Mormons React to Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Season 3 Pt. 1 | Ep. 2088

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, Shawn Dillin. It is November 25th, 2025. And we're here for it. We're here for season three of secret lives of Mormon wives being shown on Hulu. For those who have been living in a cave somewhere or haven't been following Mormon stories, secret lives of Mormon wives is probably the hottest. Show on all of streamed media, possibly, but it's it's huge. And it's all about Mormon women who basically live in Utah, Mormon or ex-Mormon women who live in Utah. We've covered it a few times on the show in the past season three's just released. And what might be different about how we approach share Mormon stories, secret lives versus other channels is we're Mormons or ex-Mormons reacting to the show. Show focusing on kind of the Mormon angle or the Mormon perspective. And I'm not aware of other people really doing that, except for Haley, who actually has these people on her show, right, Haley? Some of them, yes. If you guys covered secret lives, submit that. Well, it's been tough because Tanner refuses to watch it, but I did just film a video of my friend Aurora at the weekend. All right. And Aurora, should I know who that is? I'm just good Aurora McCorzen and just like a Utah influence. Okay, okay. Well, that's Samantha from Zeppel and the shelf. And of course, we have Haley Rolf from Girls Camp. Do you call it a podcast or YouTube channel? Girls Camp podcasts. Okay. Yeah. And we have Alyssa. Oh, I don't want to use the wrong name. Alyssa with back. We have Alyssa with back. Hello on Mormon stories. Welcome back. Thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah. All right. So we only covered, we only did one episode on season two. Should I feel ashamed or embarrassed about that? Only like a little. I think that was too short. I don't have anything quick to say in response. I should also say I'm so excited for the first time. I think to have joining us from an undisclosed satellite Mormon stories office somewhere in the UK. We have Brooklyn Alden, who is our video editor, but she's so into Mormon pop culture. I forced Brooklyn to join us. Hey, Brooklyn Alden. Hello, you're absolutely correct. I love reality TV and X Mormonism. So I'm happy to join this one. So is this Brooklyn? I mean, I have a horrible memory sometimes. So have you ever appeared on any Mormon stories episode ever? Not once ever. Not once. No, but you know, Mormon lives is what will take me out and bring me out into the public for so. Yeah, no, first time. And you've been working for Mormon stories. What five years, six years, how many years? About five years. Yeah. How do you escaped coming on the show in five years? You have with great complication. No, I like to be behind the computer after the film he has taken place, but I really enjoy all of your secret lives and Mormon wives episodes. So happy to be here. It's like the Greek chorus to this one. You know, just that's the literature reference. Somebody help me out. What is your British? These two seem like they would know that. Sorry, I'm scared of reference already, but that's like, you know, in the group theater, when you have the audience on the stage to help the real audience know how to react. So I'm just reacting to you guys. You're already given these super sophisticated takes, Brooklyn. Alright, well, we want to we want to also welcome our live audience. It's super fun to have you. We hope to incorporate comments or questions. The best way to show your comment or question is super chat that helps support us financially, and it also helps helps your comments stand out amongst all the other comments really quickly. Mormon stories exist because of the generous donations of our viewers and listeners. If you're donor, thank you. We couldn't do it without you. If you're not a donor and you value this content, you can go to Mormon stories.org/donate, become a monthly donor. And we'll keep providing this content. Alright. So our plan is to have two episodes on season three. I'm a little worried. We're not it's with there's too much. There's a lot. Right. We can almost need an episode. Her episode. We can control ourselves a little. Wait a three or four hour episode for episode. Exactly. Yeah. I think we did that for season one. Yeah. We were in horror on season one. We left you no stone. Absolutely. Well, anyway, um, today is part one of an undetermined number of episodes on season three of "Secretless More Life." Really quickly. Brook, would you want to tell us a little bit about yourself or do you want to remain mysterious and anonymous? I can share a little bit about myself. I don't mind. Yeah. Not too private. Yeah. So my name is Brooklyn Alden. I grew up primarily in Park City, Utah. So right in the middle of Mormonism, you know, I grew up as I would call it very orthodox Mormon. And I left the church. My whole family left the church when I was 18 years old. So this year is actually my 10th year out of the church. Um, and yeah, I've worked for John for the last five years. And I will say that I think the church looks very different in the 10 years since I've been out. So it's interesting to watch this stuff and see what it's like now. Yeah. All right. Well, that's super fun. It's good to have you. Um, Alyssa, remind us a little bit about you. Alyssa, um, I like reality TV. I teach university English. I'm a writer. I have an essay that was just just published an exponent that kind of talks about motherhood. So that ties in here just a little bit. And I'm just happy to happy to chat. You're a double mom. Is that right? I am. Yeah. Just had my second. And have you been on since having your second? No. This is my inaugural. I had him like a week after we see this. That's partially why we didn't finish season two because you had a baby. Because I had a baby. Yeah. Well, congrats. Great to be back. Thanks. Happy to be here. Uh, really quickly. Haley. Do you want to remind us who you are? Of course. So as John said, I have a podcast called Girls Camp Podcast, a podcast, a YouTube channel, secret lives in Mormon wives is really my bread and butter because I love talking about Mormonism. I love talking about the overlap between Mormonism and influencer culture, especially. And I'm also a former Mormon wife and mother, myself, like Alyssa. Wait, you're not a former wife and you're not a former mother, right? A former Mormon wife and Mormon mother. Still a still a wife and mother. Okay. No longer Mormon. Well, good clarification. Yeah. Your next Mormon Internet culture you never know. So true. Very true. I had to make that clarification. Sammy, tell us about you. Remind us. Yeah. I'm one half of self on the shelf. I am ex-moment. I also used to be a moment wife. And I'm not a mother, but I love reality TV. Well, you're wiser than many moms, I know. How's that? It's really nice to say John. Great to be back. Yeah. Great to be back. All right. Well, now that we've done introductions, Alyssa, we're going to have you kind of be the guide for today. I'm going to run the camera and y'all can call on me when you wish. How does that sound? Perfect. Hey, sounds good. So let's just start in, you know, we're doing episodes one through five right now, as much as we can. Let's just start in the juiciest part of the first half of the season in Jesse's affair. So a lot of what we see just at the beginning of Jesse's relationship is Layla confronting Jesse in the car. Is that an influencer event or something like that because Marceana had told her that he had had sex with Jesse. So Layla confronts Jesse to see if that's actually true. She immediately confesses to having an affair. She says she kissed him twice. She says that they had an emotional affair for a couple of weeks, but she is adamant that they didn't have sex. This becomes a really big storyline. So what do you want to say to us about this like the first episode or initial thoughts on the affair on Jesse's take on everything. Yeah, I mean, I think this, as we see this all unfold, we learn a lot about patriarchy. We learn a lot about gender dynamics within Mormon culture within Mormon marriages. The very beginning, the first thing that comes to mind in this like initial when we're finding out about the affair is that Jesse is, she is honest about it. She comes out and says, yes, there was enough air. It was exactly this. The sex part was not true. She seems willing to talk about it, take ownership. Jordan's word for using. Yeah, her husband Jordan's words. And yeah, she seems like she, I guess I think it's just important to mention that she really owns up to it and seems like she's working on taking accountability and moving forward from that point. Any other panelists responses to that initial disclosure. How did we feel. Well, I so, you know, obviously in the early promos for secret lies Mormon wives, the word soaking would come up. And, you know, I think of soaking is just a placeholder for this idea of like Mormon sex versus Mormon not sex. And so she's claiming she didn't have sex, but she had an emotional affair, but the kiss. She said, didn't he say there was some stains on his shorts. And so like for me, that introduced this whole idea of where they trying to do that very Mormon provo BYU, rexpert kind of thing where they were trying to like have as much enjoyment as they could without technically violating some sort of boundary. Am I making this up or was that there was it in the first episode where we where he said, oh, I just thought we had sex because there was a come stain in my underwear. They come stain on momens race. Yeah. Well, was it that episode. Oh, I just love the come stain reference on Mormon stories. That's definitely first. I've seen a lot of episodes. Yeah, there's like a Monica Lonsky situation going on now. We're gonna have to figure out. I think a rule line that we see with this affair that we saw in the past two seasons of secret lives of Mormon wives is there seems like there's this really intense need to have like very specific details of things that have happened if it is of a sexual nature. And I feel like that comes out in this affair as well because Marciano claimed there was sex, Jesse claims there wasn't sex. So you have all these people getting into like the nitty gritty sexual details, which is kind of, you know, harkens back to the initial swinging scandal when there was so much talk about what exactly happened physically. And to me that rings very Mormon because it is similar to sitting down in a bishop's office and having to say with exact specificity what happened. And I think that yeah, I mean obviously on reality TV, I think they kind of play into the salacious details, but I also think there's something Mormon about that of needing to know exactly what happened. Doesn't it seem like there's more curiosity about the specifics of that than like, okay, what was the emotional environment you were in to make you make those decisions like that's what seems more interesting to me. Yeah, but there's a lot of focus on just like the specifics of the sexual activity. Yeah, and I think kind of like what you were saying John about how we're like relating this back to the linguistic arguments that we tend to do in Mormonism on what is sex, what is and how far can you go before you have to talk to your bishop can we go right up to that line and then when you're talking with the bishop, you have to be really specific about what you did and you know depending upon your answers that will determine your role in the repentance process and just feels very checklist item. And it seems like that is what a lot of the women and the men in this season are more comfortable talking about, which is interesting they're more comfortable reading these, you know, salacious text out loud, confessing really openly with each other, but they're much more vague and much more protective of sharing like the emotional problems and the environment of that it seems like that's the line that they're not willing to cross. But everything else is open on the table because that seems like that's in the everyone deserves to know and then and I guess we get to this in a minute too, but just like this need for not only Jesse to confess for the other women to find out like the capital T truth and that it's their job as a friend to be able to determine the capital T truth in order to then proceed on what the next steps are. And so yeah, this also does feel just very reminiscent of like how we react in Mormonism to sexual disclosures and how we almost have to like open our handbook and say okay, if you know if you did have sex, I'll act this way if you didn't have sex, I'll act this way. Can I ask does it matter if they had let's just it sounds like they're trying to avoid intercourse, but they're still having sexual or relationship of some level. All of us have been in commuter relationships does it matter is it is an emotional fair less significant than an actual sexual affair or is emotional fair worse than an actual sexual affair. Should it matter to is it Jordan, whether or not they did or didn't like is that even like I think that's it might not be a Mormon question, but I think it's an important thing I'd love to hear people's perspective on that. I feel like every couple kind of has their own ideas about what would constitute an emotional affair, but also I'm like if you kissed it kind of isn't an emotional affair, you know, I suppose it they kissed and then it went on to be just emotional. I've you know couples have all kinds of lines when it comes to what's an emotional affair because I mean really an emotional affair is that you're seeking inappropriate closeness with someone outside your relationship, but we all need emotional closeness. So it makes sense that that would be something you would do if you're being emotionally abused as Jesse said she has been for years. That seems like an inevitable outcome to be honest like seeking emotional closeness in other ways when you can find it and this is an epic Smith that isn't totally possible to have an emotional fair without kissing at all. Yeah, yeah, the kissing to me makes it I mean more of a fair. Okay, oh, I see, I think I think that emotional affair is interesting here too because what we do know is that they kissed and then that they sexted essentially which is being referred to as an emotional affair, we don't get so much insight until like how emotionally close they did become. But I do think the terminology is interesting here as we are saying with the semantics of everything because when you're throwing these terms around especially when you're talking about a context where you know Jesse she got married very young in the temple, she left her first marriage and very quickly ended up marrying Jordan. So I think you also have these dynamics of yes, these are women in their 20s early 30s, but some of the behaviors and I don't say this. I say this as someone who is part of who also is in this group of people, but I feel like a lot of it felt very. Almost high school to me, like the kinds of questions it was bringing up even the terminology that was being used, it felt less like an adult affair and more like a kind of a situation that my unfold in high school or an early college years, and I think that that makes sense such as indicative of the life path that most of these people have been on where they didn't have exploration. I also see this in a lot of ways as maybe people wanting to explore in ways that they didn't before, but you know, now they're married and have children. Yeah, I mean, I think as Mormons unfortunately we're all just so sexually stunted and I think it comes out not just in the behaviors, but just in the conversations the way this sex is talked about the way the relationships I talked about the fact that these people are navigating serious trauma, serious relationships, all whether. They're caring for multiple children and some of them are 25 years old like there's just so many factors at play here that I think also make it more difficult for them to be able to navigate and healthy emotionally developed ways. But I do think also that part of what you were saying john about like does it matter I think I agree with what you're saying Sam like it depends upon each person's relationship, whether you know they're definition of both a physical or emotional affair. But I do think once you bring the camera that a woman not only had an affair, but had a sexual affair had sex that raises the stakes a lot just as far as like the reception publicly about you know what the response is going to be about a woman who had sex and kind of the scrawlet letter that's going to go on her, the already was going to, you know, she was going to have for stepping outside of her marriage in any capacity and then you add sex and I think that just the weight of that for women in particular is really heavy. And to me, I think that was at least my assumption was that was what a lot of the panic was coming from for Jesse was, you know, not only is I don't know if Jordan believes me or if he doesn't believe me, but now everybody is going to see me in a very dark light, even darker than they probably already were and I imagine that's terrifying. Yeah, she also says, I mean, I think it's in the very first episode, she says something like I kind of found it a little funny, but she said, you know, in the Mormon culture specifically an affair is really bad, which I think, I mean, I guess the reason I found it a bit silly is because it's like, I think generally speaking that something that you know society, there's a lot of shame attached to and things like that. However, I do think that's a salient point, which is because of how taboo sex is, especially for women, there is this added layer of shame. So I think even for Jesse's sake, she did seem and I understandably so she wanted it to be known, we did not have sex, we only kissed because I think that that will affect inevitably how she's judged, especially by Mormons or Mormon adjacent people. If I can, I don't mean the nitpick, I wrote this down, she actually wrote infidel that she said, infidelity is definitely frowned upon. Why are you laughing? Because of course it is, right? Not just frowned upon, like you get excommunicated, you can get this fellowship, like it's just an extra murder, right? My take on a lot of those lines are like the producers like, okay, how can we get the Mormon angle? What is the Mormon church about cheating? Like, well, yeah, it's definitely frowned upon. Thank you for that exact line because I did chuckle a little because I was like, yeah, to say the very least. But I've been to my interview booth for like 10 hours, just a lot of questions and a hundred percent. I have to say, I totally agree with those last comments and I almost felt like her emphasized it over and over. It was an emotional fair if you want to call it that emotional fair. It came across to me as her trying to like downplay the affair when like John was saying earlier to some people and some relationships, potentially even my own marriage, like I feel like an emotional fair would almost even be more hurtful to me in certain scenarios. I just felt like a lot of downplaying and trying to draw a clear line of like, oh, it didn't go this far. It wasn't sex all this way, you know. And I also thought it was interesting on the comparison you're making to, you know, the culture and Mormonism about where do we draw the line of what is sex and what is not. And I definitely see an element of that in a lot of her responses and kind of what I'm imagining her mental process was through the whole interaction with Marciano. I think there was a lot of that going on really quickly roll call and only for those who want to answer you have two choices. Spouse has sex with another person or spouse falls in love with another person. Do either of you have one you would prefer. I've debated this heavily amongst my friend group and I usually am the odd man out because I feel like I would be hurt more bisexual affair, but I feel like most I'm usually alone in that. So I'm curious what. And it can be partner not spouse. I think I would be hurt more if I had emotional affair, but I think we're the opposite. Yeah, I feel like that tends to be usual, which is understandable. I think yeah spouse, if you're listening don't take that. For Miss neither please, but. Well, just he didn't fall in love with someone else just, you know, it wasn't those two options for her. No, no, no, I was just for the sake of the conversation. I think even though theoretically, I think love is abundant and non exclusive, I do think it would be much, much more challenging if my partner fell in love with someone else. Then had someone else. Yes, definitely. You want to answer you don't have to. I think that was a beautiful way to put it. Samantha and I think I agree with that statement. I probably don't want you to be happening. I personally would be more hurt by falling in love with someone else. Yeah, I think I'm falling love. Especially if it was more than me, you know, I don't even know what that's kind of the main. All right, okay, sorry if I derailed, but this is thank you for your patience with me. That was great. Okay, so so they they discuss this. Things are bad. Jesse lets us know that she told Jordan immediately. Well, by told he looked through her phone, he found out things weren't going well. Is she a reliable narrator? I think so. I think she might be honest. Yeah, she seems like an overly reliable like a very earnest narrator at least where she. I don't think she leaves out any details. It is not hard to believe that he went through her fire. Yeah. Well, regardless, Jordan is understandably upset. So he learned a new word. Amassulated and he's excited to use this frequently, which I'm sure we'll dissect it a moment. So he turns to his good buddy Dakota for some emotional support to confide in. So we have a clip kind of of this conversation, a little bit of it. And what their take is on the whole thing. All right, we'll roll the video. Supermasculating 100%. It would it would do the same to me. Jordan's growing up more than two. The men are the providers. That's what he's always seen his whole life. Now it's completely opposite. