Converting desire on YouTube, part 2

Recovering the art of femininity and lost female education with Jasmyne Theodora

Glory be to God, I’ve come through on the promise of a Part 2.... In Part 1, I discuss why it is I’m looking for feminine Orthodox voices on the internet. It’s not about finding just any Orthodox woman with a podcast, of which there are certainly more than I would consider covering in this series. I’m interested specifically in the conversion of the desiring aspect of the soul on the social scale. That means women. I’m interested in women speaking to women in ways that men can’t, and I want to boost their voices so that more people can find them. The women being reached out to, especially younger women, are online — which means invariably that their souls are disordered, with the desiring, appetitive aspect of their souls throbbing especially hard (and consequently the incensive, controlling aspect of their souls flapping in the wind). What such women respond to are, in a word, influencers, so I am looking for righteous versions of that.

Influencers are objects of desire for the women who follow them; that is, they desire first of all to relate to them, to find them relatable, but then also they look for the influencer to embody all their aspirational goals. They desire to be like them, to look like them, to live like them. Both my previous featured YouTuber Michaela Nikolaenko and the one I wish to turn to now, Jasmyne Theodora, check all those boxes. They are young (mid-twenties), college-educated, conventionally attractive women married to faithful, masculine providers, with whom they have started a family, both Jasmyne and Michaela bearing their first child within the past two years. They both went through atheist, leftist feminist, and pagan phases as young adults (relatable!) but are both now Orthodox Christian converts, and their souls are so much better for it. Michaela had been a podcaster with first a yoga brand and then an Evangelical brand before converting, and Jasmyne worked professionally as a model for seven years. These backgrounds are important because generally, young converts should not be broadcasting their lives and ideas to others. So many things typically go wrong when that happens. No priest in his right mind would recommend a young female convert start up a new influencer ministry! If she converted outside that online space, it could only mean destruction to go into it now. But women already operating in that sphere are not unworthy of conversion, and it’s possible even for them to continue producing online content, provided they are not suffocating in pride or vanity. I’m wholeheartedly impressed by how these two young women in their humility seem to avoid the pitfalls converts so typically fall into, at least in their published content, which is where it matters most as far as this article is concerned.

So Seattle-native Jasmyne Theodora’s YouTube channel differs from Floridian-transplant Michaela Nikolaenko’s in more ways than just geography. With Jasmyne Theodora, who formerly posted as Jasmyne Alysse, confession of the Christian faith is not the focus, though if you listen enough to what she’s saying (or happen upon one of her more explicitly Christian videos), you can see her faith is the foundation of her perspective. Rather the focus is on the nature of femininity, and the how and why of going about in this life being a woman. And whereas Michaela’s preferred format is the interview, Jasmyne Theodora crafts video essays and tutorials delivered by monologue. Besides the briefest glimpses of her family, Jasmyne Theodora is the only human you will encounter on her channel. Compared to Nikolaenko’s dialogical Socrates, Jasmyne Theodora is the professorial Aristotle. Since I published part 1 of this series and teased that I wanted to feature Jasmyne Theodora next, she has done me the generous favor of posting a video that functions perfectly as an introduction to her channel. She had previously given an interview with a liberal feminist who has since balked on releasing it, so here in typical monologue fashion she recites the questions she was asked and what her responses to them were:

Her channel, then, broadly speaking, is about recovering the art of femininity and lost female education. Here is the list of her videos from latest to earliest, my preferred way of perusing her content — although... she has a small set of impactful unlisted videos that you have to go to the playlists to find. Four of them, of either a more polemical or more explicitly Christian bent, can be found at the head of this list, and one of them, on her preparation for a natural home birth, is at the head of this list. My sense is that she intentionally cultivates her public presence so as to be soft and inviting to outsiders, while allowing herself to be more frank (and her faith-based opinions more explicit) to those closer to her — which certainly fits with her philosophy about being feminine. In this sense, Michaela Nikolaenko’s more assertive professions of faith are not feminine in comparison, but that’s attributable to the Protestant culture from which she comes more so than being at all masculine. This observation, however, about how externally we are to wear our faith might give us further insight into why feminine Orthodox communication doesn’t prosper as well online as does the masculine sort. It requires a longer process of building a relationship and as such is more like Orthodoxy itself, the Church being archetypically feminine, which is why of course I’m taking so much time to focus on this topic. But I digress.

