much so that yes, I spent a year and a half writing a paper on it.That is the episode that just aired this week that we're recording the beginning of December. So if you go to YouTube, you can watch a short video that we made on it if you're curious about more of that story, digging into that story. So for me, I feel like the good girl training that I got, first of all, you just never ever wanna hurt anyone's feelings. And there's actually virtue in that, I believe. Like I think being careful with people, speaking to the divinity or just the goodness or even just the good intentions in people's hearts, I think is really, really important. I do believe in being careful with human souls. I do, I stand by that. But sometimes our need to be nice and also to not rock the boat. And especially if a man says something, we are so trained in explicit and implicit ways from the time we are babies, that men are the authority figures. They are the leaders, we are the followers. They have the final word. So doing what makes them happy keeps us safe. And that's the message we get from literally the time we're babies. So here's one story. I remember I was probably 30 or so, and I was just having a conversation with some people, some other couples that we were friends with. And one of the men, it just came out of nowhere. We were talking about, I don't even remember what. And he said something that went past me. And as I was like processing what he said, it registered in my body of like, that was so racist. It was a horrible thing to say, specifically about black people. And it registered in my body. The conversation kind of moved on. And I just sat there and I did not say anything. And I mean, I stood there for a long time. And at any moment I could have spoken up and said something. I could have written him a letter afterwards. I could have written him an email. I guess I could track him down and email him now. I never said anything. And I don't even think I've ever even told anybody this story until this moment. And it has haunted me whenever I think about it. It makes me physically sick. And I think, why didn't I say something? And I think I was so trained to not rock the boat. And I thought, you know, if a woman had said it, I probably still wouldn't have said anything, but especially a man saying it. And I mean, this is a choice we all have to make, like being the person that's like policing other people and like, nobody likes, well, maybe some people do. I don't like being in that role. But now, because I've had that experience, I can tuck that into my pocket. 

 15:57

I hope that I'm more prepared. And then I have something to say to redirect. I have another story that happened more recently that I can tell too. I don't know if you want me to go on this, but. 

 16:10

I'd love to hear it. 

 16:12

Hey, this is a tricky one too, because yeah, I'm still kind of unpacking this, but I had suggested to a group of friends that we read a certain book about racism and it was all white women and they're all liberal white women who I thought would be on board and like be wanting to do this work. And when people read the book, it was a book that I had read in my PhD program, the response that I got from some of these like Democrat voting, liberal white women was like, oh my gosh, what a downer is what people said, like what a downer, so depressing, oh my gosh, this is not why I read books. And it was kind of like, don't ever let Amy choose the book again.This was a new group of friends for me also. And so I was like, wanting to have these people as my friends and like, it's kind of rare to find what I thought were like minded women and that they're all very progressive in their values. But I was like, wow, they had no tools for sitting in it because white people were inevitably implicated in why the sad stories were sad because of white people and because of our specific ancestors actually, because it was it was about Native American history, not black history. So it was like, our ancestors were the colonizers and to see how they did not have any tools to process that kind of guilt and shame that were coming up and also just the unpleasantness of somebody else's pain. And then anyway, I left the conversation, cried all the way home. And then I was like, forget it, I don't want because we were going to host a meeting discussing the book. And it hadn't come up yet. And I'm like, forget it. I'm not hosting the meeting. I'm not going to talk about it ever again. I just don't want to do it. And I sat there. And after I cried it out for a while, I was like, that would be then me not having the tools to deal with my discomfort. And then I would lose an opportunity to speak about it, to have the conversation and anyone with even a little crack of openness in their heart to hearing the message. Then I don't speak out. Then I'm silent again and they lose the chance to learn, but it was more about me, about me being willing to move through my discomfort and think I might lose this new group of friends by still having this meeting and speaking about what I believe about what happened. So I went through with it. I held the meeting and I did speak out, not in a hopefully not in a soapboxy way and not in a shaming way. I didn't even mention what they had said before, but I'm actually really proud of myself and I think it showed that I learned because I just shared, I guess, an example of when I was silent and I didn't have the tools to know how to speak. And then another very awkward social situation where white women are giving me the message, like, we don't talk about this stuff. And I said, oh, well, I do. And I think this book is important. And so I went through with it and risked losing those friendships and risked being seen as like the downer, I guess, or whatever. 

