Latest / We Are More: Sisters Talk Faith & Feminism / Ep. 130: Mansplaining Angels

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Ep. 130: Mansplaining Angels · We Are More: Sisters Talk Faith & Feminism

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: To the We Are More Pod cast. My name is Alyssa. And my name is Bree. We're two sisters passionate about all things faith and feminism. We believe that Jesus trusted, respected, and encouraged women to teach and preach his word.
• 0:26
  And apparently, that's controversial. Get comfy. Hello, world. Again, with the French. Oui.
• 0:36
  I don't know. I got one note. Well, at at least it's an exciting note, an international note,
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Offensive note? Let me know.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Always a possibility. Okay. So I found something literally, like, an hour before we started recording, and I felt like we should talk
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: about it. Oh, I'm going in blind, ladies and germs.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I don't know what we're about to talk about. Okay. So you know how we always say... We joke. Actually, we haven't made this joke in a while that the masculine man does taxidermy.
• 1:07
  Yeah. Okay. If you have not heard us reference that before, we used to talk about that a lot.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Men do taxidermy. Women do embroidery?
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Embroidery, I think it was. So I've found a new thing. What? It's called taxidermy. What?
• 1:23
  Okay. So it's where people pull apart a piece of text. So the one that I found was a Tamagotchi, and they pulled it all apart. I'm showing Brie now. You But can't see there's the motherboard, and there's the little black back and front plastic things and the screen and whatever.
• 1:40
  And they put it in a shadow box. Like, it's
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: some sort of price. Framed like a taxidermy bug.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: So my question is, if men do taxidermy and women do embroidery, who is doing taxidermy? The geeks. Oh, alright. Of both genders?
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Yes. Okay. I just
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: thought that was the funniest thing I've ever seen because it's so seriously done. It's all labeled. It's in this beautiful shadow box. Even the little key chain bit is in there and labeled. Someone took serious time pulling apart their Tamagotchi.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: I don't think we have to gender this.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: This can be anybody under the sun. Anybody who feels like a super weird hobby. Our brother. Yeah. That does sound like something our brother would do.
• 2:25
  That's so true.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: He used to ask for pieces of technology. Mhmm. And by that, I mean the cone vacuum. The shot vacuum of 2009. I don't know.
• 2:39
  Mhmm. It looked sleek and cool Yeah. And modern. And he wanted that so desperately for Christmas, and he just wanted it to take apart.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: Yep. He got it too. Right? Yeah. Mom and dad got
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: it for him?
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: And then he just ripped the thing apart. And... Because he wanted to learn how it worked. But... Yeah.
• 2:55
  So there's a a market for this, for taxidermy.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: I could do that. I mean, I... It wouldn't be good. No. It would be broken.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. All the things would be broken. It's like when somebody... Have you ever watched on YouTube? Someone tries to teach someone else how to butcher a chicken properly, and then it's hacked to death.
• 3:12
  Yeah. That would be your your Tamagotchi.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't understand technology. It's a mystery to me. It was not how our brains were built. No.
• 3:21
  I I was outside playing in my day. I wasn't on the computer programs.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Both our brother and I were very much like the computer kids when we were younger. And I mean, I say that, like, we're playing Oregon Trail. Okay? Like, Brandon wasn't pulling apart the computer. But Brie was not that.
• 3:44
  Brie was not the computer kid at all. No. You didn't know where your phone was, like, 99% of the time.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: I lost many a phone. And now I... I'm on I'm on the web.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: You're pretty techy. I mean, you've gotta you've gotta figure out a lot of programming and stuff. You're good at software. Kind of.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: But my favorite thing to do is to call the software companies and say, can you remote in and figure this out?
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Hey. That seems wise to me.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Or I go on chat GPT and I say, help me. They say work smarter, not harder. Right? Exactly.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: So there you
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: go. Mhmm. I don't
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: know how to transition to Angels from here. So this week, we're kind of entering our Halloween phase. I feel like we already entered the Halloween phase a while ago. Mhmm. Things have happened.
• 4:30
  I'm wearing a shirt that says spooky on it. It's got bats, and they really bother Brie.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: I have green nails. Is that spooky? I don't think so.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: Okay. So we thought, what is super spooky? Obviously, Angels. Obviously, Angels. Obviously.
• 4:49
  Because have you... This is all over social media where they're like, oh, biblically accurate blah blah blah. It's supposed to be biblically accurate angels, but then they'll stick a ton of eyeballs on a Furby or something.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: Or the tree toppers around Christmas time. Because you'll put an angel on top of your tree. Biblically accurate angel on top of your tree, and it's a bunch of eyeballs.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think I said this last week, but my first introduction to this whole concept was the books A Wrinkle in Time or the book and the series A Wrinkle in Time because they talk about angels being these creatures with all these eyes and whatever. And that was never introduced to me, which... I mean, okay. I don't know that you need to necessarily introduce this concept to kids.