Jasmyne Theodora’s focus being on the art of and education about femininity, her videos therefore fall into a few different categories, all of which will be familiar to anyone who has seen a conventional women’s magazine. Really, that’s the role her channel is filling, that of a conventional women’s magazine, but one coming from an Orthodox Christian perspective. There are very practical guides to skin care, hair care, clothing and fashion, feminine hygiene, and the sort. Lists — lists abound pertaining to various things like, prominently, relationship advice. I’ve noticed in sundry media that whereas men like to rank things, putting them in order according to competitive values, women like just collecting things, amassing them in lists arranged in some kind of aesthetically pleasing order. It’s like that on this channel. For example, in one video (as you might find in a women’s magazine) Jasmyne Theodora introduces us to the taxonomy of women’s bodies and how best to dress them (the Kibbe body types). The content is illustrative of her years of experience as a model and exemplifies how immensely helpful she can be to young women for whom this knowledge does not come naturally. In my fiction-writing mind I imagine a single father of multiple daughters discovering this channel and bursting with gratitude, remembering Jasmyne Theodora in his daily prayers for the rest of his life — especially since the benefits of her channel go far beyond the practical.

Living in one’s body — as one’s body — is a special challenge for us denizens of gnostic, online culture. That’s especially so for women, given the greater hormonal variability of their bodies. Whereas men seem to have an on/off switch toggling between aggressive and flaccid (a challenge to manage, no doubt, if one is to be sociable and productive), women’s bodies twirl around in dizzying circles. It’s a temptation to turn the carousel off, but in a lengthy video displaying her proclivity for scholarship, Jasmyne Theodora explains all the havoc various types of birth control work on a woman’s person, soul and body (see below). Then in a recent video, and her longest to date (also see below), she explores the four phases of the menstrual cycle and how to optimize one’s life according to it. Again, the fictional single dad in my head, bewildered by the pubescent daughters he loves, leaps through the ceiling with joy at this discovery.

I’ll reiterate, living in one’s body, as one’s body, is absolutely necessary if we are to offer ourselves in love to God and neighbor. Beyond the practical side, Jasmyne Theodora’s video essays on the theoretical approach to embodying femininity offer such desperately needed oxygen to the brains of any humans undergoing this gendered journey. When you take them all together, it can really hit you with the realization of everything we’ve lost as a species beholden to an ideology of feminism which obliterates femininity and, in the name of freedom, wrecks freedom. After all, in this day and age, when our entire culture is like that fictional single dad without any knowledge of femininity, as if his wife, the mother of his children, was slain by a drunk driver with feminist bumper stickers — why would a woman want to be feminine? Jasmyne Theodora addresses this question in the following video, functioning as a prologue to her own vision of feminism:

But her earliest major statement video I would identify as this next one, titled “The Art of Softness | How To Be a Soft, Feminine Woman.” When you sort her videos by popularity, this one comes up first.

That video is from March 2022. Over a year later, and after exactly one instance of childbirth, she covered this territory again (so much so that she reused the thumbnail image), expressing her perspective even more vividly and boldly.

You can see her idea of feminine virtue has nothing to do with passive inaction, but it takes effort, courage, and strength. It’s not masculine, but neither is it how a masculine, or masculinized (read: feminist), perspective would characterize it. I’ve written a lot of words about the lower passions of epithymia and thymos (the appetitive and incensive aspects of the soul, which are coded feminine and masculine, respectively) and how to exercise them virtuously. But I do so unavoidably as a man. I’m no paragon of masculine virtue, but even I can’t escape my inherent masculinity. Hearing epithymetic virtue described from a feminine perspective in a feminine voice just hits different. It’s so much more effective, so much more productive of that virtue in others. I figure it’s incumbent on me to highlight her voice as better on this topic than my own.

But the question of who the audience is for Jasmyne Theodora’s videos is an interesting thing to consider. It’s clear in how she crafts her address that she understands those in her audience will naturally be the people interested in what she is talking about. That is, it will generally be women — with 12% males, as she notes bemusedly in the intro to her menstrual cycle treatise. She also understands her audience will be open to her perspective being Christian, but won’t necessarily be Christian themselves, let alone Orthodox. She is careful in this regard to fulfill the virtue of St. Silouan that I mentioned last time, how “Father Silouan’s attitude towards those who differed from him was characterised by a sincere desire to see what was good in them, and not to offend them in anything they held sacred” (Saint Silouan the Athonite, p. 63). Her approach to discussing her faith is consistently soft and nurturing, not insisting that the women watching her (and 12% men, all girl-dads I’m sure) believe as she does, but striving to present an attractive image of being as she is, which is Orthodox Christian.