 19:27

It may be, I mean, and it's kind of stupid that it was that hard, but we're such social creatures that the fear of like being judged, being ostracized, losing our place, like you said, with proximity to, you know, comfort that it was hard. 

 19:42

Yeah, I mean, we want safety and connection. It doesn't matter where we are. Safety, connection, and dignity. And to see in those two examples, not rocking the boat, and then rocking the boat potentially, like not hurting anyone's feelings, potentially hurting someone's feelings.I am really interested in the tools and what allows people to go from being someone who feels like you felt in that first scenario frozen. And I don't know what to say. I don't know how to say it. I can't say it too. I can say this. And in fact, I feel like it is important to say, and it's something that I can contribute, is to be having this conversation in the circles that I am a part of, that I have access to because of who I am. And I consider myself white passing. And I have a lot of access and privilege because I don't have an accent, because I have certain ways that I dress and present myself. And so, when you talk about the women not having the tools to interrogate and sit with that, tell me what you think those tools are, and then I'll add some thoughts. 

 20:59

I'll say, yeah, the most impactful thing was just the education. Like I said, I was immersed in reading the thoughts and feelings and scholarship of women of color for probably two solid years. I carried bell hooks around with me in my purse and in every waiting room or waiting for my kids to come out from school. I read bell hooks over and over and over and over again.And then the other book that I would recommend to anyone listening is This Bridge Called My Back, which was, I think it was published in 1982, early 80s, and that it's called Radical Writings of Women of Color. This bridge called my back blew my mind open. I went into a world that I didn't know existed and the empathy that it developed in me and the understanding of like, oh my gosh, I'm starting to see now invaluable resource. This bridge called my back and everything by bell hooks and also Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. That was the first thing is like, you just have to put in some work of reading what things feel like from the other point of view. And then the other thing in terms of like actual what you say in the moment, you might have said this, say this instead, you might be tempted to feel this way. That's okay, but here's some tools to deal with it. There's a woman named Leatha Udayabhanu here in Utah, actually, she's in Provo and she has an Instagram called Essentially Awake. She does workshops and I just happened to have met her in every conversation I have with her or like workshop I've attended. She does anti-racist work and really specifically helping white women learn what it feels like. Her family's from India, but she was born and raised in New York. But anyway, she's brilliant and has really, really helped me. So those are some of the things, like just having the tools, like I mentioned before, to sit with the discomfort, whether that discomfort is shame of what my ancestors did, shame of what I myself have done in the past when I didn't know better, or depending on the circumstance, discomfort, fear, like terror of like, maybe you're talking to your dad and you're like, he's not going to love me, my dad's not going to love me anymore. I mean, that's this terror going through your body, like you need tools to be able to calm yourself down, figure out what to say that you so you stay in integrity and like you said, like dignity, but connection and belonging, that doesn't come easy, like that's carving out new pathways in the brain.You know about this more than I do. I'm sure Sara, because I'm like more of a historian and less of a psychologist, but those are the thoughts that come to my mind. What do you think? I love that. 