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great. But I just think for a man that adds another layer of feeling not enough. There's nothing wrong with it. It's great actually. It wouldn't be rich. Don't get me wrong. No, there's so much laughing and headshaking and cringing articulated voice it. The fact that his wife becoming the primary breadwinner is kind of even a factor in the conversation for him. I just think it's telling why? Because it's like your family came into an enormous amount of wealth that you get to benefit from. But for some reason, that's, I mean, obviously it's showing that these Mormon men are do feel amasculated by not being the ones to earn the most money. What do you think he means? Which I think that is a masculating. I think being bothered by it is more amasculating than, you know. Absolutely. Yeah, I think I'm glad Dakota called it out so explicitly because Jordan from the very first clip of him talking about this affair. Even to Jesse, he kept saying, I feel so amasculated. I feel so amasculated. And even if he didn't say it as many times as he did, that seems to me an odd word, an odd initial reaction or hill to die on when it comes to an affair. And I think Dakota pointed it out, which is there is already an insecurity there. There's already an insecurity around masculinity that this affair is then exacerbating. And I wonder if the, you know, the roles were reversed, if potentially his language would have been different because if he was in a position of financial control in his family, the way that Jesse is, then, you know, his response might have been, oh, well, I do this this and this for you and I do this and this for the family. And this is how I'm thanked, but instead it's, oh, this is so amasculating to me. And I think that just goes to show that he likely was feeling that way already. And it kind of shows how fragile that like ideas about masculinity are that how manly you are is affected by how much money you make or if you're, I mean, if your wife cheats on you or not, I feel like masculinity can be something more intrinsic and healthy than that that can't be shaken, chicken so easily. And he seemed more concerned and granted, you know, I'm sure there's a million caveats that they were working through this already, but he seemed to be particularly concerned about everybody snowing about the affair. And he mentions that quite a few times that that was one of the things that he was really paranoid about and a lot of it, I think, does come down to perception that he's going to be seen as less of a man that manliness is somehow defined by your wife. Only money to have sex with you or being dependent upon you financially and that both of those things are challenging his own manliness and he mentions at one point, he said, I don't want to be seen as less of a man because I chose to stay around when they're talking about working things together, which is really interesting that like to brush her off would somehow be a way to be considered more manly. And he talks a little bit about like how he's worried about what his son in particular things about this like it does seem like there's so much combined here about about sex and manliness and financial prowess that really come together and she's challenging all of those things and that seems to be a lot of what his confidence is sense of self is built upon. And even though I understand him being her, I feel like if you really loved her deeply, you'd be concerned about this affair coming to light because she is going to get destroyed by the internet, the world. Like I feel like there should be like some level of concern for her like if you're on a reality TV show and your wife has an affair, generally the audience is going to be sympathetic to you, but she's the woman in the situation, you know, with like the. Scarlet letter, yeah, anyway, yeah, he just doesn't seem concerned about her to which again, I understand that her is not yeah well, I think to that point as well. Talking so much about how a masculated he feels feels like such an external concern of how people are going to perceive him perceive his relationship perceive the way his partner in his relationship sees him. And yes, we did see some tears we did see him grappling a bit with this, but it felt like most of his grappling was what is the world going to think of me and think of us as opposed to I love this woman and I'm devastated because I trusted her he's not even really talking in that way he's more so talking about like what is the perception and the feedback going to be. And I think that's also really telling because it shows where his priorities are as opposed to I love this person and i'm really devastated about what this might mean for a relationship. Are we saying that he cares more about what people think than what's actually going on in his life and in his relationship is that what we're saying. So I think it's also worth mentioning of course they are on a TV show so there's a lot of talk of that of like okay now this is brought up on TV so now we're going to have to deal with this publicly which absolutely is valid that's a different thing than dealing with privately but even still i mean correct me if i'm wrong i don't think we hear him at all talking about like personal his personal feelings about it beyond on that level of perception. It's obvious that they didn't have this sort of beautiful close bond that was fractured by this event it's like it was maybe more of an external externally focused relationship to begin with before it happened which does feel pretty like patriarchal marriage culture. I mean this may be a hot take but like I almost see this entire franchise in some ways is a metaphor for Mormon emphasis on appearance because so much of this series is about how they're looking and I know that in my Mormon experience so many of the most. High profile families in any given Mormon ward you find out they look perfect on Sunday perfect close perfect hair perfect behavior even the bishop in the bishops family but then you go home and it's a wreck and and so not a lot of integrity kind of relationship and or familial or even interpersonal or personal integrity. Between who you really are when you're not in the public Mormon gaze and how you present when you show up at award or in this case on international television absolutely yeah. I think that's the whole tension of the show and I think that's a huge reason why it's such a success is because when people think of Mormon wives they think of these women on tiktok who. Look stunning who are freshly postpartum but dancing with their friends and they all have their partners and it appears one way and then I think the impetus for the show ultimately was when Taylor Frankie Paul said actually we've been swinging and that is crazy to an outsider who sees Mormonism as this very shiny curated thing and I think the show has just continued to. Kind of explore the inside workings of something that to an outside perspective even within the community is oftentimes a very shiny curated this odd thing part of what makes our community so messy is kind of these two tensions we've been talking about this hyper awareness of appearance having everything seen curated and perfect and clean and nice and pretty and also we have this like hyper compulsion. To confess and everybody needs to know everything and it seems like for so much of this show where we're balancing both of those tensions like first Jesse and Jordan were trying to keep everything interrupt they were trying to not even let their close friends know that there are any problems they're trying to be very private about it but then once it opened the flood gates opened and Jesse was willing to almost like word on everything and was hoping to somehow receive like redemption or forgiveness from everybody based on that and so I think. And so I think in all of these relationships that seems like there's really no like balance of understanding like appropriate levels of sharing in different conversations or how we can kind of like navigate these relationships in a more balanced friendship way it's either i'm going to pretend like everything is perfectly fine or i'm going to drive three hours to investigate and take a lie detector test. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with what I was all saying and I think Jesse even directly addressed this and said how she's been masking it for years and they've been acting like it's perfect but she mentioned multiple times how there hasn't been a day that they've gone without arguments and yet that you just want to keep like putting on a smile and continuing to act like everything's perfect and beautiful and I just totally agree it's such a. Mormon thing that happens and I think it's interesting that Jesse has actually been one of the few to be open about the fact that she I think doesn't believe anymore and you know has. I was just about to say that I think it's important we call out they are x Mormon Jesse and her husband Jordan and that had me thinking and reflecting a lot because yeah i've spoken to Jesse and she is definitely x Mormon and yet still the impact of the upbringing as we're. The impact of the upbringing as well as being so entrenched in you know the there's no friends with active Mormons they're still living in Provo Utah and so. It is interesting to think about I guess kind of the the lasting power of the culture and of the messaging because even being x Mormon we're seeing a lot of the same Mormon dynamics coming out. And sort of the scaffolding of her life because she entered into this moment marriage with kids when she was moment it's like it's still moment it's still woman patriarchy so she's still kind of having to live in that system even though she's left it. It's still the structure of her whole life yeah. I do want to just mention briefly about Jordan you know i'm there very few things i'm finding that are uniquely Mormon you know what I mean I think I like to say the Mormon experiences the human experience. In many ways but it's it might be worth calling out that in in the church of Jesus Christ the battery saints there's this document that we talked about a Mormon stories called the family proclamation and in there it says. A husband or a father's role is to preside and provide and so. I guess we can say where do Jordan's feelings come from he probably doesn't choose his feelings to feel emasculated i don't know you know i don't know to what extent he really even means that word per say but what I can take from that for sure is that he feels crappy. And he feels crappy because if he's presiding what does that mean if his wife stepping out and then if she's the one that's providing in a Mormon context he could easily just have these feelings like i'm failing as a Mormon man based on the family proclamation and on cultural expectations for what man are supposed to be he comes by that honestly right. Absolutely and I think that's partially why in some ways. The entire conversation that this series has about breaking the patriarchy feels like regressive you know i would imagine people outside of Utah when they're talking about how they're going to break the page to our keep up many of them are clearly still in patriarchal marriages and the main definition they have for feminism or for breaking the patriarchy is by. And I think part of that comes back to what you're saying about the family proclamation that it literally says men should be the ones to provide and preside and protect and so they're kind of bumping up against that but I think for an outsider I would imagine it's like okay well women working. This is we've established this decade ago you know this is not like a new way to kind of like we're you know it's not radical is not exactly yeah but the way that they're framing it is like wow we are. Like we're the breadwinners and we're going to that's the main way that we're kind of like going to be fighting this patriarchal. System and that was also the main way the main language that they have for feeling like I'm isolated like you were saying that seems like that element which I think for a lot of people like well yeah you know the women a woman can work that's totally fine that's not weird still seems to be such a sticking point and I don't think it's. Inherently because these people are immature these people are silly reality TV stars but that they have this proclamation framed on their wall and they read it all the time and it's still you know in practice in 2025. Yeah I also am remembering a point in the season a bit later as this is all unfolding where Jesse says that Jordan said she couldn't do anything right around the house when it came to laundry and taking care of the kids like she rattles off some like traditional homemaking tasks and that just adds. I mean so much to discuss there but you look at Jordan and you think in you know his wife is providing a wonderful income for his family and he has the opportunity to step in in so many other ways to help support the family dynamic and find purpose and find meaning and it seems like he doesn't it seems like Jesse is still the one doing all of those things. And yeah I guess just back to the point about a patriarchal setup and him feeling a masculinity is maybe particularly ironic because it feels like he's kind of floating in this meaninglessness because he doesn't have work when in reality there's so many ways he could find meaning in his life beyond working for a paycheck that I think would probably help him form a greater sense of self and identity and even masculinity. And you know who's to say how much he is or isn't doing that but I do think we had a pretty good clue when Jesse said like he's critiquing the way I take care of the home it doesn't sound like he's really helping out there either. That's a really good point that he has the ability to search for meaning now and he doesn't have to really worry about it making a paycheck like how many men are frustrated in corporate jobs or like under the patriarchy because they're having to. You know put how much they're earning first and he now has this opportunity to in some ways do whatever he wants. But it just doesn't seem to be he's not maybe his brains not set up to like think about it like that the wiring runs deep right yeah absolutely yeah. All right okay so so let's transition a little bit to macy and Michaela we we have just a quick clip just I think I don't know how long we want to talk about it for. But Jesse confides in macy and Michaela and she's very open like we've established this is what happens I kiss them they are surprised for trying to decide whether or not they believe her they want to believe her but they're also skeptical which which is interesting and then they make a joke because. Jesse said that when they kissed they've been drinking I think she said she had five espresso martini is you know I understand a good espresso martini and yeah so then this next this next clip is kind of they're like. Lighthearted woman response to this all right we'll roll a clip. I can keep her playing Jesse telling us she had an affair over and over my head I've been trying to find the church and I can drink because things like these times in me and alcohol. You should love church I'm just kidding. No big old size now just to be clear like I don't think taters much of a Mormon these days and I don't think Laila is much of a Mormon these days like first of all or any of them very much Mormon these days but also is Jesse the only ex Mormon. They see has a temple recommend the woman who just said that yeah okay so they talk about that in the season she has a full temple recommend I think besides macy she's like for sure the most Mormon on the spectrum. I mean I still think a lot of them identify as Mormon but I think macy is is likely the only temple recommend holding maybe you. Maybe maybe with me yeah I feel like they were holding on to it to certain degrees which we see a lot like a lot of people be. Inactive for years but they wouldn't declare themselves ex Mormon yeah like Jesse's the only one that's just like fully. Removing herself entirely from the label as far as not drinking in context of this clip macy wouldn't drink but I feel like the rest of the. So it is yeah I mean I think her making that comment I also just finished macy's book recently because she has a memoir and I will say maybe a little bit in her defense she has a really I mean I found her story really compelling but she has. A history of drinking party as a college student that got her in compromising situations so I mean obviously we can talk about kind of where this comment is coming from but I do think. From her perspective I can see a little bit why she's like you know I've. Had too much to drink before and found myself in situations that I wish I wasn't in that I probably wouldn't have been in without alcohol and so I think that's. Also a part of where she's coming from here when I think part of that too is. It's like the abs and it's only sex ed and then you get pregnant the first time or the first few times you have sex. I think that as Mormons like we don't learn how to have a healthy relationship with alcohol very well because it's all no alcohol and then it's really calm and I think for ex Mormons to. Find themselves in compromising situations or active Mormons who are being who are being sneaky and I think you know of course Jesse should not have done this and I also think. It's that you have to learn how to be able to handle alcohol in appropriate ways and I think that's something that our community doesn't do very well at we don't know how to like learn our limits often. And so we kind of like go back in this black and white thinking of like see this is what happens when you have alcohol we're kind of clumping any association of alcohol into the worst case scenario bucket or leaving the church into this worst case scenario bucket we don't have like. And of course that happens people do leave the church and they can have a terrible life. But also people can leave the church and have you know be healthy and happy and I think that we just love to kind of categorize these things even though she's saying it like heartedly and I and I kind of get the joke and maybe it's kind of like a ha ha. But the base of that is that is a comment that Mormons do say in earnest all the time absolutely and I mean another rebuttal is that plenty of Mormons have affairs sober. That's not like the determining factor obviously but it's very easy when something like alcohol is involved to be like oh see there you go. Good on us because we don't drink alcohol and are there for sparing ourselves this kind of behavior when that's also just not true. I think she's also it's also showing you know she's almost like so eager to say that and I was like. Disappointing it not surprise that she came out with the most Mormon response ever to a situation like this of it's exactly what I said when I was Mormon of always because you love the churches and this when Jesse the whole time is talking about how. The status of you know the state her marriage is in is what caused this and at no point I feel like to cheat blame it on drinking alcohol or felt like if I hadn't had so many drinks I would have acted differently like I feel like so many times she emphasized this is due to. The place that me and my husband were at and it was just funny me when I was putting clips together had to include that one because it's just the most classic Mormon response from the most Mormon person on the cast and you know the response has never changed I feel like from Mormons it's always this. It is the it is the ex Mormon trope right that you leave the church drink and then have an affair. But you know I just think in my immediate family for the 25 years we were all super devout there was. Hidden drinking there was hidden smoking tobacco there was hidden affairs and that's just in my immediate nuclear family and over half let's just say that so I am I do get a little bit grouchy about that trope or stereotype getting perpetuated but also. We can also have a sense of humor about that really quickly fit angel said is the super chat and I think I got objectified she wrote john the beard looks great. How does it feel to have a man be the one that gets the first comment about his appearance is that good should I be insulted or should I be. I think we're breaking the patriarchy. All right where do we go next. All righty so moving along oh okay so. Things are not going well Jesse Jordan we're still staying just kind of on this same topic of Jesse for a minute just kind of moving through the episode so an episode to. They decide they're going to do a 90 day separation kind of see where things go. Jesse and Jordan have an audible argument and I do think it's interesting to think about the things that Jordan is willing to stay on camera. That's unfortunately very telling Jesse's mom and sisters are downstairs listening and Jordan is just just being really insulting. Jesse's crying they just haven't argument and Jesse's mom seems very surprised about the affair but is telling Jesse that she thinks that Jesse should have left the relationship years ago. And this is