• 5:32
  It's kinda weird. But it... That was the first time I ever heard of anything like this. And turns out angels in the Bible are strange. They're strange.
• 5:44
  Yeah.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: If you just look at the portions of the Bible where Mary was approached by an angel or, you know, angel imagery out there in the world. It seems just pretty straightforward. Person with wings. Cool. They might be glowing.
• 6:01
  Cool. Are they in the sky? Sure. Maybe. I don't know.
• 6:05
  But they're not like that.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Right. So I think all of those are... Like, if somebody said Angel, all of what you described probably would come to people's minds. Immediately, thinking Victoria's Secret, Halloween costumes, little babies on ceilings. Oh, Precious Moments.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Precious Moments.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: There used to be a Precious Moment movie. We would watch it at Christmas time. It was Timmy's gift. Oh, I pulled that out of nowhere. Timmy's gift.
• 6:34
  I'm so proud of myself.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: Think think of. I have a walnut.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: If you haven't seen that, it's classic. Go watch it. Okay. So let's talk about what the Bible has to say about angels because there's... There is a good amount in there.
• 6:52
  So first, the Hebrew word malach and the Greek word angelos both mean messenger. So angelos would be where we got our word angel. And it doesn't describe... Neither of them describe a specific type of angel. It's just a general word messenger.
• 7:10
  So our word angel comes from that sort of general concept. But the Bible has several very specific heavenly beings that it talks about, and a lot of them come from Ezekiel, actually. So in Ezekiel one and then again in Ezekiel 10, we talk about cherubims. Now these are nightmare fuel. I'm gonna be totally honest with you.
• 7:35
  If you really think about what this is practically, it's frightening. So it's described as a being with four faces, one of a human, a lion, an eagle, and I think a ram. And it's also got four wings, and there are, like, wheels with eyes around them. It's a whole thing. Right?
• 7:58
  So Ezekiel is having visions, and this is what he's experiencing. And
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: it's a lot. Be honest with me. Did Ezekiel get ahold of a mushroom from somewhere? Maybe. And things were happening.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Something was happening. But I mean, that's... It's a lot. Now there are kind of callbacks to other faiths when you talk about this because we can think of other religions of the time that had gods or heavenly figures that were kind of this mishmash of creatures.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: I think about my art history classes where we did look at different imagery from different religions and their gods and their idols and whatever. And it is similar to what these descriptions are. Kinda like multiple faces, a combination of human attributes and animal attributes. Mhmm. And it's interesting.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And we'll get into a little bit too about is this meant to be taken literally or is it sort of figurative? Because you could definitely say that if it's figurative, that Ezekiel was pulling from other influences. We know that the early church did that kind of often. Mhmm.
• 9:12
  We do it now. Now the second type of angel is in Isaiah six, and that's the Seraphim. This is the one that would have been in A Wrinkle in Time. This is the super weird one that you're hearing about on the Internet. So it has six wings, two that cover its face, two that cover its feet, and two that fly it around.
• 9:34
  We need multiple wings. Yeah. To to cover things.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah. To cover things, to get us places, to do octopus things. Yes. I don't know. Octopi have eight.
• 9:47
  And maybe they had hands too. Maybe. Well, they did have feet.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: We know that because wings are covering them. And they have lots and lots of eyes, and they are surrounding God's throne at all times. There's smoke involved. There's... They're on fire all the time, and they're constantly praising God.
• 10:06
  That's their... Sort of their purpose is to surround the throne of God and to praise him all the time, which is a lot. It's a lot happening for the Seraphim. I don't really know
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: what to do with that. I'm just gonna... I'm gonna set it there and leave it be, I'm gonna move on.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: And these would have been creatures that, for the most part, humanity is not interacting with. These are not what we think of when we think of the angel coming to Mary or the many other times that angels come down. These were... If we're taking them literally, very specific versions of angels for more specific purposes. Now, obviously, Ezekiel is interacting with them in a vision.
• 10:50
  Isaiah here is kind of interacting with them because he says one put a burning coal to his lips. But these are unsettling. And I think when we think about angels, if we talk about what we just talked about, those seem nice.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: When I think about angels, I think about singing. What? Who... Jamie something sang that. I don't know.
• 11:17
  When I think about singing, it's a heavenly tune. Anybody listen to country back in
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: the nineties? Okay. So then there's the third type of angel that the Bible talks about. And this happens throughout the Bible, where angels come down and interact with humans in such a human form that people just sort of think of them as people. There's not a bunch of eyes coming at them.
• 11:45
  No. It's like special people. Right. So this happens in Genesis where two angels visit Lot. It happens in Hebrews where people are entertaining angels, they don't even realize that they're not human.