 23:47

because there has to be a learning. There has to be new information. I think one of the most damaging things that we have subconsciously done as religious people inside of religious structures and also just it's in our politics, it's this aversion to changing our mind. As if changing our mind represents weakness or badness about us, it's so tied to the way we think about shame, like if you're in shame, I am a bad person.Somehow we've hooked that together like changing my mind means I was bad when I thought that thing that I used to think in the past versus there's just a certain amount of knowledge that a brain can hold at a time and as you go accumulating more knowledge, it's meant to change you. I mean that's the whole point and we have tolerance for it in some circles. I think science represents a really beautiful place where learning and experimenting is the point and we have such beautiful elasticity around changing past presumptions and updating data but we don't in our interpersonal relationships and circles. I think that's one of the hardest things to overcome is that we are meant to change and learn and we can't do that when the container that we're doing that in is one of shame because shame always means we have to defend and it places us in such a poverty of generosity and graciousness for ourselves in a way that I think I mean the only reason that I am able to have the conversations that I do about people pleasing I was the biggest people pleaser I from morning till night was hypervigilance about was I doing enough to please God was I doing enough to be a good person what did you know this person think of me could I do more and the only reason that I'm able to have these conversations with any integrity and generosity is because I can look back at that version of me with so much love and so much understanding of the actual harm that I caused and perpetrated and I think just being able to change the structure in which we hold ourselves from shame to one of generosity even just generosity I mean compassion for a lot of women that seems like a too far right but just some generosity I think is so essential and then the second thing that I'm really interested in your take on is we are terrible at processing our grief and there is real grief around the harms that we have caused but we can't separate it very well from the shame and instead of thinking you know I am a bad person processing our grief allows us to get to this idea that I am a good person who did something harmful that I regret and that is such a huge difference in in self-perception we're so programmed for self-blame so programmed you know to kind of tear ourselves apart I think like when we get to the point where we see the harm we have done if you know you're going to be terrible to yourself of course you can't see it of course you're going to do everything you can to not see that because it's nothing but self-punishment for you. 

 27:37

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's definitely true. And I also think we're, we come from a culture of bypassing, right? Of emotional bypassing. And we come from people, at least for me, with like Mormon pioneer ancestors who buried their children on the trail and just kept walking. And those stories, and the, you know, even in our hymns of like, being cheerful is the virtue for the Mormon people, specifically for Mormon women, right? Like, scatter sunshine and have a smile on your face. If you chance to meet a frown, do not let it stay. Like we have it from the time we're little, smile that frown away. Like, so whether that frown comes from grief or shame or like all of that stuff. And so I think we are trained, you know, to bury it on the trail and keep walking and not look at it and just pretend everything's okay. And I do think that that harms ourselves and it harms others.And it just stops us from being able to move forward. Like you're saying, can I also say one thing that I want to make sure that we have a chance to say, even though it's going in a different direction. So we can come back in a second if you want to. But I just have to say to the generosity that you just talked about, creating a container, where we're safe to learn. And we feel we have the tools to be able to confront like, oh my gosh, what if I've done it all wrong? And I did bad things, even though I had good intentions. I just hope that anyone listening to this can take that and then use that to have empathy for men. Because this is how a lot of men feel in the conversations about patriarchy, about feminism, right? They can get defensive and closed off. And then sometimes they respond in not great ways with anger, with defensiveness, with deflection, they won't take anything in. And I think it's the same thing. It's because like, oh my gosh, what if what you're about to tell me means you think I'm a bad person? What if it means I really did do bad things? What if everything that I built my life on is not right? Are you saying my grandpa is a monster? My grandpa was the best? You know what I mean? And so having that compassion, while still figuring out how to speak the truth, hold boundaries, say the truth. But I just, I'm criticized sometimes by some people because I people think I'm too easy on men. And I don't think I'm too easy on men. I do speak, I do speak the truth. But I till my dying day, I will stand by my belief that people learn best when you can give them the benefit of the doubt. And I do believe that most people are doing the best they know how with the information they have at the time. And if they're going to be open to new information, they need to know that you're not going to sucker punch them when they open up to that new information, right? Or make them feel like crap because of the things they've done in the past. So I believe in it as a value. And I also think strategically, it's the only way to reach men is to help them feel like, yeah, we don't think they're bad people just because they didn't know something. 