where we really start understand that that this affair was not did not exist in a vacuum who starts talking a lot more openly about the emotional abuse that was going on. And I will say it seems that the beginning of the season she seems a little bit more worried about protecting Jordan as the season continues she starts. You know kind of like opening that door a little bit and it gets darker and darker as the episodes progress as we see more of Jordan's behavior on camera and as we hear more stories. So this is really where we're diving in I guess one thing that we'll say for this and just for the rest of this episode there's a lot of dark themes in this series so take caution if you're listening or watching. Yeah so I just wanted to hear what you guys are thinking just about that initial once we kind of start hearing about you know how this relationship is actually looking on the inside. Yeah it's one of those moments where a little shocking but not very surprising I would say and I think I mean certainly I'm biased toward Jesse probably for a lot of reasons but I do think as soon as the context unfolded. I very quickly was like oh it's completely we see exactly why she did what she did seems like it was a cry for help it seems like it was looking for validation that she wasn't getting at home maybe even potentially subconsciously sabotaging her marriage because of the state that her marriage was in. It felt very reminiscent hearing Jordan speak to her on camera to how Zach spoke to Jen in previous seasons that was kind of like the toxic relationship of previous seasons I do think it was interesting because Jesse has really put on speaking of that facade she really has put on kind of they seem really happy up until this season and the way that they interact online together Jordan is very involved he's involved with her. He's involved with the men he's very involved on the show and so to realize oh this has been happening all along since they first met is just really devastating I think as well because we see Jesse as this character who is before she even came on this show before she was even doing mom talk. She is a business owner of like a gigantic company she seems to have it all together and so to see her being treated to to have her husband be so demeaning toward her is let me be so clear that should never happen. But especially when we've kind of come to know Jesse for being this like boss babe that she is it's particularly jarring because it's like what legs does this guy even have to stand on and yeah it's kind of one of those things of like up there's another one and we kind of are seeing this pattern repeated that we saw in earlier seasons with a different couple. It also kind of shows how sometimes just like slapping a label on something that has happened like affair can be like flattening because it's like okay what is an affair it's like you you cross these boundaries that you have sort of agreed upon within your relationship. But it's like emotional abuse is a constant boundary cross so when you look at it like that it's like I don't know I feel like in Mormonism obviously the way this would get litigated is like the affair is always the worst thing. But emotional abuse is like someone crossing your boundaries for years presumably and like deliberately sort of wearing you down so that you become reliant on them. It's no wonder that she was like seeking external like worth building in someone else when that's like what she's sort of been primed for and isn't getting it from a husband. I don't know if this is in that initial conversation I believe it is because I feel like he brings us up a lot but Jordan also uses their children against her multiple times where he says things like now our son will know that you're a cheater and what will our children think of you and think of us and I think that that not only speaks to the level of emotional abuse and manipulation because that's just a horrible thing to leverage against a mother. I think it also speaks to what we've been talking about with this dynamic where they do have children and because of the Mormonism because of the pattern of getting married young and having children young and now Jordan is almost using that as leverage to further his emotional abuse to further the guilt and the shame which yeah I mean if we do need to compare the two. I think absolutely Jordan's wrongs far far away jessies a fair and I think part of what makes it so difficult is that when we use the word affair like you're a saying Sam like that feels very tangible and I think emotional abuse verbal abuse some of these things can be a little bit more ambiguous or it might be different within different relationships or it might be harder to like pinpoint exactly what's happening or to be able to articulate exactly if that's happening in your own relationship. And so I think Jordan is obviously creating an unhealthy dynamic for years and then he uses the affair as leverage to explain why to justify the behavior that he's doing he says a couple times you know you know you're making me act this way you deserve me to act you deserve for me to act this way and Jesse makes a comment at one point saying like this. This this is familiar this type of fight is how things used to be so it's very clear that this is a very very familiar dynamic between the two of them and Jesse says in a different podcast separately she talks about how. As far as using their children against them that Jordan at one point like brought the kids and said okay everybody I'm telling you right now that like mom and dad are getting a divorce like in the middle of a fight as a way to like you know make Jesse feel horrible and I think part of that is like weaponizing the family which also feels the way that is used here. Also feels like a seven from this patriarchal system that like we're using oh your mom and yes having children that of course reasons the stakes and I think that that is just a fact you know that that is a really important layer but also it's like that's being weaponized by the men over and over again that like I can treat you badly but if you choose to leave your breaking up the family and you're a bad mom now this feels like a comment that. Zach was making that Jordan was making that Dakota has been making that Taylor's family has been making that the idea of the nuclear family being together and being perfect is more important than the mom being treated well and that the mom being abused or the children witnessing the mother being abused is somehow going to be less harmful on the kids than a divorce or then the parents not being together. And I think Zach makes a comment to like and like like these women you know they're just there get you know they are just okay like break up a family says i'm all for female empowerment. Yeah but he says ultimately why is not everybody in the situation rooting for the family to remain together and I think it's exactly that I think it's it's particularly telling that in an affair where the woman is the one who cheated that seems to be much more top of mind and I think that just goes to show within the patriarchal framework well women are in charge of the well being of their children and so regardless of what sacrifice. Although I completely agree I don't think it's better for the kids to stay in a toxic or abusive relationship but it's kind of like well regardless no matter how you feel about how he's treated you if you're a good mom you do what's best for the kids exactly you love your kids if you're not selfish yes yeah which is wild for him to be saying while he's weaponizing the children. The kids are not primary to you because you're not even cognizant of the impact that's going to have on them or how you're crossing like they are emotional boundaries like that's not healthy for a child to be like receiving your reactivity like that in an argument absolutely. As a child of divorce and as someone who's experienced lots of divorce as probably you'll have in our or or in our lives per se the comment I want to make may or may not be relevant to Jesse and Jordan but I want to just. Introduce it anyway one of the things I hate there's two things I hate about marriage that I love marriage to think I hate about marriage number one is it seems like it it seems like it sometimes leads people to feel like they quote have or own the other person to the point where they don't let's just say try as much in the relationship as they did when they're recording. But the second thing is far more insidious and that's that if the marriage isn't working or ends up not working out. There's so much shame and stigma around divorce that it makes both sides feel like they have to really blame the other for being the cause now let me just say yes abuse happens yes i'm sure Jordan was emotionally be so i'm not in any way trying to take away from Jesse's experience. Or claim that there aren't sometimes one sided divorces and I have seen two sided. Problematic marriages where they're just trying to destroy each other with hand grenades and bombs and allegations and I just hate that why can't it just be it didn't work out so we had some years together maybe we had some kids maybe we didn't but I wish you well let's now go find our next journey but I can't say that this part of the series was giving those vibes but I wanted to just introduce that topic anyway because it bugs me. Well there is a point when Jesse because Jesse has been previously married before Jordan and as she's like really reckoning with the fact that she might end up divorcing she it's kind of the most emotional we see her and she says I don't want to get divorced again and I think that is such a unique situation to be 30 years old in a second marriage with children. Still so young and be like oh my gosh I don't want to do this all again I thought I had already done this and I think to your point I mean I don't want to psychoanalyze too much but potentially Jesse having kissing Marciano could have even been her way of being like now this is enough reason that I can that we can part ways she not even needing to blame but just having it be enough cut and dry of like oh there was cheating because then people can be like why do divorce well there was cheating because it is more cut and dry than emotional abuse. So I ticked up clip of her on a podcast today saying that she thinks that it was like a deliberate self sabotage because she was wanting to get out. It is interesting that instead of just saying hey let's talk hard to heart this isn't working I'm not feeling good you're not feeling good. I want to choose the hand grenade option and blow up our lives the other person's lives our kids just we'd rather blow it all up then have the difficult direct one on one conversations. I think a lot of couples in traditional Mormon situations that got married that young it's like you you really don't know each other that well. I mean Jesse even talks about this herself her and Jordan met and got married very quickly while she was very fresh off of her divorce and so a lot of times they think these marriages they lack. I mean sometimes even just compatibility but beyond that there's just not the that level of communication is just and I mean that's hard anyway obviously I think all relationships are striving toward that but I think speaking for myself because I did get married at 20 am now 30. I mean looking back luckily for my husband and I we've been able to work through it but looking back at how much growth we've had to do with specially around communication it's just your setup at a disadvantage when it comes to having those types of conversations I think especially because marriage the concept of marriage I think also in Mormonism is not what marriage actually is I think it's if you find the right person. And you love each other initially and you believe in God and stay Mormon then you will be happy and yeah it's just a lot more complicated than that but people don't want to show that because that's not how marriage is viewed. Well it's Spencer Kempels any two people who are Mormon who love God can make it work mentality yeah anything part of what is also just like we keep coming up against these relationships over and over again is really young marriages and within Mormonism marriages simultaneously not taking this seriously because we get married six months after we meet each other and it's like if you're if you're Mormon awesome you're 18 awesome you love each other for a minute like. Totally fine have kids right away and so simultaneously so cavalier and it's marriage for time in all eternity it's the most important thing in the entire world it's extremely difficult to get a ceiling canceled once you've been sealed and so I think like we're just hitting this problem over and over again of these really casual marriages and also I mean I think divorced as stigmatized anyway everywhere but then you add the Mormon element. And even though Jesse and Jordan aren't Mormon anymore that stigma is still there the idea of getting divorced within Mormonism within Utah is so scandalous it's the worst thing that can possibly happen and I just think that they're not really well equipped to either handle marriage yet because they're young to handle or handle divorce because the stakes are so high. That's the thing it's so understandable that she especially if they don't have good communication and he's abusive she's not going to feel able to go to him to workshop these problems it sounds like she probably couldn't get the buy in from him. And it's just such a normal human thing that whatever we're repressing is going to come out in a more dysfunctional way. So I'm almost like who are we to really like litigate the morality of this stuff it's just like a fact of of human nature that if you're trying to you know like conceal a part of your own inner reality it's going to like fight for your attention so you will like you know make wilder moves and yeah potentially pendulum swing to try and like create some movement like it's it's her saying that she was like she kissed Martian or whatever as a way to self sabotage it's like yes sure but it's also it's like her psyche attempting to like find wholeness in a way like it's a it's a it's a dysfunctional way to go about it but like yeah as much as it's self sabotage it's also this like pursuit of healing in a weird way. Totally look at it. It's good to hear yeah I kind of feel like another layer on top of all the things you guys are saying is that I personally think it is a thing for women to feel like they stay in something much longer than they probably should because we have the sense to feel like I can make it better I can keep fighting for it you know it's the classic classic trope of like I can fix him it's okay you know we just I think work really hard to keep fighting for something and I think end up staying in longer for longer past everything is past something sorry a healthy place of the marriage and then I think that just creates so much build up and then they're just in such a difficult place it then something like this happens and I don't know something along those lines of just I think a lot of this happens when women are don't know when to leave. And I would just also add an element of Mormon doctrine and theology that more and more I'm feeling like is build or sold as the greatest feature of Mormon doctrine that's actually potentially one of the most damaging and harmful and that's this idea of eternal ceilings eternal marriage eternal families because any of these stakes or pressures to stay or stigmas are all amplified by a billion when you add that you're breaking up an eternal marriage you're breaking up an eternal family you're violating your temple covenants you're leaving the covenant path instead of allowing people to be people and all the medicine work out or we're not happy oh let's find you someone that you're happy with it's you you got to stay married not just for your entire life but for eternity or you're violating your covenants with God it's just too much pressure or you'll never see your children again yeah right yeah exactly it that's possible punishment yeah I wonder too about the X Mormon side of things with Jesse and Jordan which she doesn't speak to explicitly but I do feel like there's almost an opposite pressure of okay now I've left the church and now I can't be one of those people who who is the church and gets divorced who cheats and then gets divorced because that's what people think of X Mormons I almost feel like sometimes there's I felt this type of pressure where it's like when I left the church someone in my family sent me an email and they were like you know I've seen what this does to marriages to families and I've seen families fall apart was what this person said of if you step away from Mormonism and these eternal covenants and ceilings then inevitably your family will fall apart so they're also could potentially be almost the opposite pressure of now that we're publicly outside of Mormonism we we maybe need to hold on even tighter just to prove people wrong essentially that's wild to receive an email yeah you're telling me wow I did tell this person to be fair they sought me out and I said no thank you so they chose an email which ended up being easier yeah but I was like okay it was thinly veiled for it but I mean I think it does create pressure right it's like oh man you know if theoretically down the line my husband and I had something happen where we decided to separate I know for a fact people in my life would absolutely similar to what we were talking about with alcohol they'd be like oh of course because they left the church and you know it's unfair and not true but I still think it it creates pressure for ex-mormons and I hate the idea of a man or a woman staying in an abusive marriage because of the doctrine of eternal families and eternal marriage right yeah yeah yeah all right so let's let's move on oh okay now Jesse visits Natasha she gets another cameo which is fantastic this is our own Natasha helper who has been our Mormon stories a lot she's a therapist who works down the hall here in this very facility but also was ex-communicated for teaching ethical mental and sexual health principles but we love Natasha so sorry I have to show you no no you're great yeah so I think that these couple clips kind of show some of the big moments of that Jesse has with Natasha that I think also gives us a little bit of insight into our our boss babes internal world a little bit all right let's roll the video if I have asked you right now what do you like about yourself what would you tell me even really giving I would let anyone move in with me get the shirt off my back like I know that like I have that quality and I like that about myself but I also hate it because I like it gets me walked all over and I've definitely had like lack of boundaries and relationships because of it what do you like about yourself physically nothing nothing wow that it was one of the saddest moments of the series to me there was just the audible gas three audible gas yeah I mean you just feel it I think any woman feels it and I think you know there's been a lot of talk about these these women and a lot of them have plastic surgery and have work done and you know there's that's a whole conversation in and of itself but I think that one question and answer just goes to show the amount of honestly just like self hatred women are taught inside of Mormonism and outside of Mormonism but as we've you know consistently been saying I certainly don't think the Mormon factor is helpful nor the Utah factor as we've been discussing with appearance and these women now being on TV where they're watching themselves and you know so much of the gig is how they look and I I can just only imagine the toll that that takes on their self esteem yeah almost felt especially heartbreaking to hear because she is a woman who's like she puts a lot of time and effort and money and into the way she looks obviously her careers the hair extension business like her life is so focused on the way she looks and yeah it doesn't seem to be yielding like there are some women who are like I don't like anything about the way I look but it's not really a huge focus in their lives maybe you know they're just in a different light of work or it's just not a big deal to them but it's hard coming from someone where you know it is a big deal yeah and it also just feels like women we can never really win as far as appearance goes and I think that's something that cuts so deep especially in Utah as we've said that is so heavily focused on on appearance that I think it's easy you know to view influencers who have this this perfect life for people who are spending a lot of money on cosmetic procedures as as the pinnacle of beauty and that if you have that you know like traditional standard of beauty if you need that traditional standard of beauty then finally you'll be happy you'll finally have self worth and I think it is a peak behind the curtain that for at least in her case even though she is a very beautiful woman and has a lot of success based on how she's looking that she still isn't feeling fulfilled by it or feeling good by it is it's just something that we can never it's an unattainable goal and it's something that's just going to be continually wiping people out and it's just sad to see that perpetuating decade after decade after decade and it seems like that narrative really isn't changing I think this also gives insight into the affair particularly once we kind of see her in Marciano on screen Marciano is very complimentary he talks about how beautiful she is and you can see why she would be vulnerable to that when she has such low self esteem