• 11:57
  You can talk about Mary and Gabriel coming to Mary, where they're angelic beings. They're coming directly from God. They're messengers of God, But they're not... They don't look different than people. They're also not described as having wings.
• 12:16
  So when we think of that Christmas scene, you know, where Gabriel is flying up 10 feet above Mary's head for some reason and talking at her, that's not that's not described in the Bible. Could it be what happened? Sure. But that is not specifically described in the Bible. That actually comes from later artistic tradition.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: Mhmm.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: And these angels, I think, are where we get more of the comforting aspect of things, where they seem a little bit nicer. But that's not really always how it goes because you've got second kings. In second kings 19, an angel strikes down a 185,000 people in an Assyrian camp. Rude. Yeah.
• 13:04
  That's a little rough. You've got several instances throughout the Bible where angels are coming down kind of in a wrathful way, kind of as messengers of God, but as messengers with a tough message.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: They're like, guess what? God's pissed.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: And I'm gonna tell you about it. So how did we get from that to super attractive angels that look nice and nurturing and have wings and... Soft. I feel like when I
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: think about all these different kinds of angels, I kind of think about it like these are different creatures of heavenly realm.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Mhmm.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: Right? Almost like all of the different types of animals that So we have we have birds and fish and mammals and, I don't know, the platypus. Which, those are things that we understand. Right. But if you try to describe them, they're a little bit confusing.
• 14:03
  Particularly think the all these different types of angels, kind of like that, but more mystical.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That's such a good way to put that. Thank you. Thank you. Things that would be...
• 14:16
  You could even say, okay, you know, to us here in North America, certain animals are normal, and we could describe them to you easily. But if you lived in a world where the Internet wasn't a thing and you weren't exposed to a giraffe, that would seem very bizarre. Would seem like impossibly bizarre.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: Mhmm. But yet, we're all still connected through life. So you have the more human looking Angels, but then you have the crazy ones with... That are made of a bunch of rings and eyes. Right.
• 14:44
  Maybe that's more of, like, a a a... A platypus. Insert animal there. The platypus of heaven.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Yes. Hey. That could be the title of the episode.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Or isn't there some kind of weird sea creature that has a crazy looking eye? It's like a squid and has one big old eye.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: I think it's just a squid. A giant squid perhaps? Maybe. Okay. So how...
• 15:15
  Like I said, let's let's jump back. How did we get to kind of that idealized human, very much like white person view of an angel with the wings and everything. So there's a decent thread we can pull here, and a lot of it comes from ancient Greek and Roman art. So much of our traditions do, But they already included winged divine figures. And so they were associated with this victory.
• 15:49
  They were associated with the divine. And so we kind of just pulled that a little bit over into Christianity because it already made sense to us. It already made sense in people's minds. So we pulled it over, we said, okay. This works for us too.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: And isn't that so human, though? Mhmm. We take something that we absolutely have no business understanding, and we try to force it to fit into our version of reality Mhmm. Into these neat little boxes and order them. But that's not...
• 16:23
  We can't we can't order our wild god.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Mhmm.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Who
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: created so many... When you think about the the amount of things god created on our earth, the variety, the complexity, and the beauty of it, he also created the angels. He also created the heavenly realm. And we don't get that part of the story
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: because it's pre us. We think about angels as always being there, but they weren't always there. Right. They're... They may be infinite, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have a starting point
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Unlike God, who didn't have a starting point. Right.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: And if God was creative with us, we can assume, we can extrapolate from that data, that he was creative when he created heaven too. That he was creative maybe in a totally different way than he was creative here.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: Maybe a little bit more sci fi y.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: Maybe. Maybe the sci fi geeks have
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: it right. He was thinking more like cottagecore for Earth, but more modern for That makes sense.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Now, you can also talk about... So the cherubim, we already talked about how they are lit. They are this four headed creature. Right? And yet, when we talk about cherubs, you think of tiny babies with wings.
• 17:40
  Sistine Chapel. Right. Little chubby naked baby with wings. Shooting an arrow on Valentine's Day, you know, all the things.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: that actually does have some tradition into it as well because Renaissance artists were already doing that. They called it putty, I believe, is how you pronounce it. Like, p u t t I? Yeah. And so that was, like, the round faced child, the perfect little child image, because that said innocence.
• 18:10
  Mhmm. That said perfection. It has all these implications, and we kind of want that for a divine being. We can't necessarily place it all on Jesus, but we can place it on what Jesus surrounds himself with. So let's make angels perfect innocent beings.