 30:56

I love that. I have run into that dynamic in, you know, my own marriage. I remember a particularly heated discussion in our hot tub one night where I was basically like coming at my husband like, did you know about this? Did you know? And he's like, I didn't. And I don't understand why all, you know, he was just like the soft target in front of me. And I we had to recover from that. I want to just tie those two things together because you cannot have generosity for other people that you're talking about without generosity for yourself first. Yes, for sure. I just don't think there's a way to be truly generous from a place that actually makes a difference. If you can't have at least some of that for yourself, I was, I was doing the best I could with the information I had at the time, just like you were doing, like for men and for people who are, who are learning and growing, are doing the best they can. That is one of the things I deeply believe that with very few exceptions, people are doing, you know, their best and they're imprisoned to one degree or another as we all are. By the way, we see the world. 

 32:12

Yep, which we inherit, which we inherit and it's not our fault. Like we learn what our parents teach us, what the school teaches in the curriculum. That's not our fault.And then we have a choice about what to do about it. But yeah, no, I agree. 

 32:29

I love that you that you said that specifically. So my my guess is that by far and away the majority of the women who will be listening to this episode are white or who have a connection to whiteness. And there is a curiosity about doing some self interrogation. Where might you suggest that they begin? 

 32:53

I mean, I guess it's just what I said earlier because that's my personality, is I turn to books. I just turn to what other people have said. And I do think, like I said before, books are a way for me, always have been, from the time I was little, like you read the diary of Anne Frank, and maybe you don't know any Jewish people in the neighborhood where you live, and suddenly you're friends with Anne. And then that opens up empathy for a whole group of people that you haven't met before. And so I think that's why books are so powerful, and that's why this bridge called my back was so powerful to me. I remember I was sitting by the pool while my daughter was swimming laps, and I'd glance up at her. But then where I was, I was sitting next to a lesbian woman of color on a bus as she was looking out through the bus window and she was talking to me about what it felt like to come out to her family as a lesbian in this family that because of their circumstances was very homophobic, but she was a woman of color. And I was like, whoa, I don't think I've ever known a lesbian woman of color in my life. Wait, what? And suddenly she was talking to me. So for me as a literature and history person, that's where I go first, and that's why I, you know, I would suggest to people that they do that. And then making friends outside of your group too, and being brave enough to have conversations about things and just like, that does take some courage, but I would suggest doing that. Oh, another really great book is Cast by Isabel Wilkerson. Essential reading, you have to read that. I don't know if that's helpful, Sara, but those are always, that's what I turn to is conversations with people and books. 

 34:42

I think that's everything because a book allows you to read in safety, and books are the work that Black and Indigenous women have already done to educate us, and so it relieves women in the present who are suffering so much because of recent political events and the election of Donald Trump again, and from having to do the work of bringing us up to speed and showing us how we are still not rising to the level of sacrifice that is needed to really participate and not be complicit. It's work that's already been done, and it doesn't require anyone else to spend the time to teach it. 

 35:32

Exactly. And anyone who's written a book knows it does. It takes years often, years of research. Often in this genre of book, it's gut-wrenching, heart-rending personal experience and to have the courage and the tenacity and the discipline to create a work like that and then put it out into the world.Yes, that work has already been done. And so that one individual woman, as you said, doesn't have to have the 500 individual conversations with all the white women in her life. She can put the book out into the world if she chooses to. And then thousands and thousands of people can benefit from it without her having to relive those painful experiences or like, okay, let's start at the beginning. I mean, over and over. So yes, thank you for putting a fine point on that. That's exactly why it's important to start with books. And by me saying too, like, have friends outside of your group. I want to be clear, like you implied, that's not with the intention of like, I need to make a friend with that person so that I can learn from them. I'm just saying like, in general, make sure that we're having like real genuine relationships with people that are outside of our narrow little scope. But that's, I mean, heaven forbid that would be turned into like an extractive relationship where we're like, of course, teach me everything that you know. And I feel like I have to be in order to be virtuous. I need to have more non white friends. That's that's yuck. But yeah, just be a good friend. 