particularly around her appearance let's move on to the next quick I'm sorry really quickly can y'all help the male audience like if I'm trying to connect myself like you know they're features that I don't like about myself like my teeth have been crooked or they're yellow or I have a big nose but like this idea that there's nothing about my appearance that I like is something that I don't think I've as a man ever felt is that like can y'all all relate to literally this idea of nothing and if so for maybe whatever comfort we're sharing can you talk about that is if it is less just too sensitive I don't know now I just had a I mean this is not directly an answer to your question because I feel like there are things about my appearance that I could say that I like I do think as a woman this is a small example but there was a video I talk online and oftentimes I'm sure everyone here has had this experience but like Mormon podcasters will like clip my audio or whatever and then respond to it or like use it in some type of way and someone did that maybe a month and a half ago and I was reading the comments which I shouldn't do but someone was talking about I have these moles on my neck and someone commented and was like oh I just can't something about me having moles on my neck and I think that's a good example of that's just not even something I've ever even cared about I actually think it's cute it's just part of me and to have even little tiny things about how you look called out when it's number one completely irrelevant has nothing to do with who I am or what I'm saying and I do think that that is so much more common for women to feel like here I am sharing like thoughts and opinions and my intellect and someone's like oh her moles are whatever and I mean that kind of thing happens all the time things I would never even think about about my own appearance people will publicly comment on because they don't like what I'm saying about Mormonism so a Mormon man will come and say well you are ugly essentially and I'm sure these women I mean I can't even imagine the level of that that they're receiving I'm sure every single thing about her face that she that she probably has loved she's had someone online say her nose is less her eyes are that her eyebrows are this her hair colors bad and you know I just can't even imagine without a mount of people pointing those things out that it's probably been stolen from her the things about herself that she probably used to love and I think in huge part because of online culture okay and I wonder if sometimes as a woman it almost is a weird it's it's almost like your brain trying to protect you by being like don't get too comfortable like don't get too especially because she's in a situation where you know she's done something that she feels ashamed about it's I could I feel like when you're in that really deep shame spiral it's very easy to feel like I just shouldn't like she said also in that scene she didn't even feel like she deserved to drink water so I think it's also probably the situation probably doesn't help like I would imagine that all times in life where she does like things about the way she looks but she probably in that moment doesn't really feel like she's allowed to yeah it's almost like a a protective response in some ways too of like well what if I say I like my hair and then you know so so doesn't so I may as well just no I don't like anything about myself yeah you know everyone on the internet will destroy her whatever she would do yeah sure I would hate to think that Mormon and or US culture makes women feel like there's nothing beautiful about them well it does I mean yeah yeah you always got to be I mean I think something that most women can relate to that men usually can't in the same way is just as a woman you feel like you should always be in some way striving to improve your appearance so like there's always a tweak you can make or you're always kind of like thinking about it whereas with men I mean if you especially if you take like an attractive man who gets feedback that he's attractive from the world he's generally not moving through the world thinking what else should I be doing he's just like enjoying that even if he has insecure days but as a woman it's like even if you're considered conventionally attractive it's like how can I preserve it as I age how can I maybe go a step beyond like it's just it's never good enough and it's just not as much currency for men yeah I mean I will save these men on the show get pretty picked apart for how they look like there's all these comparisons of they look like the kid from Incredibles or whatever and I'm not saying that's justified nor do I think that they don't deserve to have some type of feeling about that they do but it's just so much less their social currency so it hurts less because these women so much of their social currency is how they look in a way that it's just simply not for the men yeah no it just also maybe super sad to hear how like quickly she was prepared to say absolutely nothing it's also something that you know because when I'm watching reality TV which I love I also kind of love to read into how being on camera is affecting how someone's acting in the moment and I almost wondered like what you guys are saying about how if she said anything someone online would have been commented you know she said oh I like my nose and I was a one thing surely like someone would have gone on and said oh she shouldn't and then her's what there's the one thing that she liked broken down even more and I just hope that you know if that camera wasn't there that you have to believe there's something should like by herself but yeah it made me really sad and I was shocked that even just as a woman who runs a hair business shouldn't do some self advertising and say I love my hair I think I'm amazing at hair you know and I do a great job I almost feel like that was a misadvertising moment but but my extensions and such and such color so yeah it definitely made me really sad especially because I feel like as a woman who always feel self-conscious about something and you know for a woman woman it's really important how you're perceived by men so I feel like that was so much what I was taught about my value and I feel like I would always have to have you know one thing in your back in the mind of like oh I don't like this and this and this but I like this thing and I'm gonna hang on to that so it was super sad to hear that she didn't have that one thing ready to go yeah and I do think that I think that internet culture thinking influencer being on TV is absolutely exacerbating all of the issues and self image issues issue that should be having anyone would be having but I also do think like it's something that a lot of women have experienced that hopefully you know people can find one thing but there have definitely been seasons in my life or I can't find a single thing I think of a single thing that I like about myself physically and there have been seasons where I've thought of something that I like but you know there's always going to be something that I don't like and I think that just kind of ebbs and flows with time and age but I think that is like a unfortunately a pretty universal experience okay next clip yeah yeah I'm sorry you get the beard compliment and I'm just kidding actually I had a friend listener offered to give me eye surgery I have a droopy eyelid here and he's like John let me pay to picture droopy eyelids so I'm like is it that bad anyway all right next clip what's this one's also Natasha okay in the same there's how are you feeling about the ability like are you in a space of self grace self-shames the first few days were really hard for me because I felt like I felt like I wasn't even deserving to drink water if I was thirsty like I really struggled like the first two days just being like I don't deserve anything like I made this huge mistake and like I just don't deserve anything I mean Sam mentioned that a moment ago but I do just feel like we just see that shame so much in Jessie's experience and it's clear that like she really really regrets what happened and has no no self grace at all and it's just hard just hard to watch I think that's part of why I mean with her affair happening yes again we can say a million times like not you know and fidelity is not good frowned upon as Jessie would say and also I mean she's heaped enough guilt and shame on herself and I think she understands she's thought about it she's working to amend it and I also think that's just a good example of you know these mistakes Taylor actually makes a comment a bit later where she says something about how essentially Mormonism exacerbates that shame and they want you to feel shame and I think that especially with sex stuff that shame is just I mean we know how shameful she she already feels about it in a way that I think a man absolutely wouldn't because of conditioning and so I think that also makes her sympathetic in this way of like no one no one needs to pile on what she's already experiencing herself yeah um yeah so I just asked GPC what percentage of people could are involved in some sort of marital impedeality during their lifetime and I don't know my glasses on to see what the result is but I've heard it's something like a third or something I'm sure but it's not saying I'm curious now um let's get those glasses on uh it says it's difficult but it says about 20% of men and 13% of women wow and at least or 20 to 25% of marriages so I mean that's 30 or third a third of all people if I'm reading this right a third of all people in marriages in the United States no are are unfaithful oh I think and like um so never would I want to like try to downplay the imports of fidelity I think we're all agreement the fidelity is good uh very good and very important and if the stat is so high does that leave room for just like we talked about destigmatizing divorce should infidelity be somewhat destigmatized or is that too much of a hot take kind of question well it we definitely need to bring more curiosity to it like I think it's just like with so many social problems or we think if we just slap a strong enough shame label on it that will make the problem go away but infidelity is one of the worst things you can do kind of universally across the board and our society regardless of religion not religion so clearly the shame thing isn't working and to me I feel like I mean Jesse and Jordan are a good example of a couple that entered into these uh theoretically eternally binding co-commitments then realize that like that the entire sort of psychological foundation of their lives was not true and left the church of course that's going to make them vulnerable to infidelity like so many people enter into marriages you know these like lifelong commitments under certain false premises like I would say a lot and I think there's marriages where that have managed to not have infidelity it's like a lot of the time even those marriages they went in under some kind of false pretense but they were able to sort of work with it and evolve together over the years in a way that you know that didn't happen I also think there probably are people that don't cheat when they maybe do like lust in their hearts because because of the shame so it's it's clearly something we need to understand better I feel like Esther Perrell has done a lot of really amazing work around infidelity and yeah I think shame is generally it just shuts down curiosity so we do need to unsame it or destigmatize it I also think in the context of committed relationships and particularly marriages it I think that communication when there is how do I want to work this I feel like to me when things escalate to an affair it's because there's a lack of communication and safety and what I would wish for marriages even is that within marriages people could feel more open to even say something like hey I have a coworker and I'm feeling this type of way and you know and they could talk about it and kind of I to me the the thing about infidelity that is so harmful is the betrayal and I've seen that in my own life people who have been cheated on and just like the the kind of lifelong effects of that lack of that that breaking of trust and but at the same time I do I think have sympathy for especially people in Mormon frameworks who end up cheating because I I see the psychological factors behind that of missing self-exploration sexual exploration romantic exploration and I think what I would wish is that it was even destigmatized within a relationship where things like that could be more openly discussed if that makes sense and I think taking it out of hiding then you know decisions can be made without keeping things secret. Have you guys seen the movie Babygo? Yes. With Nicole Kidman. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't see it. Fantastic movie. Yeah. Love really good. Yeah. With this stuff too. I also love Esther Pearl. I was going to mention her as well. One of my kids said something other day really interesting and maybe it's an obvious thought but he basically said anytime you make something forbidden you're going to increase someone else's desire to do the thing. And then the more and then I thought and then the higher the stakes the more forbidden it is the more terrible it is the even more they're going to want to do the thing that's forbidden which is the weird paradox because what what that implies is that we're creating society the behavior we don't want and I've seen this when I've counseled let's just say Mormon men who or women who were forbidden to look at porn and masturbate by their spouse by the church you know we've talked about many times on more stories that there have been reports that at times Utah has had the highest rates of porn usage per capita in the United States and I've seen it where I've counseled a couple really where the where the let's just say the woman is feeling like the husband is literally unfaithful because he looks at porn and masturbates so the husband just wants to hide and lie about it but then that shame makes him feel terrible and he needs to self-sude so it doesn't more it's this terrible spiral right but then when I've seen a couple get to the point where the in this case let's just say the wife says you know what I'm not going to police your personal behavior I'm not going to code it as infidelity so like no big deal what you do in the bathroom or wherever is like no big deal like weirdly for many people I've counseled the desire to actually masturbate a look at porn has declined significantly once they were given the permission by their spouse to do it yeah so that would be an argument for not you know again the goal is to have less infidelity but with this argument mean that maybe one of the best ways to have less infidelity is to make it less stigmatized yeah because I think there's it can create such a psychological tension and like feeling of being trapped like feeling like as you kind of mentioned earlier there's this tendency in a lot of marriages to feel like you own the other person and generally as human beings we don't do well when we feel like we're being constrained by like this concept that someone else owns us and so then it does make us want to act out yeah and it's not I don't think it's chosen like I don't think we choose any of these behaviors no and I do think infidelity is a really good example of how like the the human psyche the human spirit our life was what everyone to say it is not easily like contained by like conceptual reality the way that we like to think like even if we have a really strong like conceptual worldview sorry I'm saying this in a weird way but it's like relationships like if you're in the presence of someone that you find attractive like the truth of that moment is kind of like that energy essentially flowing between you like that's real whereas the idea this idea that like you belong to someone else I mean that obviously that's like an agreement you can make with a person but that is ultimately just like a conceptual reality versus like the real moment to moment reality of like oh there's this erotic energy happening between us and if your erotic energy has been so tightly constrained your whole life it's gonna fight its way out agreed yeah I mean I think those conversations require a lot of maturity in relationships I mean speaking about porn or masturbation I think even talking about an example of this my husband he's a cinematographer he's often working with like gorgeous models and if I ever find myself feeling like insecure about it I'll say to him like what's your you know you've been working with this person what's your relationship like like but I have to be open enough and secure enough and mature enough that if he ever were to say like oh there's like a little bit of a vibe there then we can talk about that without me like freaking out or being you know what I mean because in my mind that's that happens you know I that has happened with me why you have to like allow the person to have their own world and I mean you know maybe this is overly simplistic but I do feel like having a safety and a relationship to talk about those things before they become some big hidden thing similar to what you were saying John about porn and masturbation I think even you know having some sort of feelings for someone you're working with if you come back to your partner and say oh you know yeah there was this kind of vibe then you can talk about it and sometimes that can even increase closeness because there's more honesty there's more openness with each other um but I do think speaking to the disadvantages of like early marriage it's like that's kind of it takes a lot of trust um to to get there this is like a bad spirit right yeah we have a tendency to within purity culture and US culture overall too to like have a big defensiveness over people of the opposite sex hanging out or having opposite sex friendships once you're in a committed relationship and I think that also kind of adds to this inherent tension that if you are married and do you have a friend who is a male or you're married and you have a friend who's a woman like that there is automatically going to be a sexual tension there and that that is inherently an unsafe space I think is also kind of building up this this tension and building up this forbidden uh issue that then you know tends to actually lead to real problems if we are like assuming oh this person because I'm married to a man and I and I have this friend um that that means that this is somehow a threat now I'm more likely going to look at that person in like a romantic way because that's been like now that I'm married I have to assume this whereas before you just be a person you know or or even honestly not even in marriage like with children we assume that like little boys and little girls that they're playing together oh you have a crush on someone you're married to someone I think this is just such a larger like social um relationship problem of how we view people of the opposite sex in particular and also just like a heteronormative culture anyway where we tend to think that people of the opposite sex are inherently going to be like a sexual desire and then we we may tend to act on it because of that yeah my well someone in my life once said long ago kind of offhandedly but they were like never be in a car with someone of the opposite sex like just the two of us could say that I was taught that as a Mormon yes yeah okay so that must have been where it came from and at that time I was in college and I had a really close group of friends I was married but we had like a bunch of couple friends and there was one time where one of the friends who was a man was like going to give me a right home because he happened to be on campus and I remember being like so out of sorts about it and really guilty and feeling a lot of shame though we just like chatted like we always do and I got dropped off at home and I think that's just an and a small example of that which is like it creates something that does not need to be there especially when you have these really also to your point say I'm like these really bounded rules of like being in a car together that's the thing where it's like that's not there's nothing that's not the thing yeah exactly it goes there yeah I also think it's hard especially in more like tightly wound social structures like Mormonism couples are not coming up with their sort of co-commitments to each other from a place of like we're tuned in to what works for us as individuals and a couple and as a couple and like instead they're just like this is they're handed this template for what your boundary should be so for example about there's a lot of couples where both the husband and the wife would probably like it if they could be a little bit flirty with people outside their marriage like they don't want to sleep with anyone else but they'd like to be able to flirt but either time any of them does it they may be go to a blame space because they have kind of that guilt within themselves that they also would like to be flirty you know things like that where again it's creating a problem where it doesn't need to exist because you're just trying to like fit everyone in the exact same box and maybe a couple that would have estuperal has a really good Ted talk called monogamish where she kind of talks about this I get can be really healthy for couples to you know who are not wanting to be polyamorous they don't want an open relationship but just allowing themselves to sort of like feel of Rossic energy with other people can be in liveening to their passion with each other just nothing to think about