• 18:29
  And what is the closest we have to perfect and innocent? Babies. Mhmm. And we just won't let them cry, I guess.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: But then you take that a step further and you think about how we've also kind of feminized
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: the Angels.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: You think about Halloween costumes. You have a slutty little angel, you know? Or you can have a a more innocent angel, I guess.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: But you would rarely see a boy or a man in an angel costume. That wouldn't
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: be a common thing to see. Because it's softer. Right. And it's not considered strong.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Mhmm.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: Even though, absolutely, it is.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Right. Well, we've got images in the bible of the angel Michael defeating Satan and things like that. But then when we see an angel that's more female coded in art, she's often more nurturing. Because there are depictions of male angels in art, but they're often with a sword and, you know, girding their loins and such. What?
• 19:33
  But when you've got a female coated angel, she's hugging children, and she's patting them on the head, and she's nurturing, she's loving, and she's caring, and she's soft.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: She's not smiting you. Yeah. No smoke.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: And so both are protecting in some way, but in very different ways. Because we code physical strength as masculine even in divine beings. Mhmm. And we code emotional protection, safety, comfort as feminine even in divine beings. And you certainly cannot argue with me that, okay, let's say you see the Bible as this patriarchal book.
• 20:20
  It doesn't say that about the angels.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: No. Tell me. The bunch of random rings with 70,000,000,000 eyeballs, is that female or male?
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: There's no way to know. I I can't see their genitalia.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: We don't know where it might be. No. No way to know.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: And I think the only way that we're comfortable... I say we. I mean, the broader church. With this female idea of power is if it's soft. Here's a very powerful being, but it can only be powerful if it's sort of soft and not complex, not threatening, whatever.
• 21:06
  And so we have even, you know, in the Renaissance period, there was some imagery of male angels. And we know obviously that the Bible talks about male angels. But now, today, you're very rarely gonna see that male imagery. It's almost exclusively female now. And I have a theory as to why.
• 21:25
  Are you ready? Woah. The powerful like to stay powerful. Right? Who's powerful in the church?
• 21:35
  Men are powerful in the church.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: No way. Ow. I fell off my chair.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: I know that's not something we've ever mentioned before. The shock. It's shocking. And men have often dominated women, not just in the religious space, obviously, just throughout the world. We deal with it all the time.
• 21:55
  We're certainly dealing with it in our society right now. But that's something that they can control. Right? If you're already powerful, it's easier to control the person who isn't powerful right at that moment. But an angelic being, you're not really above.
• 22:14
  That's something that's above you. Now I'm not saying that necessarily that's how God sees it, but in a way, that's kind of how... We like ranking systems. Right? It would be God, angels, humans to us.
• 22:30
  Well, the person in power doesn't like to know that there's someone above them.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: They want that direct access to god. They want
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: to be buddy buddy right up there. So the only way that it can make sense to have this being who is perhaps higher up in the ranking system than you are Or at least in the food chain. Yeah. Is to make them, in a way, weak. To make them soft.
• 23:00
  To make them nonthreatening. Because if they're nonthreatening, well, then I can sort of manipulate them to be whatever I want them to be.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: They're there to protect me because I'm the priority here. And we've talked about this before. Anything that they see as traditionally feminine Mhmm. They also associate as weakness. Right.
• 23:20
  Even though we know, just because something is more traditionally feminine does not absolutely mean it's weak. Mhmm.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: Caring and compassion, Weakness. For And I really think that that's what it boils down to, why we have feminized this concept of angels because it's impossible for the leaders of a church who think that they are at the top of the food chain, who even try and box God into being who they want him to be, to tell him who he's gonna be, they can't have that angelic being. And if the angelic being is masculine, then it's a threat in their world. Then it has some authority in their world. If it's feminine, it doesn't have authority.
• 24:11
  Think about that. Think about the far reaching implications of that. Okay. I don't know
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: if we talked about this last week or not. But like when a girl is out... A girl. When a girl's out there in the wild, and a man approaches her, and she doesn't wanna be approached, the simple word no is not enough for them. Mhmm.
• 24:31
  But if you say, I have a boyfriend Right. That has the potential to stop them. Because even an imaginary man has more authority than you as a physical woman right in front of me.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: So it's the same thing here then. Even as a divine being that we can't see or interact with, really, if it's a male, they have to respect it. They have to defer to it. If it's a female, they don't think that they have to. No.
• 25:03
  And I really think we... If we pulled apart so much of our faith and looked at it this way, we would see so much of this. I mean, we already do, obviously. But even more, if we pulled it apart and said, if we just respected women as equal creations of God, how much more of God's creation could we Experience. Interact, experience?
• 25:26
  Yeah. It opens up something very different, and yet we're not willing to do it. I actually had somebody comment on TikTok the other day. I posted a video. I've been very aggressive on
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: TikTok lately. No way.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: I'm so sorry, world. But I posted basically saying, my husband is not the head of the household. He's just not. It's the dog. Some days it is.