 37:09

I also love that books provide us with an opportunity to just like take responsibility in choosing books, in deciding to intentionally spend our time, you know, reading. I homeschooled for about a decade.I mean, I was a real Mormon, Amy. And I bought a lot of the civil rights units for a group of families. And I read Malcolm X's autobiography. And I remember just being I was like, I thought he was the bad guy. Right? I thought Martin Luther King's the good guy and Malcolm X is the bad guy. And I just I can't I had one of those same moments when you're describing sitting by the pool. I was reading this book about this man and the development of his ideas. And here's the thing, I don't know that I necessarily could endorse all of his tactics and ways of thought. That's not the point. The point is not to agree with. And it's we do so much of like we close ranks around, you know, people who think the way we think. But it gave me a window into the life and soul of a man that otherwise I'd have no access to. Yeah. And I love this that so in our day as well, it means following black and queer and indigenous and people of different races, their takes, even though we don't agree, even though it's not something that's just going to reinforce what we believe. I think that's a really beautiful way to take responsibility for learning something new. 

 38:45

That's what's helped me the most for sure. 

 38:48

And then what I would add to that is having a grieving process, having a way in which you intentionally interact with the grief that comes up around so much of the harm that we cause. I remember the day inside Mormon land, you know, the Mormon, and I use that term affectionately. It's not disparaging. We pay tithing, you know, to the church, and then there are other offerings. And the church has a huge financial arm that they really downplay. It's not something you can find out anything about. You can't really find out how, you know, a lot of the money is used, but there was maybe you heard about this, the whistleblower inside of an investment arm of the church that really revealed that the church has billions of dollars. And the instant shame that I felt, having been a missionary for the church in Bolivia, sitting in homes that were sometimes a little more than a dirt floor and a corrugated tin roof with some boards, you know, holding the whole thing together and telling them that they could not be baptized unless they paid tithing. You know, women who made a few dollars a day giving money to this church that I now knew had billions of dollars, the shame that I initially felt, how could I have done that? Why didn't I know? Of course I didn't know. The whole point is inside of these structures is to keep people from knowing the truth and just keep them busy upholding the structure. And that was my first real experience with moving out of that shame into grieving and grieving that I participated in that harm.And I can say it has been transformative for me to learn how to grieve. And just as Americans, you know, a lot of the people listening to this will live in the United States and, or be very familiar with United States culture around emotions were just so terrible at processing our grief collectively, individually. And it has just been a huge, huge thing for me to be able to grieve. 

 41:15

Hmm. That's beautiful. And I mean, I'm grateful that you shared that with me.I have similar because I served a mission also in South America and humble circumstances and have similar grief and anger around things that I was a part of too. I'll say too, back to our conversation about how helpful it is also to be able to process that grief privately, like you said, rather than sometimes in conversation, I think back. And if listeners, I'm sure you listened to this Sara, some of the episodes that I did with my friend Reyna, who is a friend of mine from BYU, who is one of, she and her roommate were both black and they lived right across the hall from me. But like 0.01% of BYU students are black. And I had not realized at the time that she was having such a different experience than I was. She was just my friend Reyna. And that was the 90s. And it was like people, we were over racism, like, and so I just was totally blind and oblivious. Anyway, you hear me on these podcast episodes kind of processing in real time as she was telling me things. And we're talking about also sojourner truth. And we're talking about Frances Biel and to be black and female in the 70s. And I'm bawling as she's telling me these things. And there is an important distinction when people talk about white tears and white women's tears. I think that's typically talking about like white women who are crying because they feel defensive and like, you're hurting my feelings by telling me this like I didn't mean to. That's the white tears that people are talking about. However, even my tears of grief, even my tears of sorrow and apology to her. I mean, she didn't mind. We're friends. Like we can carry that burden for each other. But I did feel bad afterwards. I thought I kind of wish that I had processed all of that grief by myself because inevitably you hear her on the podcast comforting me. You hear her comforting me about slavery and about racism and all the racism that we're talking about. And Reina has endured enough. She doesn't need to be comforting white people about our sorrow about what happened. So I would say that's something that I kind of learned. And she was just so gracious and lovely, but it's a little embarrassing to me to think about listening back to that and hearing her comforting me. And again, so I would just say to people again, this is why like reading a book, sitting with it and sobbing by yourself and then maybe writing in your journal about what it means to you and all the mistakes you made and how you're so mad at your ancestors and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff we need to process. We do that by ourselves. And then if we have show emotion of empathy in conversations, I still think that's okay, especially if we're friends. I think that's okay, but just to not put that burden of them needing to comfort us. 