but when in Mormonism are you ever gonna hear a case for like yeah it's fine to flirt with the opposite like that would be obscene yeah never ever and in the Mormon framework even saying that people will be like well then you don't really love your partner or they don't really love you and I think that's so reductive yeah and unfair especially when we're talking about these statistics of cheating it's like I don't think it's about how much love you have for your partner I think it's so much more multifaceted than than that and then it's more multifaceted than these structures allow it to be and then you know you just when you're in Mormonism or other high-demand religions it's just like an increasingly tight structure I mean back to the genesis of all of this the Mormon started swinging and this is why right they didn't I think they had a lot of this eroticism and like sexual tension and they had no other way to channel it and so they ended up going to cabins and drinking and fooling around with each other and to me it's like I'm surprised that doesn't happen more often when you think about these Mormon couples I think it does happen a lot yeah yeah it probably happens more than yeah none of our now it's a TV show yeah true but I mean as far as like the really tight social structures too like when we're looking at the show I also just find it so interesting like the really distinct difference between mom talk and dad talk and I think that has really come to fruition this episode and I think that also kind of mimics larger social dynamics that exists within Mormonism and outside of it but it feels like that's especially prominent within the church like okay women go here men go here we're very like gender binary and then you also need to only hang out like with your own gender in any particular social gathering like my husband and I were talking recently like we were just on a group date with some friends and we found that like the women were supposed to talk to each other and the men were supposed to talk to each other and like my husband like found our conversation more interesting and kind of joined and like a couple people seemed like lightly surprised like they didn't know like what's he doing here and you know and I think they're just kind of tends to be this like this very distinct disparate like gender distinction I guess like in social circles because like we think if we're going to cross it all there is inherently going to be some erotic energy but that's not necessarily going to be the case yeah and I'm typically just ends up objectifying women I feel totally just women generally know that they can like talk to a man in a social situation and it doesn't mean it's anything but I hate when I'm at like a certain type of event or party and it's very clear that if you as a woman just you know start chatting to a man who's a has a wife or whatever that that's kind of not it's like well then you're just all you're saying is that like you can only see me as a sexual object yeah not as someone to chat to yeah I think you're a competition with with the other way yeah yeah I was just thinking about something I noticed this is a small thing but I feel like it came out in this season as well also in last season is Macy and Mikaela it seems Macy's the one who's like more moreman they constantly bring up that Taylor and Miranda have been in sexual situations together because of the swinging and there's even a moment in this season where they're talking about if they were garments or not and Taylor's like oh I they make a joke of like well you've only seen her when she's naked essentially like you never saw her in garments and that feels like an extension of that as well which is like this inability to like they're still so caught up on like oh you've been you've kissed each other we're still reducing the relationship yes exactly as opposed to like this is all really quite fluid and ever changing it seems like the the moreman mind can't really grasp that and and gets really stuck on that of like these two women have kissed each other what does that mean you know and have you noticed that all of the moreman wives constantly make like gay jokes to each other like they're always kind of like sexualizing each other which I have no issue with but it's just interesting it's like even though they're supposed to kind of contain their erotic energy to their husbands it's coming out with their girlfriends in this interesting way I'll say I was really glad so my daughter one of my kids is working in LA and and Alyssa was super fun that your husband was traveling in LA and yeah they got dinner and my my daughter was just like the moreman part of my brain was like this is so weird I'm having dinner with someone else's husband but then she's just like oh wait a minute it was just a fun dinner yeah yeah so people are we're figuring you know right slowly yeah that's good all right all right so yeah well what what happens next okay um so as far as as timeline goes there are a few more slides on Jesse if you want to keep talking about Jesse or we can move on to our next topic of just like the room yeah let's finish up what do we think yeah okay okay let's see do do do do do do so they take a road trip uh yes that's where we are all right Eminem take a road trip they are back to being their truth tellers trying to really determine the truth on whether Mariana and Jesse had sex so they do a little bit of buddy comedy here on their way down and it's very charming but I do think it is you know really just interesting this dynamic that we have of this like intensity to try to find the capital tea truth and again some of this could be production like go on a road trip to be to be ver but I do think like the larger story is really interesting there about this like intensity of the semantics that we've talked about a minute ago so they go to be ver Marciano admits that he lied about having sex with Jesse and they're really relieved about that um do you want to say anything about the Macy and Mikaela on their way to with that with the Marciano the only thought I had about this is I'm just remembering a moment when Jesse is talking about how she cheated and she says this is Taylor's role and she kind of makes this point of like I how am I here and I was just thinking about that in relation to Macy and Mikaela who are very much playing this like I mean we get more into some of Mikaela's internal world later in the season but they kind of play these like stable characters I do believe Mikaela is openly not Mormon anymore but Macy being kind of the most Mormon and they kind of act like these mothers of like okay we're gonna go solve this we're gonna go figure this out and it feels almost like a setting apart like this is not what we do we solve this problem and I'm just thinking about that in relation to maintaining the perfection maintaining the you know this is my marriage would never be in the situation so here I am trying to help save someone else's marriage um and you know not saying I wish anything like this upon them necessarily I'm just saying it's interesting to see how the the ebb and flow of those characters and how ultimately I think this type of thing can and does happen to all sorts of people um and it's sometimes difficult to see that and much easier to be like well I would never but here I am like coming to save the day and figure out what happened and the objects that are particularly interesting because they do they are both pregnant you know which is like an irony but we have like two pregnant women who both have like three to four kids who were like also only 25 from me make you less 25 I don't know hold me see as a couple of years older but yeah they're taking on this like maternal role this like yeah let's let's fix this let's put this to bed while they're still so young it's also just like a really interesting yeah dynamic all right so from there he admits he said okay I kiss Jessie I stayed over in her room while they were drunk um but then he did lie about them having sex so they jerk I know yeah why would you lie about that I'm screen time he got five episodes out of it so yeah really horrible and so then all the women they go to Saint George for an event and to may see or and Jessie decides to wait isn't it appropriate that the woman's carrying all the shame for the whatever infidelity there was yeah absolutely how much screen time was given to Marciana wallowing in shame not at all genuinely if it was the genders were reversed it would be heinous yeah the level of she especially because Marciana knew that Jessie was married it wasn't like a agenda situation in the other season where she can she was fine because she didn't know he knew she would be a home wrecker yeah and Jenna even is kind of pitch that way a little bit and she didn't know she did nothing yeah well because if a woman cheats it's like well she made the decision to do that where if a man cheats it's like well there was this gorgeous woman in his bed what's he gonna have my needs yeah yeah exactly yeah I just totally agree that you know it's the show's literally called secret lives of Mormon wives there's not even any plausibility and you know plausible deniability here that he knows she's a married woman and I just completely agree with the double standards going on throughout this entire show that it's just kind of like we're all gonna laugh and joke and take a silly lie detector test with him where I just wish I could see it in roles reversed and he'd be called you know if it was a woman we called home wrecker probably shamed all over the internet maybe lose her job like you know I just couldn't really get over that double standard for sure I've definitely seen that you know just the classical b-way football player has sex with a female b-way student somehow inexplicably the female b-way student gets expelled but the b-way football player stays on a place or the Mormon man has an affair somehow she gets excommunicated and he doesn't like it it almost seems like there's no way that's real but I think it's it's real it's it's just this world sometimes I can't yeah yeah absolutely yeah so from from here let's dive into our lie detector test so yeah so so Jesse meets with Marciano in St. George and decides to go to dinner with him they talk about it everyone is I think we can maybe talk about both about the dinner about their meet-up about the lie detector test all of that but basically they have dinner Marciano is very flirtatious with with Jesse he's complimenting her he brings her flowers it's Jesse McKayla and Macy and Taylor who are all in St. George at the same time maybe someone else that I can't remember they do the lie detector test to prove their innocence lie detector test as you know valuable or invaluable as lie detectors are basically comes back that they didn't have sex they kind of like build this up as if it's going to be a storyline because something came back inconclusive but then they never address it yet so apparently it's not a storyline so I guess we'll just get past that little narrative lip and then they but the real the real drama is that they go to dinner with Marciano when they when they read the results and Jordan is really upset about this that they went to dinner together and this sort of seems like a bit of a back and forth among the women on whether or not it was appropriate for Jesse to go to dinner with with Marciano and the other women they all went to dinner together Taylor is really um thinking it was a very bad idea for Jesse and Marciano to go to dinner together Macy and McKayla are a little bit more joky with Marciano this becomes a tension more later when Jordan finds out and also all of the men are very very upset that the the women that their their women didn't stop stop her so let's let's chat about any of that I didn't think the dinner was a big deal I don't know if that's just a meat I mean I think the reason I think in a reality TV world it's just like of course they needed him there to read the results they probably said bring him to dinner and just like okay like that to me is not like the line in the sand that it seemed to be amongst everyone particularly because they weren't alone everyone else was there I mean obviously in you know breaking the fourth wall it's like Marciano was also a coworker at this point like he's there in Utah to film he probably needs to eat dinner I don't know to me that was an interesting thing for Jordan to like really dig into and also for it to be like such a big deal amongst the women I don't know I didn't find a topic of a deal personally as they were separated I'm like that is like the function of a separation is to just experience yourself as separate people for a while but so I do agree that if the genders were reversed the women would have an issue with it I do think that's true but I also think it speaks to the fact that Jessie wasn't remotely worried that she was gonna do anything wrong with Marciano like she was trying to get redemption you know like there was no risk that anything was gonna happen yeah I also think that brought up an interesting dynamic of the group dynamic because then Jordan kind of used that as like that's when we got the comment from Zach about mom talk needs to be working to save Jessie and Jordan's marriage and how could they let Marciano come to dinner with them and I I appreciated how the rest of the women handled it because they're like I'm not Jessie's handler like she is she invited him what am I gonna do and yeah maybe just speaks to also like group in measurement and this need for like policing amongst everyone's all up and everybody else's business when in reality it's like Jessie invited him and I respect the women for being like it it wasn't their job even Taylor she said how she felt about it but I don't think it was anyone's job to kick him out but it is also a very Mormon thing to think we need to tackle on each other BYU on our code you know this kind of like baked an idea that if there's a problem like we need to tell someone I remember when I was at BYU my roommates it was we were trying to decide if like it was our duty to call the honor code office because our roommate had an incense in her room and we were like technically like I know we're supposed we didn't luckily but I do think like that that pressure is so heavy and so I think that's kind of like where some of that is stemming from and I can understand why there's like going to be a thorn in their side for Marciano in particular understand that he's not a neutral character that he's also being flirty I can see how there's going to be some sensitivity there I don't think there is going to be any real threat of an actual relationship or further cheating happening but I can see how it's like you know it's like when when your partner maybe like his friends with someone that you don't like like you don't like that they're hanging out together or talking to each other but I don't think it's this as as scandalous as as they're making it sound so I can kind of see like why it would be a little bit obnoxious or annoying but I definitely don't think that it's this huge your issue not the best look maybe but also not like yeah the crux of the issue either yeah yeah um yeah I agree that it just didn't seem like that big of a deal to me and I think it almost spoke to how almost casual the whole situation wants to begin with and I never felt like it was that huge or you know superstolations or scandalous of it you know not great to be kissing someone outside your marriage but I just felt like the fact they could so casually go to dinner and there wasn't some like big heartbreak there from this emotional fare where we were so connected and then you know it's not about me and it fell off and like I felt like if there was all of these serious feelings there wouldn't have been able to just so casually go to dinner and it just kind of re-iterated to me that the whole thing just doesn't feel like that big of a deal to begin with in my eyes I don't know I could be totally off but really cool to a couple comments I'll share a reddish 0823 says great show such smart lovely women I totally agree thanks for the super chat a reddish um I hate snarky comments and I'm going to call one out bacon cruiser writes hug remember when Mormon stories was Michael Coe and Dr. Robert Rittner implying that this conversation isn't worth having um I hate this comment because I'm in like episode 22 of like a 35 episode series with Dr. John Turner on the life of Joseph Smith like we do we just did we do the earliest discussion series we just covered nay home like what the freak let us talk about the secret lives of Mormon lives please like media drives culture like it or not like stupid low common denominator media has a massive impact on culture I know I think this show has I mean never heard of those guys yeah I don't know who those doctors are but I definitely know the secret lives of Mormon lives women I mean if I may yes I do yeah if I may bacon oh eight oh two um I mean I do think that I I understand where that pushback comes from around reality TV but I mean to your point Samantha this I think even 50 years from now this will be such a turning point in the way that Mormonism is known and spoken about I'm listening to Alex Cooper on call her daddy one of the biggest female lead podcasts in the world and she's talking to Taylor Frankie Paul about Mormonism and what it's like to date Mormon men that has not happened before we're seeing Mormonism really explode in a way that I think is unprecedented and I think that of course that's worth talking about of course that's worth looking at what is this show saying about Mormon dynamics what is it showing to the outside world about young Mormon women I think it's well well worth dissecting to the bone as we are and as we will yeah and you can recognize the ways that reality TV is produced and the ways that that's influencing the stuff that's happening like I think if you're a smart viewer you can sort of see some of the differences between like what's production versus what's like obviously real authentic emotion that's being brought out whether or not the show is the thing prompting it like it's still real human emotion you know and I'm just gonna say I think it's easy to discount these women and their lives because they are young women who care about how they look and they make TikToks and they dance and I think that that is reductive to think that they don't matter and that their stories don't matter and that their stories don't say really big things about the culture that they grew up in and that they continue to be a part of so I think to discount them as like silly and vapid which many people do people do this with influencers people do this with reality TV stars and again yes there's levels of production I understand it's you know you have to take some of it with a grain of salt but I also think that you know who's to say that uh some doctor man has a more important life or opinion to be spoken about then these women I think these women are worth speaking about and if they vapid it's for a reason so like that's interesting yeah exactly it's like it influences the things people hate about influences it's like well that's the impact of capitalism and like an insane advertising culture in the US and blah blah blah there's always DPU you can go yeah a list of grandfather posted a video noting that the sickle lives of Mormon wives has had the largest uptick in Mormon Google searches than anything else over the past 20 years so that all of Mormonism like including the Romney running for president twice you know this is the cultural moment that Mormons are are going to be known for and I think that it's also interesting that like the two people that bake in Greece 0-2 is noting it happens to be men and women dissecting part of culture that is especially impactful to women is somehow seen as less valuable is something that maybe you should uh think about yourself bake in Greece Wow drag okay Brooklyn yeah I could not agree more with everything I mean I think whether we like it or not this is a big part of what's going on in Mormon culture right now and you know we got to talk about it it's Mormon stories this is John's job and I I love it and I also think these shows real the House of Salt Lake City like it's showing a spotlight on a new way that people are living Mormonism that I mean I personally did that understand as someone who was very morally Mormon very orthodox Mormon and I do get that there are people trying to live Mormonism in these ways now and it's interesting for me to see it and I think someone needs to in an educated way comment on the Mormonism of this all where normal pop culture podcasts aren't able to do in the way John is so I think it's good content for the channel John do you have well uh lame bake in 435 sorry uh so Michael Coe and Robert Rittner Michael Coe was a Yale anthropologist who commented on Book of Mormon historicity and Robert Rittner was a huge University of Chicago Egyptologist that commented on Book of Abraham historicity and while I I'm here for truth claim stuff like this is like stuff anthropology but it's also life stuff yeah my life has an anthropologist as a viewer of reality well it's all connected right I mean we even have a moment I'm sure we'll discuss about Leila talking about her biracial identity and this scripture in the Book of Mormon about the you know the curse of blackness so that goes back to the truth claim of the Book of Mormon and the historicity of the Book of Mormon like these are the real impacts of that happening to people so I think to me it's all connected and I think to Brooklyn's point the whole world is watching the show I feel like it's