• 25:53
  But you guys know that. We've talked about this. That's not how my husband and I live our lives. We don't have a head of the household. We work together on things.
• 26:00
  We are a team. And it's beautiful and lovely, and it works really well. And this woman, and it was a woman, hopped on and was arguing with me and telling me that just because it works doesn't mean it's from God. And kinda went off on different verses and things like that. And how if my husband wasn't being the head of the household, then he was sinning.
• 26:26
  And if I wasn't pushing him into that role, then I was also sinning.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: How about we talk about this? Mind your business. Also, head of household. Head traditionally means source. If...
• 26:41
  We've done this in episode on the word kephale. Mhmm. Which where we get the word head from, which means the source, the start of a river or something like that. That would be God.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: Yep. Yep. It would. Not either of you. Yeah.
• 26:57
  Okay. I actually told her that our content probably wasn't for her. Because here's the thing, guys. I match energies. And so if you are wanting to have a respectful, discussion, I'm there for it, even if we have different opinions.
• 27:10
  But if you're gonna tell me me and my husband are sinning, we're gonna have some words.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And those words aren't gonna be... They're not
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: gonna be loving and caring. Sorry. But that actually leads us super well into the next section. And that is a verse... I'm sorry.
• 27:28
  Not a verse. A poem from the eighteen hundreds. Yeah. 1854 by Coventry Patmore. And I think we've referenced it before.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: I think I'm gonna name my firstborn Coventry.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: Your firstborn has, like, 17 different names at this point. True. And you don't wanna birth anything. So Also true. So this poem is called The Angel in the House, and it had an astonishing amount of influence over the world at the time and over the church still.
• 28:00
  And you don't even know it. I'm gonna give you just the highlights of this poem because it is exceptionally long, and I really just don't feel like reading it. But the biggest takeaways from it are that a woman's happiness comes from pleasing her husband. Oh, does it? And this is described as the natural order of things.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: And Coventry is a man. Right?
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: Yes. I believe so. It says, man must be pleased, but him to please is woman's pleasure. So again, it makes it this natural statement. And if it's not your pleasure to please your husband, now you're weird.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that, like, chocolate didn't exist back then.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: Apparently not. It's a big
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: problem Or like for a massage.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: So not only are you expected to serve men, you're expected to enjoy it the whole time. You're you're the nineteen fifties housewife. You're thrilled about this. And if you don't, there's something wrong with you. Right.
• 28:54
  Now the second part is that the ideal woman is almost superhumanly good. So morally... Like, she has this incredible moral character.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: Women have had such an... A journey in the religious space. Yes. Because for a while, they were like, no, they're too sexual and sinful. Mhmm.
• 29:13
  Right? Then all of a sudden, they're like, no, no, no, no. They're spiritually just superior to men. Right. They can't hold any authority over men, but they're good.
• 29:22
  They're just naturally very Yeah. And now, they're like, well, they can barely turn their heads to breathe.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: And this is why they were called... The poem is Angel. That's And why we're going into it. Because we see angels as superhumanly good. And women, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, are supposed to be pure and ideal and placed on this pedestal of beauty and wonder.
• 29:52
  So now they can't be human. And that's the really hard part is basically people will say, like, can't we make an assumption about a group of people if it's a good one? No. No. You can't.
• 30:05
  Because everybody doesn't fit in that box. If women are superhumanly good and they have no flaws and they can't be immoral at any moment, Now they just have to be this one tiny thing.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: And you feel like, again, if I don't fit into this little box, there's something wrong with And other people think there's something wrong with me. And where do I go from here?
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Right. And I think so many of us have felt that. Because if you've deconstructed as a woman, probably it was because you didn't fit in the box. Probably, it was because the box was so small, and you looked at it
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: and you said, I can't do this anymore. And again, that's just a human way to organize things. Mhmm. Women are feminine and soft and good. And men are strong and they provide and they're warriors.
• 31:00
  Mhmm. And if you think about it, how limiting is that to our Creator? Right. Who thought of all of these creatures and all of these angels and all of these plants and all of these planets and all of these stars to just be like, okay, no, there's just gonna be two types of people, though, because that's enough. Yep.
• 31:22
  I'm gonna give them free will too, but like, no. No.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: But stay in the box. Yeah. Don't leave the box. Free will with limitations. Another aspect of this poem was that men and women are assigned different roles in love and marriage.
• 31:38
  So Love and marriage. Love and marriage. So the poem centers in a lot of ways on a man's experience of courtship and marriage. And the ideal woman is not presented from her own perspective, is not presented as sort of a human in and of herself. She's presented through his eyes, through what he's looking for, so the object of his desire.