 44:26

Yes. And I would just also add we can talk about them among us white women, right? We can, we can, we can comfort and help each other because that is not the job of women of color, black women to, to do that.One of the things that I'm curious about is the way that women don't take action because even subconsciously we know if I take the wrong action or if later I realized I wish I would have taken different action, I'm going to like tear myself to shreds. And so I just wonder about your experience. You know, you mentioned embarrassment hearing those past podcast episodes and yet they're still there, right? People can still listen to them and hear you maybe not being as sensitive to Reina's experience as you wish you now would have. Tell me how you learned to put yourself out there knowing that in a year I might listen to this podcast episode and be like, okay, well, I wouldn't do it exactly the same way. 

 45:34

Yeah. Honestly, it's so hard for me. So hard for me. I hate making mistakes.And the worst mistake to make is where you feel like you've hurt somebody. At least for me, like I would rather, I'd rather die. And so as I was starting the podcast, I got really good advice from people that said like, because that's, that's the risk also of doing the podcast, like I did, which we talked about at the beginning, I was reading the books along with the listeners. So I hadn't read Audre Lorde when I read Gerta Lerner at the beginning. You know what I mean? Like I had had some education and I've whatever I've had the life experience I had. And I said, I'm so scared that I'm going to look back five years from now and listen to myself and be like, oh my gosh, like I was scared that I would use a wrong word that like was not okay to use like the terminology or that yeah, that I would say something that was hurtful. And they just said, like, if you wait until you know everything, you'll never do anything. And I was like, okay, that's true. And they just said, just keep your feet moving. And I just felt I just kind of knew that that was the next that I wanted to do this work. And also that that would be so good for me in my personal development and kind of getting over myself. And I hoped that it would be useful for women hearing it and that it would provide an example of, oh my gosh, she made a mistake. In fact, what did I just read? Oh, I know what it was. It was in Sharon McMahon's book. I'm the phrase that she says, like the courage to fail in front of people. And that that's what it takes. Like in order to do the work we were born to do, whatever that is, it takes courage, not just to fail where nobody knows about it to fail in front of people. And I just decided to do it and not look back. And I for my own sake, and then like I said, also in the hopes that that would inspire and comfort other people to be able to have that same courage in their lives to take those risks. 

 47:56

Well, it worked because it worked for me. And I think that not only listening to you kind of take those ideas apart as you were learning them and as you were having like first exposure, I think it's such a beautiful just metaphor for what I hope people are learning from my podcast, which is there is no right way to proceed to undo people pleasing. There's just the next right step. There's just the next thing that presents itself that you either want to take on or you don't. And that's it.And you just have to be willing to just feel whatever you need to feel to get through that, to be able to connect to yourself in that new way. And as we end here, I just wanna ask as you have done that and had just the courage to do the next right step, because I'm sure you know now as well as I do, there's no one right way to be a feminist and you're always gonna make some people mad somewhere. You've named some of the criticism that you have received about maybe being too easy on men. How have you changed through this process of just having the courage to fail in front of people, to do the next right step, to listen to past versions of you with some generosity and some accountability and how have you changed? 