really important as people who lived it ourselves and who understand I mean speaking to you John like the depths of these truth claims etc to be able to also provide some context because I will say one thing about the show and I'm curious if they're doing this intentionally but they don't provide a lot of Mormon context they really don't and I think people are fast needed by it because they're they're seeing these things play out without understanding all of the context behind it and we're happy to provide context and this was such a deep season I felt like all the themes was so heavy and deep for how much they were touched on or like able to be yeah commented on it was pretty nuts yeah um I also forwarded you guys the tiktok where Kristen Wig is on Amy Polar's podcast talking I mean that's the top five in the top 10 again another podcast chapter in the world talking about secret lies of Mormon wise yes I just listened to another one last culture restaz Jennifer Lawrence was on it and she's talking about Heather Gay and talking about soaking you know it's like you you kind of can't avoid it now in a way that's really yeah yeah in some of these podcasts I've been hearing people like googling on the spot like what is the Mormon temple ceremony like trying to understand like what are all these references like what are I was listening to a podcast with like two women in New York and they were talking about like did you hear that like the Mormon temple garments got changed like I see that like all the women are really excited because they can wear tank tops now like this is really becoming such a big moment and I think it's like teaching the world not just about these women's lives but about Mormonism overall and they're also talking I heard one of them mentioned something about like Joseph's Miss young wives you know like even those types of stories are really starting to permeate and I think that's going to also really affect Mormons current Mormons who we've talked you know you've talked ad nauseam on the podcast about how Mormons aren't aware of like their actual history but now that their history and their stories are becoming nationally and internationally known I think it's going to be more and more difficult for active believing Mormons to not hear about Joseph's it's 14 year old wives and to not hear about those things like I think that is also going to be a repercussion of this show even though they're not talking about those specifics on the show itself I may be stretching here but like this week the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced that young Mormon young women can now serve missions at the age of 18 and recently we also reported that for the first time in the history of the LDS Church but also in broader U.S. Christianity there are more men in the pews than women on any given Sunday that's in the LDS Church and broader how could it not be that that shows like this the disgust modesty the disgust patriarchy the disgust beauty standards in the treatment of women aren't impacting how young Latter-day Saints are either opting in or opting out of church membership is that a stretch yeah not to mention like you see the way that their beliefs are shifting throughout the seasons like we're on season three and Jen who starting off in season one was extremely devout is becoming less so she's still identifies as a member but we see a conversation later which we weren't going to talk about this time but whatever where she talks about how she's you know has some issues with some elements of the church and and they talk really openly at one point in the season as well about like Utah's treatment of queer people and about like they're they're starting to get really specific about problems within Utah and problems within Mormon culture and I think that we can see not only the narrative of you know Mormonism at large being disgust but each of these women's beginning to have faith crises as we're coming along which almost feels inevitable as they're starting to gather more fame which also means gathering more information which means being around a wider net of people that are outside of Mormon culture and outside of Mormonism that seems like like the more this is growing them it's just getting bigger and bigger and it seems like this is probably why the church is so worried about it is snowballing for both members on the show and people outside of the show that there's the more awareness there's about Mormonism the more the secrets are coming out about Mormonism the secret lives perhaps and it's it's not a good look did you'll see the tiktok put out by the LDS faithful YouTube apologists like Jasmine Reply and Carden Ellis and Jacob Hanson they do this secret lies in Mormon wives circle dance oh I did see that they each they each do a little dance pose and it's Jacob hey should we do it yeah absolutely I can I know that dance that they did but it's what oh no no keep going I mean Brookhead I don't know how you're going to join the dance from from the UK but we'll stream you in um it's definitely you know I even saw Jasmine asking the question of whether secret lives of Mormon wives is going to be good for the LDS church do you see that like is it does it does it help paint LDS church members to be less weird less very young pioneer dressed stodgy awkward puritanical I've wondered that I've wondered that with especially because Whitney Levitt and Jen Affleck of the cast were on dancing with the stars and another huge thing yeah which is absolutely huge and you know watching them on that show particularly where a lot of the pros on dancing with the stars are Mormon or Mormon adjacent and yeah it's a bit of probably a both and where there is part of me that's like oh don't get the wrong idea that there's not some some real issues underlying this because when you see like just these gorgeous pro dancers happily Mormon um but I think this show as we've discussed before it's like it only takes a little peek behind that door to realize it's not exactly as it seems so yeah maybe there's a certain element of I don't know to me it almost makes it seem more bizarre that people who are living seemingly I don't want to use the word normal but that's the easiest word that's coming to mind normal lives are also holding these like very unique and to the outside world often strange beliefs um it kind of throws that even more into contrast I think recent obviously also Derek and Julian Huff were raised Mormon I mean you freaking Mormons everywhere yeah Mormons are everywhere yeah yeah really are like I remember I've been through several Mormon moments in the past 20 years like PBS came out with this series called The Mormons 2005-2006-ish that was supposed to be a huge deal Richard Dutcher came out with his movies early on and that was supposed to be a big deal book or musical came out and big love and we all thought oh that was going to be a really big deal um and then Romney was the president like they're they're keeps happy these Mormon moments keep happening in US culture and weirdly this is the biggest one so like it the trend is there's going to be a bigger one yeah I'm curious from your standpoint having tracked all of that John why you think this is if if you think this is the biggest one and why you think it is I mean you could argue I think people I've heard people say that I don't want to say this about myself or us but like I've heard people say Mormons are good looking I've heard people say that Mormons are taught to be public speakers from a very young age so they're very articulate or they're missionaries and so they um articulate they uh we're a performance culture where we're learning the dance and sing and play musical instruments from a very young age even act and then the missionary mindset of all was wanting to project well we're very image-based we've already talked about that we're very there's a heavy beauty culture I can't tell you many many people I know who have come from California who have come from LA and they're like I can't believe how appearance-based Utah Mormon culture is for women that's LA I got to think LA does Utah out LA LA like this might I mean with plastic surgery rates we do right yeah yeah and then and then also um we're the quintessential American religion like and we're so corporate like we're we're a three hundred to five hundred billion dollar church at this point and we're the most capitalistic of all like corporate Mormon Jesus is the most capitalistic wealthy successful Christian Jesus of all Christian Jesus is so I mean in so many ways we are the quintessential American religion why wouldn't we be why wouldn't Mormons represent American culture why someone tell me yeah yeah well I think of your point earlier on when you were saying nothing is uniquely Mormon and I think Mormonism provides like it's kind of like a magnified version of like a puritanical culture it's a magnified version of patriarchy so when you're able to see it so magnified it provides a really great entry point to talk about not just Mormonism but about patriarchy generally about purity culture generally um so I think that for that reason as well the Mormonism aside it's just a it's a really good entry point talking about these broader systems and cultures that really matter. Brooke and I saw we had to get to it and I saw you were unmuting for a second and no yeah I was just responding so I agreed John when you're saying hey could this help the church I think it absolutely can I just firmly believe that all publicity can be good publicity and I'm I frankly have been surprised that the church hasn't embraced this like Mormon moment even more and that they do seem to be wanting to remove themselves so much from it because we need to go out and book a Mormon musical came out I feel like they were kind of loving that moment and really working with it and you know they would have the signs up everywhere time square like you saw the play and I read the book and using that as an opportunity to like sell themselves more and it feels like they really just wanted distance themselves from this and I get this you know a swinging element involved but Book of Mormon musical had some a lot of adult themes in it as well and I'm just I I've been surprised that they haven't embraced it more and understood that it could help the publicity of the church well yeah that's brilliant point and you know quit and cook the Mormon apostle who's in charge of mystery work is running around the world now saying that the earliest church is growing in every region or area in the world not just Africa not just Latin America not just the Philippines but everywhere I think he's lying or misleading people that's my opinion but if it's true then maybe maybe signalize a Mormon wise is leading to an avalanche of US conversions so I guess to stay tuned on that one because wouldn't that be interesting if we're if we're good at all the sudden double as a world religion because of signalize a Mormon wise and now jump the shark we jump the shark all right where do we go listen yeah well while we're just kind of talking about maybe the women's relationship to Mormonism let's let's talk about that more um I think that we can just kind of a draw we have a clip I guess let's let's jump forward um to Taylor kind of talking about her relationship to the church this is I don't see the number I think oh okay so which uh 523 oh okay sorry sorry he's called a Taylor and Dakota church yeah this was right at the beginning it's like it's slide yeah it's that one I think oh okay okay okay all right here we go thanks sorry for our technicalities yeah that one please hi everything you really go to church oh wow yeah yeah when it comes to church I only go for like the foundations of it like love family service and I like going but I like to go when I want to go it's like a personal thing for me and I know not a lot of people can live in the gray but for me I can I mean that's we did a show recently on Mormon stories about these four types of Mormons and uh of of all the people in the United States who identify as LDS a quarter don't attend at all so that leaves you know or remaining 75% 25% identify as as ultra orthodox and then another 25 or um I know no another seven-ish percent are like confused and don't know but there's this large block of like 41% of people who identify as Latter-day Saints in the United States are kind of cafeteria buffet liberal progressive Mormons like she just characterizes like uh sometimes I go sometimes I don't what do you all think about that I think it's an interesting comparison point I don't want to jump the gun on what we learned from Macy but I've been thinking a lot about this because Macy I would say is a progressive Mormon in the sense that she has a temple recommend she believes in it it seems and yet she will say things like I firmly disagree with their stance on LGBTQ people she drinks coffee Taylor I have a less hard time with Taylor's approach because I feel like Taylor is saying I like God I like Jesus this is my faith tradition it's familiar to me so if I want to go worship that's where I go she seems a little bit more almost honest with herself I guess in a way of just being like yeah I know that this is this is kind of unique and it might cause questions for people but it's like if I want to go I go if I don't I don't whereas to me Macy feels like she's living in so much cognitive dissonance of like no I'm Mormon I go to the temple I do all the things and yet I drink coffee and firmly disagree she's on the show yeah and and I mean she's not you can tell she's like not wearing her garments which is fine I just think to me that approach is a bit more frustrating where I feel like Taylor there's still a big part of me that's like girl just give like you don't need you know there's a better church is out there if you want to go worship whatever but I can understand where she's coming from in the sense of yeah this is what I'm used to this is familiar to me I know my ward if I feel like going that's where I'm going to show up whereas someone like a Macy it feels more frustrating because it feels like an unwillingness to see that she is doing something that the church is so adamantly against that she's getting a temple recommend even though she openly drinks coffee like technically speaking that should not even be allowed to happen yeah can that happen now is that like a new thing or can you have a temple recommend and drink coffee I mean nowadays you the church is not enforcing cannabis really yeah well I mean once once cannabis became legalized for medical use in Utah and also in Colorado and other places I think the church just realized this is going to be impossible to enforce so I have heard of no church discipline around cannabis I've heard of no church discipline around psychedelics so weirdly Mormons all over Utah active faithful believing Mormons are doing mushrooms they're doing they're doing ketamine they're doing LSD I recently yes for sure like psychedelics have you ever heard in like a therapeutic setting my well not just that I had I had a bishop tell me that is staked president took him on a psychedelic journey wow wow recently in the past six months really because I was just going to say someone I know was recommended ketamine therapy from the bishop's wife like in the patch of mason's wife so Patrick Mason is the number one faithful LDS scholar in the world probably who's actively doing scholarship his wife ran a psilocybin educational seminar it was like ketamine slash psilocybin at the restore conference which is the conference for faithful Mormons in the church like so anyway I think coffee and tea the church is sort of unofficially telling bishops to staked presidents not to keep people out of the temple for coffee and tea um I just think across the board the church is lowering its standards and I was going to ask y'all when you watch these women sort of talking about how they Mormon on the one hand I think we're all celebrating but are any of you just going and Brooklyn I think I want to go to you first because I think I was watching you shake your head on this like do any of you watch these women and go that does I don't even recognize these women as Mormon. Brooklyn do you want to go first on that? I definitely agree that it's difficult for me as someone who like to say that was not able to live in the gray because I just think when you see Mormonism a certain way you just I just always saw it as like either you're doing it all or you're doing nothing it's such an all or nothing religion at least how I understood it in my orthodox Mormon brain so it is really difficult for me to understand even how that works within their brains um but then I feel like I have such a respect for someone like Taylor who's so authentic about it and I have to say I feel like I'm almost jealous of how she's able to live in that gray because I was just someone who was not and it was like if I wasn't all in then I needed to be all out and I think a lot of things almost wouldn't be easier if I was able to be in the gray but I'm still in a place where I just can't wrap my head around how that works or how they rationalize that in their own mind so it still confuses me to this day you know as ten years outside the church yeah I also feel it's just very conflicted about all of it and feel very confused I think that anybody of course has the right to be able to define themselves and use whatever label they want to and I think that if somebody wants to define themselves as Mormon and they can define themselves as Mormon but I definitely don't like see myself or like the religion that I grew up in in them and I think there has been a lot of conversation like casually saying oh it's a younger generation thing like it's this new thing but I think it's more of a recent thing because I'm still an age to all of these women and I grew up extremely orthodox and it wasn't just that my family was really orthodox it was you know a grew up in Utah and it was very very strict anything even remotely close to a tank pop at prom was completely unacceptable there was some really serious like social repercussions of anything like that and so yeah I don't know I think I definitely feel mixed about kind of how those things are coming out similar to even just like the garments for example in some ways I feel jealous kind of like how Brooklyn was saying like this thing that had so much trauma for me is now this celebrated moment for so many people in this community and I feel really happy for them and I also feel like an outsider it is a really odd way to see this thing that I want to know so well and still feel like I know really well changing underneath my feet I sound like I'm a hundred years old like the same old used to be but yeah I don't know it's it's a really odd to not feel like I even really relate to the community that exists and how much does change even since I left which was in 2018 you know even at that time like you saw I was it was seven years ago it just shows how fast Mormon culture is changing it's changing at light speed yeah right yeah I just had Amy McAfee alabust on my podcast John thank you for connecting us breaking down patriarchy yes from breaking down patriarchy and she shared an analogy that was like oh that's it and she said that when you grow up in the church you are living in this beautiful happy town with your family but you start getting sick slowly over time and then you learn that there's nuclear radiation and it's causing you to get sick so no matter how much you love the town you know you have to leave it in order to prevent yourself from getting more sick and she was saying that she sees these changes like changing the tank tops like maybe not cracking down as much on coffee and tea as almost a medicine to mask what is the underlying problem which is still patriarchy in in this context of what we were talking about and I feel like that helps describe it how I feel about it which is on one hand I am happy for Taylor and I do respect her and even admire that she's like you know effort I'm just gonna relate to this the way that I want to but on the other hand I almost worry that now women will see that they will remain in the church in this kind of halfway way but when they're still showing up to church they're still hearing patriarchy they're still seeing patriarchy and that like Maddie Packer responded to that clip with you and Amy there that that's the way it's going there's this whole resurgence now on tiktok an Instagram of faithful Mormon apologist young women who are sort of responding to you Haley responding to Alyssa Grentel responding to you Samantha and others basically clapping back and saying stop calling us oppressed we we have power we love this stop telling us that we're miserable it's a real resurgence yeah and they say we are anti-feminist because we are saying oh you know garments are anti-feminist and they're like well we are choosing it so you're the anti-feminist because you're saying that I didn't actually make this choice but I think objectively speaking the person who made the choice of what the garments look like is a man our men period I mean that's you can't argue that so yes it's a woman's choice if she wants to opt in or out of that but it's not a woman who is like making those calls on that level and I do think yeah I mean obviously I do feel passionate about this because I found myself many a times like in levels of conversation with these women and again it's like I think what's so emotional about it for me is I see myself in them and I see like no I can have it always I can stay Mormon I can do you know have this life that I planned on having of being a Mormon and a good Mormon and I can be a feminist and I can be an