• 32:03
  And so because she is from his perspective, she is shaped by what he wants. She becomes a figure, a nonhuman creation,
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: but not what she truly is. Exactly.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: There was also at this time... So this is Victorian era, and there was already sort of this shape happening around women. Things were changing for women. Prior to this, there was not... I'm not...
• 32:31
  Certainly not about to say, like, oh, there weren't definitive roles, but it was different. Society was a little bit different, and Victorian era was starting to shape this idea of a woman being more domestic, a woman being more nurturing. And this poem really leaned hard into that. So he didn't single handedly create this. It was a product of its time, but it sort of, like, stuck everything together in one and was a convenient way for a church to use it, for society at large to use it, and to say, this isn't just what Coventry Patmore wanted.
• 33:11
  This is what God wants. Because this is the ideal woman, and God would want the ideal woman. Therefore, we're gonna assign this thing that a man named Coventry wrote to God. And then Virginia Woolf came along, and it... This was in 1931, so there was about ninety ish years between when it was written and when she came along.
• 33:36
  So this had a lot of influence. Over a course of ninety years, this is still being remembered in society. It's still being talked about. And so she gives a speech called Professions for Women. And she described this poem as a presence in her life.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: Like a bad... Like a demon presence? Like an... Oh, yeah. Kinda.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: Like an always staring over your shoulder presence. Grim reaper kinda waiting for you presence. Like, okay. This is the expectation of who you're supposed to be. And she felt it.
• 34:08
  And I relate to that so much because you feel it. You feel all those expectations on you like a weight. And if you're like me and if you're like Brie, you almost feel itchy in your own skin. Like, I can't do this. I can't be this.
• 34:23
  Either itchy or completely deflated. Mhmm.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: Like, there's no way I can measure up to what the world is wanting of me. So why do I even try? Yeah.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: And so Virginia Woolf talks about how she basically had to kill this angel. It says the angel wanted her to be charming and sympathetic and pure and unwilling to express offensive opinions. You know? Like, that expectation still sits on us. And it said...
• 34:55
  Wolf wrote, had I not killed her, she would have killed me. I think that's so powerful. And it's this imagery of killing an angel, which is tough,
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: a little brutal.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But maybe brutal like the Angels were often brutal too. That's not a real angel. Yeah. If you don't kill some of these expectations that never came from God in the first place, you will not move forward.
• 35:27
  You will not live the life God wants you to live. And he has so much for you. There is so much out there for you to do. We've talked about this before. God didn't create you and then find a thing for you to do.
• 35:38
  There was a u shaped hole in the universe, and God created exactly the person needed to fill it. He created you because the world needed you very specifically. And sometimes it doesn't have to be these big overarching things like, you're gonna cure cancer.
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: Mhmm. You know? And boom, you're there. Sometimes it's just relationships. Mhmm.
• 36:02
  There's different people in your life that benefit so much more for just the pure fact that you're alive. Mhmm.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: Now here's a really interesting discussion question that I wanna talk about. And we haven't prepped this one, so we'll see where it goes. Why do we call women angels when they're doing something for someone else? You angel. But not when they're exercising authority.
• 36:27
  Oh, ow. That made me feel uncomfortable. We do that. Right? Mhmm.
• 36:34
  When you bring dinner to someone who's sick, when you pick up someone else's kid from sports, when you, I don't know, do someone's grocery shopping for them.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: Sacrifice. Right.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: We call that angelic. Oh, you're such an angel. You're such an angel. You're soft. You're comforting.
• 36:57
  But when she exercises her God given authority... Or let's say... Let's even go more spiritual with it. Let's say you're sharing the gospel with someone. Let's say you're getting up and preaching.
• 37:08
  Let's say you're doing a podcast or you're defending your faith or any of those things.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: Ripping down the patriarchy.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: You know, all that stuff. Casual. We don't say, oh, you're an angel. No. You're more so called a menace.
• 37:27
  Yeah. We get that a lot.
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: Or a heretic. Right word? Yeah.
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: Or Jezebel. We get that too. That's fun. Or a
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: witch with a b.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: It's just interesting. It's just an interesting thought that we've softened angels. We've softened this concept to be feminine, and now we perpetuate it. We continue it on in our culture even when we don't realize it. As a feminist, it wouldn't occur to me if I said, oh, you're such an angel.
• 38:00
  Not that that's really, like, part of my vocabulary, but it wouldn't occur to me that that has gender expectations tied to it. Mhmm. And I'm not saying everyone means that when they say it, but it does have gendered expectations.
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: Also, you probably wouldn't say that to a man. No.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: I don't... I could not imagine a scenario where you would. Because you don't expect men to be nurturing, and you only use it in nurturing contexts.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: And it would almost sound offensive towards a man. If he came over and shoveled your driveway...