 49:28

Hmm, that's a good question. Well, I can share a story that just popped into my mind that shows a way that I haven't haven't so I just got just like a week ago out of the blue a text from a man that I'm friends with that I used to talk about gender with a lot all the time but we haven't spoken in a few years and he texted me out of the blue and I was at the grocery store and he like Just jumped into this kind of highly charged gendered conversation about the for B movement, which is touchy, right? That's a touchy subject for people and he just jumped in and what I felt was like I don't want to have this conversation with him I know how he feels about this. I'm not in the mood He hasn't done any of the work to be able to have this conversation. Also. I'm not having it over text whatever. So I gently set a boundary around like Would love to have this conversation in person at a different time The text I got back from that was so disrespectful So rude and it just showed this like theory at his obviously his expectation was that Whatever he wanted to say, I would just go with it like whatever he wanted to do. I would be game He did not like me setting a boundary interestingly what I did was Immediately started comforting him. I Immediately started saying like don't worry. Don't worry. Some things which I would stand by saying like I know the goodness of your heart. You're still my friend I stand by that but I went beyond that into like just soothing his feelings. Don't worry. You didn't do anything wrong. Everything's okay. All is well after he had sent a truly disrespectful text So processing it afterwards, I thought well shoot all of this research I've done all of this work Hundreds of books and articles and conversations. I am a feminist freakin scholar now I will sometimes say like I am ungaslightable. You cannot gaslight me anymore because I know too much That's true But guess what when it's a person I know who just like blindsides me when I'm in the cheese aisle of the grocery store And I'm like go and my whole nervous system starts going into like panic My knee jerk was I just went to what I was trained to do as a child. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. He's mad soothe soothe soothe, make peace, people please, we can't have him think that I mean we can't have right and I did that So that is one thing that hadn't changed but what has is that I even could recognize that that's what I had done and Then make a plan to circle back and say, okay. Oopsie daisy I reverted to the way I was raised and I just did this this and this I'm gonna let I'm just gonna like lay this all out for you and I'm gonna say I don't allow people to speak to me that way Here's a book you can read if you would like to have this conversation with me then we need to make sure we have a common vocabulary read the book and then get back to me if you want to and we'll have the conversation in person and also if you ever speak to me that way again that will end our relationship,

 52:46

right? So I have tools now. I wasn't able to use them in the moment when I got broadsided like that But applying the lessons in real life is a different animal, right? You can know a lot of things in your head and applying the lessons is hard, but I'm learning Sara I'm getting better. So I don't know. Hopefully that's maybe relatable for some listeners and helpful in some way

 53:10

Oh, it's so relatable. I mean, I still do this all the time. You know, I still have moments where it's like, I can see myself doing the pleasing. I'm like, Whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, but I but I can't stop it. Yep. And again, I love, we can just call back to like the generosity that you have to have with yourself to be like, of course that just we are not in charge of how our nervous system is perceived threat. That's a process we just don't control. And if we can have some graciousness for the fact that the threat seems large enough that I felt like I had to please the threat seemed large enough. I mean, gosh, the sense of entitlement, right to, to text you like that, but to have some generosity and then also to just understand that the only way we correct present behavior is by recognizing it in the past, there isn't another way. And it's only by seeing it after it's already happened and understanding why it happened that way that we can get some kind of different tools and capacity for the present. But then also there's always going to be things that we just feel threatening. Yeah, it's always going to happen. And so I'm just so grateful for the work that you have done. It has really informed my ability to feel like I can have a conversation, like I have a place in this feminist movement that I feel like is so essential and more essential now than ever. And I'm, I'm just really grateful for you. 

 54:47

Thank you. Well, I enjoyed this conversation so much, Sara, and this is this was really enlightening and so, so happy to be here today. Thanks.