ally to the queer community and I can drink coffee and I can wear a tank top now and I think again Amy said it best where it's like you are still not going to be able to avoid patriarchy you're still not going to be able to avoid purity culture that is still the foundations of the Mormon religion I think yeah but this puts this really does put exponents or liberal or questioning or critical Mormons in a weird position because we're all we're all saying Mormon culture is a problem Mormon culture needs to change and so they're changing and they're making garments better they're making the temple ceremony better they're becoming more laxed about adultery about premarital sex about even being gay like Charlie Bird and his husband are still active and faithful as far as we know in their ward they're making all these improvements and we're stuck between hopefully there's part of us that are like yay they're making it better for women better for gay people better for just adolescence and young adults and this grumpy self like you said Alyssa where it's just like I stopped the Mormonism I was raised and I didn't get to wear that dress okay I did not I heard that I heard that when you were talking but like do we want the church to get better or not and if they get better then we're grumpy because we didn't have that experience but should there be a part of us that's happy that they get to be in a healthier church and even if yes a man still decided what their underwear is wearing at least it's a it's a less yeast infection yeah it's more comfortable yeah more comfortable tiny bit more sexy underwear I'm not I'm not I promise I'm not calling you I think it's a complete right I agree I think it's both and I think to me the word I keep thinking of is insidious it's to me it's almost more insidious the more they're pretending to be something that I just don't think they are and I would almost I don't want people to be harmed along the way which I so I am happy that people are hopefully being spared harm and discomfort etc because people are still Mormon and will continue to be and at the same time I do think it also is kind of sneaky too because it's like now people can say active Mormons can say look now 18-year-old women can go on missions look how progressive and it's just not that doesn't make the church progressive and if it if it's more progressive now tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny bit right so yeah but to your point it's true it's like you don't want it to be I'm not actively rooting for the church to get more patriarchal or more unfriendly toward LGBTQ community but I think that that is who they are at their core I think speaking personally and so it almost just feels like more yeah it's like sneakier it's complicated yeah I could just see the general thirties just go man those ex-mormons you just can't make them happy you know you don't change they're mad damn if you do you convince them that you know you start making big changes and they're grumpy I want to come to you and let's say I'd say I'm I told Brooklyn I'd come to her first and then let's say I'm gonna say oh you're fine we may have slightly been done this point but just going back to what you said about you know women are saying hey I'm not I'm not a press don't paint me as that I feel like that's super you know in line with how Mormon women feel I I would remember being in sacrament p is probably around eight years old with my mom and my mom whispered my ear of like oh you know we all us women secretly know that we are kind of the most powerful in the church and just kind of always being taught that since I was young and I feel like that's just kind of a sneaky way of making us feel like it's our choice when it isn't always I don't know then after I left the church I just kind of always look back on that feeling like I don't think that did come from women I think it came from having to justify where we are in that patriarchal system patriarchal system and it just feels it gave to me as I look back on it that I I didn't use to convince myself like oh no I am kind of won't even higher above in this grand scheme than even the men and the fact you have to convince yourself that so much I think shows that you're not I don't know that makes sense but totally and they're going to say we're being condescending Brooklyn like we're not letting them describe their own experience we're projecting onto them even our past experience but they're they're saying now on TikTok and Instagram stop telling us we're oppressed stop telling us we're unhappy we're choosing this and we're happy and it's complicated right Brooklyn yeah Alyssa you go and then and then say me yeah I mean I think it's an individual woman can absolutely be happy and she can choose out for herself and she can be empowered and she herself may not be oppressed and I think that's that's really good and I think that can be the best choice for many women they can find genuine joy within the church genuine empowerment within the church and I think that's fantastic but I don't think that takes away from the systemic and structural patriarchal format of the church and you said a moment ago like well they're making big big changes and I think you know we we've had the temple language change in 2019 we took off a couple inches these are seemingly big changes but they're still somewhat you know topical changes and that even members themselves would admit that they would say their policy changes not doctrinal changes the problems really are with with the doctrine itself that the doctrine is inherently patriarchal we have you know reading Dear Mormon Man from Amy Fyola best the video was just published about I think we can see from there that it is layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of patriarchal men in charge elements of the church and so we can as as empowered as an individual woman might feel and happy to wear whatever outfit she's choosing we have to also be honest with ourselves that all of this is coming from men that that righteous dominion is still dominion it doesn't have to be unrighteous dominion in order for it to be harmful that we are still not making choices for ourselves and whether we feel like we are granted little bits of permission along the way awesome that's great I think that can make an individual person feel very happy and satisfied with their life but that does not make it a healthy institution that does not make it a progressive institution that does not make it a profeminist institution I don't think the church wants to be profeminist and I don't yeah I think the church wants to be a patriarch but I do think it wants to be healthy say me what were you to say I had like a million things I think what Hailey said about the fact that it's it's patriarchal and it's purity culture kind of no matter what is sort of the main crux of it like the fact that a church that's sort of losing influence over its members is workshopping the best ways to continue having those members be psychologically dependent on them like that's the real issue I really don't give a shit like what kind of garments they're allowed to wear I don't think anyone actually who's like ex-moment saying like oh man I had to wear worse stuff I don't think any of us actually care you know yeah totally and it is insidious the ways that they're like I don't know sort of performing an amount of progressivism and I also don't think it's any more progressive allowing women to go admissions earlier now because it's like okay you're recognizing that you're losing women that you a patriarchal church are losing women so you're just like how can we retain control of their psyches I'm like where's the that's not progressive it's like that's such a shallow they don't want to be progressive they want a strong church yeah but I want people's psyches to break free from control I think they want to have have a strong church which means not scaring people who are conservative or people who are progressive conservative throughout the needle uh-huh conservative people can say they're conservative progressive people can say they're progressive and they've got plenty of arguments with every I mean even just taking like the women being able to go on missions at 18 you can argue a conservative argument for that that they still have only a year and a half that I in some ways I could see it I saw a tribune article arguing that like this may increase education for women this may lower the birth rate I don't I didn't read the whole thing so so I could be totally misconstruing their argument misinformation but but I could also definitely see that being something that would increase the birth rate increase people going to Mormon staying with them or men as them because with men and women leaving at the same time I can also see this as more high school sweethearts getting married because they're not going to have the time where women are going to be going to college and meeting an rm or even maybe decide and leave the church within that first couple years or maybe waiting longer for their rm to come home they all of everybody will be leaving at the same time coming home roughly around the same time marrying their high school sweetheart having babies right away in some ways I could see that increasing people staying within the church so that is a Mormon or a more conservative Mormon argument and then you take a more progressive Mormon argument and say oh well now it's slightly more equitable so I think yeah you can thread the needle on on both ends and that and the church wins regardless it's tricky I'm just dying to know it's just it's objectively factual that the church culture is becoming less orthodox and it's objectively factual that the church is weakening its control over its membership we often talk about the bite model and the bite model is defined primarily at first and foremost by behavioral control the church is ramping down it's turning down the volume on its behavioral control and I'm just dying to see number one if it actually works out to be a healthier lived faithful LDS experience even if it's not even if it's still patriarchy is it still a more positive experience than let's just say what y'all experienced and ultimately does it weaken and harm the church in the long run or does it retain an even increase growth by by chilling the f out a little bit what's interesting because Taylor in that clip we just saw said that she goes for the foundations which is love family and service and like there's a human foundations and the church just sort of co-ops them and is like where the guys that are serving you this but I feel like the more you remove the behavior control and the rules the more the church is sort of revealed to be what it is which is like well then what's unique about it it's like the the specific bizarre behavior control is a big part of what made it unique and what gave people identity and like the feeling that they're peculiar people blah blah but love family and service you can find anywhere like those are intrinsic to us I do think we could talk about this all day I do think the church does a good job of creating community not that it's the only place that creates community but I think it creates community I think it provides structure support for parents and families that need support maybe not all parents and families at all socioeconomic levels depend on the church as much but it's able to do that through the apparatus of the patriarchy as well and that's that's one way to organize decision-making and leadership and I'm not a defender of the patriarchy but I you know I think I mean I just meant that if you know we had an African from Kenya who joined the church in Africa came the United States became a doctor was angry you know left the church was upset that he was not told the truth about the priesthood ban and yet when I asked him are you glad that the church is quintupling down on African converts he's like yeah I'm so glad these Africans are going to be brought into a church the values education let's get to help them learn literacy and education and have a community and support and you know they need to figure out the church is it true at some point in their life I'm glad in in those younger years or in those earlier years they're getting support that helped me become a doctor in the United States that's what he said yeah right it's it's a tough one it's like the problem of like Christian missionary work generally where it's like you're offering these yeah exactly you're I mean especially Mormonism with such an ethnocentric religion um that like it's complicated it's complicated it's complicated I feel like it's worth bringing up again Jen talking to Ezra Soza so Jen went on dancing with the stars and she's talking with Ezra who is a pro on dancing with the stars and is openly ex Mormon and gay and their conversation was so interesting because Ezra I mean they were friendly and polite and respectful toward each other but Ezra was like yeah I came out as gay and my parents took me out of dance they thought dance was making me gay um he was like I mean it was awful and traumatic and then he said eventually my family came to see this for what it was and they left the church in solidarity and Jen responds and she's like yeah you know like I just kind of take the good and leave the bad and I feel like that yeah and it puts it so into perspective which is like and not to say that I don't think Jen is still being harmed by the dynamics of the church but it's like okay someone who's not gay can more easily take the good and leave the bad Ezra could not and I think it's really beautiful that his family in solidarity realized well if this is what I did to my son then we're gonna also step out on this um and no on the show is that I I wish they would they would play that out a little bit more like all there's these little glimpses we get of these things that we're discussing and I'm sure that these women have thoughts and feelings on these things but it feels like they're really towing a line it almost feels like they maybe find it like political or something and that's what they're trying to avoid because it is in some ways but I was like oh man if we could only get a few more minutes of that conversation with Ezra and get a little bit more into like well how do you relate to people like Jen Ezra who have just been like well yeah sucks for you I don't believe in that part but you know I still go on Sunday because I like it I just feel like there's so much there and it is complicated and I don't mean to make it more reductive than it is but there's so many points that I feel like the show could have explored that and they just seem I don't know if you all felt that way but it felt like they would get there and then just like next scene season four season four yeah hopefully hopefully I just love that point you made Hayley because I think this all the time that I think that it's such a privilege to be able to stay in that gray area of the church where some people for example like we're saying with LGBTQ it's so much more difficult and harmful to mental health so many aspects of their lives in order to stay in and I just see this in my own life of people that I grew up with LDS versus my family leaving LDS where as soon as I felt like for example I mean in my life just one small element of like going through divorce in a family like as soon as you didn't fit into that little perfect Mormon box where it works out really well for you just the people who do fit in that box that I just don't see them ever having a reason to leave the church and I just see that as like such a privilege that isn't recognized a lot of the time and I think someone like Jen and maybe Taylor have that privilege yeah I have to always check myself because I sometimes have this tendency to want to remind ex Mormons that there's good in the church but I have male privilege like I had a great lived male experience as a Mormon and one of the things I hate most about civilization is that like it's white man and then it's black man and then it's gay man and we're we can talk all day about how sympathetic we are about those people and how glad we are for their advances but women are always last there's still never been a US president who's a woman and Michelle Obama said she's not running for president because America's not ready to have a woman this president says she's not going to run like women we talking about LGBT people oh man LGBT people are really hard in the church but what Margie tells me is that women are really harmed in the church and I I'm just going to admit that I forget that well I think as a white woman I do that same thing because I mean that's another thing that I feel like we got a little bit more of this season with Leila who's a block by racial woman and again that's something that I think could be much further delved into but her experience is so different than you know Taylor's experience because of her ethnicity so I feel like that yeah it can kind of go down the line forever and I think it's important to remember as a white woman too yeah and I guess I don't know it's so human that we get into these modes of thinking where we feel like we have to endlessly litigate something like is it good is it bad and it's just like everything in life is going to be just a mix of all of it I think most ex-moments like ultimately do know that I mean a lot of us would probably say like the the ends don't justify the means like maybe the church does provide a solid community that is helpful to a lot of people in certain ways but like women women's bodies and and lives are not acceptable collateral damage for that like the human psyche is not acceptable collateral damage for that you know we're fueling this like multi billion dollar engine that you know maybe it's helping some people get education but it's also robbing a lot of people with education as well I mean specifically women if we're being honest it's true it's true let's play a couple you mentioned Laila let's play a clip that we have a couple clips around this theme of standards and patriarchy and and he could be more I mean it doesn't have to not be but I'm like I just don't want that double standard of like we can't do this in this but we can have sex yeah like I didn't like like drinking you know I mean what give me shit for doing that but then you can have one time we like to text and help once everyone church together five minutes and that's getting home so I kindly grip off my dress like exactly maybe we should wait like a couple hours and just get home from church yeah there you have it what's wrong with a little poster sex everybody come on it's like right after a couple of hours I mean let's just point it out to me the the self-serving nature of and also I guess more so the way that a Mormon man can seemingly judge someone like Taylor or Laila and be like you know don't drink coffee don't drink alcohol heaven forbid that you're seeing doing those things oh but I want to have sex with you so that one doesn't matter as much when in the hierarchy of Mormon sense sex is very very very much worse than those other things and I do think systems like Mormonism when you do have all these different rules you know not everyone does but it does give people grounds to be hypocritical in that way and kind of pick and choose where it serves them and and where it doesn't should we play the second clip do it all right let's play the second clip I think that's something that's common in Utah is that we almost like correlate being a member with like if they don't have that they're not raised with like good values which like you can still be a good person not be a member most of my friends weren't Mormon so I think I knew that like obviously people can have like good morals about being a person without being Mormon like that was never in my big things more difficult like when you have kids if you if you're passionate and you want to be Mormon and he doesn't then you're having a full set marriage for sure yeah for like it would be hard oh Macy's defense yeah she is she gets defensive a few times here which is really interesting and I think it's when they when they start a kind of dissect like the elements that but aren't even just like cultural parts of Mormonism but that are literally doctrinal parts of Mormonism that like Mormons are inherent are just better than everyone like we're the only people that are going to make it to heaven and I think that's kind of where Macy's cognitive dissonance is really coming into play and she's doing a lot of like of what I think a lot of people like the the Mormons in your comments who are saying well I haven't felt oppressed is not looking at systems and is just looking at personal experience and I think that is just like a really harmful way of especially responding to someone being really honest and being really vulnerable in that moment when Leila is talking about like her lived experience to kind of jump at this well I haven't had that I think that's a really common way that we as humans want to like push away from like systemic criticism and try to just like make it more about our own personal lived experience and you constantly see like the more Mormon people in the show like Jen saying it's cultural issues it's not doctrine but it's like when she was talking with the dancer it's like well the family approximation to the world is doctrine like the first presidency all signed that so it's not just cultural to be homophobic you know but it's like that's they keep like relying on that as their excuse and wanting these things to exist in a vacuum yeah I think I particularly bristle at this moment with Macy because two reasons the one thing is that kind of separation of