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: That sounds a little dirty.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: He wouldn't then be like, oh my gosh, you're such an angel. Mhmm. You would probably be like, my hero. Mhmm.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: Now, for our last little bit, we wanted to talk about something very modern. Oh. And that would be the Victoria's Secret Angels. I know Victoria's Secret. I think you've sang, like, four times in this episode at this point.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: A lot of songs about angels.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: So Victoria's Secret introduced its angels concept in the late nineties. And the wings were on the runway, like, the big crazy wings in 1998. And it became a symbol, not just of the brand, but of sexy women. I mean, there's all kinds of references in, like, nineties TV of the Victoria's Secret catalog hiding under a kid's bed or whatever. You know?
• 39:27
  And it's an interesting context because you've got this Victorian angel from that poem we just talked about who was modest and selfless and devoted to her husband. Domestic. Yeah. And now you have this very different image where an angel is celebrated for beauty, for sex appeal, for glamour, for a perfect physical image. And those were very contrasting ideas.
• 39:58
  They don't fit together. Except that a little bit they do. Because what have we turned women into? Objects. Societally, we've turned women into objects.
• 40:10
  So not only is the expectation now to be selfless and devoted to your husband, it's to be sexy. Attractive towards your husband as well. A physical ideal. And that's why you see things like... We've talked about this before, but churches having weight loss groups for women.
• 40:32
  Never for men. Weight loss groups for women. Why? Is it because they need help from a health perspective? No.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: It's because if you told women they were good enough, the whole system would collapse. Mhmm.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: So now, not only as women do we have this expectation of being soft and feminine in order to be this perfect angel or a perfect Proverbs 31 woman. We also have to be sexy. We also have to be available to our husbands at any time. We have to be glamorous. Not too glamorous, but glamorous.
• 41:15
  Society has heaped all of this on our heads and just keeps adding more. Every decade, it's one more thing. My skincare now has to be on point. Oh my gosh.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: When we introduced eyebrows.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, Takes up so much of my time. That's so annoying. And I think it is interesting that we used... Victoria's Secret used this sort of heavenly image of purity to now sell sexy clothes. It's weird.
• 41:47
  It is a contrast. But it speaks to where we jumped as a society, to what we expected of women as a society. Who benefits from all of this? Women sit in the muck, in the garbage of these expectations.
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: Who benefits when women have to meet an ideal that changes all the time? Who benefits from everything? I don't wanna stand on my soapbox for too long, but we do have a podcast, and we're nearly 200 episodes. Yeah. We've been on
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: the soapbox a long time. It's always men's. It is wild how much we've allowed this to happen. And some of it has come because women were stripped of power for so long.
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: But
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: we allow these gendered expectations, and we almost fight for them.
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: Well, even in the way that lady commented on your TikTok. Mhmm. Because if they believe what you're saying Mhmm. Then that means their entire life has been alive. Yeah.
• 43:05
  That all of the things they've done up until this point have been for nothing. All the suffering that they've endured has been for nothing. But I'm here to tell you, it's okay. Leave the past in the past. Okay?
• 43:21
  Let's move forward. Don't you want to just grab some women by the shoulders and shake them? Yes. I'm like, open your eyes. Mhmm.
• 43:31
  We serve an amazing god. And if you dig into it at all, you'll realize how much he prioritized women. If you read the original language, not helper, but ezra konego, what that means. Or if you look at how Jesus treated the women who surrounded Him completely differently than of his time.
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: And you look at how men are treating women now?
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: I think the suffering is the key to why women keep pushing this narrative. Because I would love to say that it's just men, but women push it in a way that keeps them safe because they suffer, and they believe that the suffering comes from God. And that hurts me because my god, the one that I look to, the one that wrote this Bible that said Jesus loves you. God loves you. God created you.
• 44:36
  That God doesn't want me to suffer. That God doesn't want you to suffer. No. Does suffering happen sometimes? Absolutely.
• 44:41
  We live in a sinful world. But he doesn't desire it for you. He desires good things for his children. And yet, these women that are sitting in these marriages... Like, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about Brian Savay and how he controls his wife's social media and what she sees and what she interacts with.
• 45:01
  And I know a lot of women in that type of relationship, And not one of them has ever been happy. Not one of them has ever been content. And yet, they will fight for that lifestyle. Because if that lifestyle is wrong, then all the suffering that they've gone through was for nothing. All the suffering that they attributed to God and made holy didn't give them extra jewels in their crown for heaven.
• 45:32
  It was just making God sad. That's a lot to pull apart.
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: Or you look at throughout history like, okay, man is the provider. No. Men... God wants man to provide for the home. Why?
• 45:46
  Mhmm. Traditionally, it's it's not that women can't provide for themselves. Look at what we're doing out there. Right. It's that men have limited the ability for women to provide for themselves.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: Mhmm. Which is why we see a higher divorce rate now that women are stepping into the workforce. And I actually really celebrate that because I think it means that women are not staying in super toxic relationships. We veered a good bit off the path So sorry. This particular episode.