doctrine and culture which I think is those things inform each other so completely that you you cannot separate them because that's where the culture comes from and I feel like it was condescending of her to be like well I'm from California so duh and like your naive it felt like she was trying to call Layla naive which I bristle at as like a Utah raised Mormon because I'm like yeah I was but that's because of I was a product of the environment that I was put inside of you know like how much can I do as a teenage girl living in Provo Utah and you're still going to internalize those messages because that that's what I thought I thought you had to be Mormon to essentially be a good person in the most productive terms so for someone just to be like well you know that's just that was your interpretation of it feels really unfair also because even if the interpretation that Macy had was different can is she not able to at least validate like oh yeah I can see how you might interpret it that way and I can understand that it's an immediate like well that's not real and you were just wrong there's nothing about the church that you know that was it she's making it I think seem like a personal failure on behalf of Layla which I think it absolutely is not it has a bit of the energy of like oh you didn't see the 1978 friend when they talked about the sister and that's on you baby yeah you should have known that as a child it's one of those weird compartmentalizing parts of Mormonism because if you go up to any active LDS person and say do you believe that Mormons are superior to everyone else in the world they're going to be outraged in how ridiculous and offensive that question is and 100% will say oh no that's that's an horrible question why would you even ask that and yet they'll get up in soccer meeting and so and so let the church and I'm just so sad for them and or or so and so died and oh so they're going to have the gospel to you know help them through it but I feel so bad for all the other people in the world they don't have the gospel like don't we all agree that we were all taught that everyone else who's not able to activity us is inferior yes and yet we were all of denied that if we were at point blank if we well even in ways like I've thought about this a lot with I mean you see it in only get married to a return missionary um babysitters your babysitter should be Mormon if she's a Mormon girl then you're safe that's literally teaching people I mean I don't know if I was the only one who internalized that but it was like oh they're Mormon they're safe they're good they went on a mission they're safe they're good and then I get out on a mission and I'm looking around and I'm like that this doesn't feel like a good metric anymore because these are all just people with you know they're just people going on a mission doesn't make anyone morally superior obviously only data return missionary exactly and I feel like that kind of thinking even if it's not like we Mormons think we're better than everyone else again that's why it frustrates me so much that Macy is unwilling to to live at least a little bit in that nuance of like and then there's a clip of her right after that and she's like well not all Mormon men because like my my husband is like so great and it's like that's awesome and I truly and he does seem like an awesome Mormon guy I don't think he's a bad person because he's Mormon and how is that preventing you from seeing that there is a real problem with Mormon men and hypocrisy those two things can also exist at once but it's too it's too damaging to her worldview to even go there and I think that's when people in these high-demand rigid structures they lose a little bit of their empathy because if they go there and they empathize all of a sudden their whole worldview is threatened and so they're just unwilling to show like sometimes what I think is somewhat basic like compassion and validation it's interesting the points that cause friction because she was at the gay pride event being like I'm an ally and the church is wrong about this you know kind of fundamental thing but then that right there like got to her interesting yeah I don't even think about that like some things she's willing to say but then other things are just like completely not yeah wait she's compartmentalized yeah now you guys are totally like hitting the nail in the head of all the reasons I wanted to include this clip um it just stood out to me so much because initially I was like so thrilled and like jumped from my seat so excited that Leila brought up such an important point of analyzing Mormonism I was like so excited oh let's get into this conversation I totally agree and then after being so excited I was like so crushed when macy just immediately like kind of squashed on it and I totally agree with the word condescending and it just felt like a bit rude to me and I imagined Leila felt the same way I'm just like shut down and like oh okay you know I guess my point is not bad they're like it just felt bad for her at that moment and it was just like a high high for me and then a low low and yeah just had a frustrating and I also just found it once again so predictable of macy to be giving like the most basic Mormon response as she did with the like oh she shouldn't have left the church this is why we don't drink like she's just giving the most basic Mormon responses while also trying to act like I love the best version of the church but she's really just living like the most mainstream version of the church to me and then also trying to be not like I don't know I find her really confusing and that moment really annoyed me from her yeah I feel like macy's in a really precarious position I think she's acting as like the most about of the women she's acting as um like a missionary to them well also trying to be like the cool Mormon who's not going to judge your friends for leaving too much maybe just like a tiny bit and I think I imagine this is probably a really tricky part about like social dynamics with with friend groups that how are mixed Mormon and mixed ex Mormon mixed progressive Mormon like there is a little bit of this tangent I think between like Mormons and ex there's a huge tangent between Mormons and post-wormons within Utah um but in this this friend group in particular and I also think like thinking of macy's role as the missionary not just to her friends but to the world especially where they see that this show has taken off she's the one who is going to be like standing in for what Mormon doctrine looks like and I imagine she feels a lot of pressure to make Mormonism seem as appealing as possible and to like in these moments be like no I promise we're not too weird like I know that I stand for this and and like because I stand for this I have to show that it's actually fine and I think she probably has these like these pre-planned moments of like yeah I'm going to to be an ally and I would imagine that um that may be a part of the discussion based on like like Chase has has said on Instagram that like all of the women are our maga except for Leila Miranda and I wonder if if that played a role in them and then discussing this trying to like take a stand in a in a small way but in a somewhat significant way to be able to talk about like legislature online on this show um but that was that was pre-planned that was decided and so she's taking like calculated risks I think as when she's going to kind of push back against Mormonism and when she's not kind of thinking about like how the perception of Mormonism is going to be and how it's going to be received and I imagine that's just a weird uh a difficult position for her to be in and in a lot of pressure she probably feels to not make Mormons look too weird I also think having read her book uh yeah to offer her like understanding of her worldview she really has gone through like really really intense things and most of that was when she was not living the Mormon rules when she was having sex outside of marriage when she was drinking so I really can't understand how now she's found safety and she's found security and structure and stability particularly after enduring really extreme traumas I can I sympathize with her finding safety there and that defensiveness is so familiar to me um and that's without having kind of that same arc that she has had yeah yeah I will say there's got to be social benefits to the church costs and benefits to the church encouraging this Mormon superiority amongst its members I also know that one of the top 10 reasons people leave the church is when they start traveling around or move outside of Utah they get corporate jobs or just meet neighbors in other states and they realize whoa those Muslims are better than me or those those uh seeks or Hindus are like way more moral or ethical than me many a person has come to be saying that at faith crisis when they realized that there were large groups of people who were more moral or ethical than the Mormons they grew up with so it's tricky for the church um we're we're bump it up on three hours I've got this lay the clip lay the getting a hair appointment should we play should we play that really quick and uh and and we'll start to get about our closing thoughts but let's go ahead and uh since we've been talking about lay that let's go ahead and play that clip I converted to the church actually so loudly after it's when I was 16 but it's obviously didn't turn out not great because when I got pregnant so fast after movie here are you still out here I don't remember the last time I even like went to church I still don't have my records during these days that I haven't like made that final step but there's a lot of things I don't resonate with when it comes to the church obviously especially like some history parts that are not okay there isn't old scriptures in the book of Mormon that states that black skin is a curse it's something that I'm aware of now that I wasn't aware of when I first converted but I try to look at the church's grace and the situations because they did renault those teachings about 10 years ago did they so I was like 10 years ago do you mean 1978 and then I realized she means the gospel topics essay on race in the priesthood where the church did basically through God under the bus and said all those super racist things that Brigham Young and others said from Brigham Young to basically Thomas S. Monson were the philosophies or ideas of men there were products at their time um still never been a black apostle so what uh that on H. O's he gave like a presentation I should look this up before here coming here but like a couple of years ago it was I guess it was probably in 2018 right because it was like the the anniversary of when the priesthood ban was lifted yeah yeah yeah he said something there I don't think he renounced anything though no they haven't they haven't ever given a formal apology to to black members and former members for the priesthood and temple ban on black people they've stopped short of that but in the race in the priesthood gospel topics essay they do state that all the prior theories around black people being less valued in the pre-existence and that's why they were given black skin all the cursing king garbage which by the way is still in the the doctrine of covenants and the book of Moses and the book of Abraham well and that scripture she references is still in the book of Mormon like of right because I was looking this up I did a breakdown episode on this so I was like did they renounce that I was kind of having the same thing and I didn't find that um gospel topic essay but I did see something that in the current come follow me manual they address this very briefly and they say something like the the curse was separation from god and the sign of the curse was dark skin and we don't know why that's the sign but they're not correlated and it's super dumb because the book of Mormon says skin of black yes right which everyone knows is a metaphor you could have any other way so we had access to I did I found that back to the exact layla moment I found that moment interesting and it's like you know obviously as an ex-mormon woman I'm kind of like yeah yeah yeah and then I'm like oh like great and it I mean it's fine like if it you know I want her to find her peace and however she does and again I'm not saying like I think it's good that the church is slowly amending um racist policies and doctrines and it's interesting to see her like open up just a tiny bit about something incredibly significant and then kind of quickly be like but you know I'll give the church grace here which again it's her prerogative but she's basically all out but like a pinky toenail right like I think she's probably pretty out yeah yeah I do think she is but I mean I think she still maybe feels this sense of needing to be like I'm not trying to call Macy an active Mormon racist or you know like there's still this and that's what's interesting about these dynamics is any ex-mormon knows what it's like to have a conversation with the Mormon and something comes up and you kind of have to tell this line of like yeah they did you know like you there's a certain point where you just kind of have to be like you kind of have to let some things go and insert in company at least I do yeah and I would also imagine like there is such a stigma for people leaving the church being angry and bitter and like going on podcasts and things like that and so I imagine Leila's feeling like I don't want to also become that trope I mean I don't know if that's what she's feeling but I would imagine also like the pressure of a black woman of not being seen as aggressive or not being seen as angry she probably feels a lot of that weight also to not yeah at least seen as like the anger experiment is going to be hypercritical I think that's one thing that like Mormons are the most frustrated about you know you can leave the church but you can't leave the church alone I think best stigma even applies to some ex-mormons as well like oh man you have ex-mormons that are normal people and then you have ex-mormons who like won't shut up about it and there is still a divide even among ex-mormons on on how you respond to these things and how forgiving you can be to the church and how much grace you can get rid of the church and they I think there is a lot of tension there or to even use the term ex-mormon which is which is interesting it seems like Jesse's the only person who was taken on the term the label ex-mormon and is comfortable with that and the other women are much more hesitant to use that and take on that persona yeah but they're almost all out I think I also wonder how much of that is production because the show is called "Securalizing Mormon Wives" I wonder if they're like oh you got to kind of pretend to be somewhat more man yeah that's the title of the show can't just be macy yeah well we didn't even cover all the stuff we planned to cover today for episodes one through five so we have to have at least one more episode maybe two I want to I want to give you all a chance to kind of come up with some any closing thoughts you have and you also feel free to plug anything you want to plug um I will just say I'm surprised at how like I I didn't watch season two I was just I was kind of just not in a place where I was feeling it so it's been weird to reengage with season three having missed most of season two and feeling surprised at how deep um the the treatment of important Mormon topics is in season three it is legit it's it's covering topics that so many of us have wanted to be part of a national conversation for decades and it takes freaking what was his name peanut butter cheese slice yeah like it's taken the secret lives of Mormon wives to bring to national and international consciousness topics that that we wanted to see for 150 to 200 years so anyway let me give each of you a chance to give final closing thoughts and to plug whatever you want to plug but I do want to thank all of you for your hard work uh in making um today possible uh Brooklyn uh I don't mean to singly you album but it's been so fun uh what do you all think panel Brooklyn thumbs up thumbs up thumbs up thumbs up you double thumbs up Samantha yeah so Brooklyn I think you're in so uh thanks guys yeah lots of thumbs up for all of you so I just enjoyed being you know able to be an audience to the super important conversation and I just think you're all super smart women and I love having these conversations just we're doing again jonna so I think it's important we have these episodes and you know when do these conversations ever get a bigger platform than being on a Hulu series so uh yeah super grateful to all of you guys for being so smart and saying all the right things well we couldn't do it without you Brooklyn so thanks uh for all you do and it is weird that all these talk shows are talking about like the sexual scandal or the relationship stuff but there aren't many really hitting these deep themes so I'm glad we're doing it anyway um Samantha uh closing thoughts um and plugs I think I'm just excited to continue dissecting this uh I feel like there's a lot of other great themes coming up that will be interesting I don't really have anything to plug my YouTube channels off on the shelf uh my sub stack there's an essay about the movie baby go on there that just feels so relevant to a lot of this jessie stuff so if you're interested in that don't you do coaching you still do coaching right yes I do faith transitions coaching still how do they how do people contact you about that um I mean you can find me anywhere and it'll be linked but it's Samantha Shelley coaching dot com Shelley within the UI yeah thank you I'm your height man always remind me of the coach yeah all right if you need a good uh life coach uh Samantha's got a lot to offer anyway thanks for coming also thanks for helping us with the production you were an important part of today's production I let you down oh you did great thank you yeah um all right Haley plug away yeah and summarize away yeah I'll just say I'm excited to continue this this is my super bold so my favorite thing to do I tell john he's like thanks for coming I'm like it takes very little to get me to come and talk about this topic maybe so I'll be like yes please ask me we are Haley yeah I would get for you I love doing this I love doing this with you all so thank you thank you john for providing this platform you can find me at girls camp podcast wherever you get your podcasts I also have a YouTube channel I actually have my breakdown of this season I touch on similar things kind of get into other things as well it's today Tuesday that goes live tomorrow so if you have not yet had enough bacon grease I hope to see you there you can be over on my YouTube channel to talk further about the secret lives of Mormon wives and you've interviewed how many of them so far I've interviewed Jesse only but I'm in talks of interviewing two other cast members um yeah so excited to anytime you just ignore me yeah it's nice to be in the same demographic I think I helped yeah or do a better job no no no no no we're not know the subject matter way better yeah watch the show you can play anyway all right Haley come back will you yes absolutely and Alyssa you you you brought so much structure and and um you made the slides and all the steps so final thoughts Alyssa yeah I mean love this topic love this show I think we're seeing you know so much of this season is really unfortunately showing like these relationships evolving and I think Mormonism is a through and unfortunately and so I think it's really interesting kind of see how that is playing out and playing out for everybody did you say unfortunately I mean like you unfortunately I mean I have the negative of Mormonism our unfortunate but the the relevance for us is very fortunate are we are we in our statistic people don't we love to see ourselves we love to see ourselves representing oh yeah it's the best so like finally people are understand dirty soda culture I mean what more could you want not much more anyway y'all are awesome thanks to everyone for joining us today thanks also to Julia for her work post-production and comments show notes moderating and all the things thanks to all our viewers all the people who made great comments we really appreciate it also thanks to our donors that make all this possible we couldn't do it without you seriously our ad revenue is a small fraction of what keeps us alive so thanks to everyone who donates if you value this content go donate this up on the shelf go donate to girls camp how do they donate to Alyssa I don't know Venmo me words at Venmo or what is it what is that list like words Venmo what is it it's a list of what that Venmo so yeah Venmo listen I'm gonna copy love it Brooklyn I don't know what Brooklyn is Venmo is but while you're at it you can also go to Mormon stories with any money you have left the Venmo and everyone else here go to Mormon stories dot org slash donate click on the donate button become a monthly donor and we'll be able to continue paying these women for their great work and also providing with more content of value so we're gonna do a part two yeah possibly three so you guys vote if you want just no more let us know we'll probably do it anyway if you want more than one more let us know in the comments we'll we'll do more anyway thanks again Alyssa Haley Samantha and Brooklyn be good to each other be kind to each other be bridge makers and peace builders did I say that right no bridge peace makers and bridge builders take care enjoy secret lives of Mormon wives on Hulu um and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories practice take care