• 46:15
  But I do think it all pulls together because we are a feminist podcast, so we're gonna go there most of the time. And there are a lot of gendered expectations on divine beings for some very unknown reason. And we don't know a lot about the angels is the reality.
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: Oh, I just thought of something.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: Alright. I'm ready.
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: Men look at themselves like they are made in the image of God. Mhmm. Right? They are close to God. Right.
• 46:46
  Do you think that's why they look at women as angels? Because they're like a step lower?
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: That's a good point.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: Look at you and your wisdom today. Well, it's because I've had two cups of coffee.
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: That'll do it. Mhmm. Brie woke me up this morning with more energy than I think, like, my four year old has. She was bouncing up and down, running up and down the hallways, singing songs. I was not running up and down the hallway.
• 47:14
  She climbed on the ceiling at one point. My head spun around.
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: I did a backbend. I started jittering around.
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: She really did have, like, a shocking amount of energy considering that she was out late and none of us ever have any energy because we're adults in the twenty twenty six years.
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: And I'm a 100,000 years old. Yeah. That's a big problem. At least that's what my knees are telling me.
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: But then I came in a little bit later to her room, and she was in a full coma. So I don't really know what happened.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: I got up with enough energy to say, I need a nasty little breakfast sandwich and iced coffee. And I consumed those things. And then when I laid back in my bed, I was like, well, okay. I'm good.
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: Alright. That was the day.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: Go back to
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: bed. We're done. It's 10:00, but we're done. And we sleep till noon. But that did not happen, sadly, for her.
• 48:09
  I woke her up again.
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: Because my sister's the worst.
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: I... We had to go
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: to our parents' house. Wasn't me. Women are supposed to support women.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I don't support you in sleeping till noon.
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: Just because you like your suffering doesn't mean I should suffer.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. I will try to be a better feminist and sister from now on. I wish you would. However, I probably won't. And next Saturday, I will likely sit on you to wake you up.
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: Fantastic news. Next week, we're talking about demons just like my sister. We're talking about the devil. Oh, yeah. My sister.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: Hurtful, but spectacular transition. But a way to jump right off of Angels. Right? So true. Mhmm.
• 48:59
  Yeah. We wanted to talk about... Because we're still in spooky season. And what is spookier than the devil?
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: The little angel on your shoulder and the little devil on
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: your shoulder.
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: You know what
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: that makes me think of? Emperor's New Groove. Yes. So that's your assignment for the week. That'll really inform the next episode.
• 49:18
  Watch The Emperor's New Groove. Report back. Let me know how you felt about it. You know what? We all need some silliness in our lives.
• 49:25
  A masterpiece. It is synaptacular. So you should watch it. And then next week, we'll talk about Kronk.
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: No. No. He's... Well, he did dress up as the devil.
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: He did. He dressed up as the devil and an angel. Okay. So there you go. No.
• 49:40
  But we're gonna talk about the devil because there are so many misconceptions about the devil himself, about what hell looks like. We... We've already talked about what hell looks like, so we'll kind of talk about that a little bit too.
• 49:53
  Speaker 2: About him being the ruler over hell Right. And how that really is not depicted in the Bible. Mhmm.
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: And it... Like, just being a fallen angel in and of himself, I think we see the devil as, like, God's favorite angel who then fell. And that's actually not biblical. Of course, we know that he did sin and fall away from God, but being, like, some perfect favorite angel is not in there. And so we'll talk about that.
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: We'd be making some stuff up.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: Not us. Society at large. Yeah. We never make anything up. We are a 100% accurate a 100% of the time.
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: And we never lie. No. Not ever. Not ever.
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: Alright. Well, this has been a fun and very feminist episode, surprisingly. Let's go
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: get our halos.
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't want that. I don't like hair pieces. They mess with the curls.
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: Well, they're supposed to float, so it's really...
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But what if it falls and it gets tangled in a curl? The other day, my ring got caught in my earring as I was washing my hair. Was a bad time.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: A lot of times, my shirts get caught on this earring over here. And I have to stop everything that I'm doing
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: and cry for a while. Yeah. Alright. So tune in next week for that. If you don't follow follow us on social media, make sure that you do.
• 51:11
  We're on TikTok and Instagram, And we like to make a lot of waves, but we would also love to chat with you because it's fun sometimes if you're nice to us.
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: As some might say, waves of mercy. I... No. Don't think waves of praise.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: We don't like to create waves
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: of mercy. Everywhere I look. Goodbye.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: Okay. Well, Brie is gonna keep singing for the whole night, I'm gonna have to deal with that. But I'll let you sign off. Alright. Love you.
• 51:41
  Bye. Bye.