Thus she doesn’t stridently push her faith, but neither does she hide it. In one listed video titled “Why I'm ORTHODOX Christian | Orthodox Christianity Explained” she covers the topic more impersonally, more rationally, operating in her scholarly mode — “Let’s get into some apologetics,” she says, after qualifying the value of this approach, saying that the Orthodox faith is not about being well-versed in apologetics but about having a prayerful relationship with God. The results, accordingly, are boilerplate catechetical material that can indeed be a helpful resource and can resolve some questions that some people might have. It doesn’t fulfill well the “converting desire” theme that I’m looking for, though. Better in that regard is the following unlisted video, which can be found among her playlists, wherein she responds to requests from her viewers to share her personal testimony as a Christian. The results wouldn’t be altogether out of place on Michaela Nikolaenko’s channel:

You can see her acceptance of Christ hinges on a profound experience of awakening, but it then proceeds to be heavily rational in character, the way diving into apologetics was so integral to her conversion. The rational aspect of her soul, above the lower passions of thymos and epithymia, required special attention, and that is not specifically feminine as opposed to masculine; we all of course share that rational aspect as the charioteer of our souls. I think that’s why, in part, she opens this video with the qualification that it is unlike her usual content. It pertains to her common humanity but not specifically her feminine nature. But this rational aspect of her conversion sheds so much light on her conversion to femininity by placing it in a hierarchical context. The blossoming of her femininity is not in contrast with her rational nature but truly is harmonious with it, even caused by it. And the hierarchical layers from which her fulfillment proceeds extend all the way up to God. They must.

It’s interesting, towards her general audience Jasmyne Theodora is soft and nurturing in character, but when she turns to her political right to address excessive elements of the “trad” movement, she becomes the opposite. She goes into what I think of as “mama bear” mode, by which I mean the way that properly feminine women maintain the capacity to exercise thymic revulsion to dangers for the protection of those whom they nurture, including themselves. Such application of thymic limitations on her messaging are threaded carefully throughout all her presentations on femininity (as in this early video, when she talks about setting boundaries), evidence of her highly rational approach, but they especially come to the fore when she addresses something like the acceptance of corporal discipline for “trad” wives. She does that in her video “The Dark World of “Christian” Domestic Discipline (should husbands spank their wives?).” She is so averse to that practice, she even lets this video be listed, unlike other videos on controversial topics, which she leaves unlisted. There’s one such unlisted video directed specifically to young “trad” women as opposed to her general women’s magazine audience. It’s very instructive to discover that it’s in this context that she sees the need (correctly) to be more assertive in preaching faith in God and recommending the Orthodox Church:

You can see in the Gospel how Jesus behaves in completely differently ways towards harlots, on one hand, and the Pharisees on the other. Harlots exploit pleasure for profit, corrupting society with epithymetic vice, whereas the Pharisees strive for power over others, poisoning society by co-opting righteousness for the sake of thymic control. With the thymic Pharisees, Jesus contends and argues and tells them they’re wrong. With the epithymetic harlots, He presents in His own person an image of beauty and chastity and kindness that inspires them to turn their lives away from exploiting and being exploited. Through attraction, He educes virtue from the epithymetically inclined, and through repulsion, He expunges vice from the thymically inclined. In both cases, He matches like with like, displacing vice for virtue. I see Jasmyne Theodora pulling a similar trick. Towards her general audience interested in femininity, she is open and inviting and spares all criticism, even while presenting what is today a very countercultural image of womanhood. But with those prone to the excesses of the “trad” movement, placing the feminine in an ungodly hierarchy of control, inimical to love, she erects boundaries against their teaching and calls them out as wrong.

The end result is a teaching on femininity that I find immensely edifying. I would go so far as to call it progressive — that is, in the etymological sense that we can progress forward with this teaching. It’s practical; it’s true; it works. Jasmyne Theodora won’t shame any woman for pursuing an education and a career, opting for self-sufficiency over sacrificing herself for a family. Without making direct threats to the modern woman’s freedom, which due to the pride and hurt that grip our souls is politically unassailable, she yet calls women to the true freedom which is found in being one’s body as created by God and fulfilling all its potential for sacrificial love. That’s our purpose; that’s what we were made for. And for a man, that’s typically going to look one way, while for a woman, that’s typically going to look another, even if there’s some fuzziness around the margins. The margins do not define us. True, if we try to define the margins, remove their fuzziness, they’ll try to define us back, making everything fuzzy, but that’s conflict we should be aiming to avoid. Jasmyne Theodora hits upon what I think is the right approach. When the soul is properly ordered according to its three aspects (rational, incensive, and appetitive), and recognizes its co-identity with the body, a body that is gendered according to a binary pattern that mirrors the lower passions — the soul not dissociating from such a body according to the pattern of death — then life abounds. The society around oneself, starting with the family and spreading outward, becomes aligned with the patterns of life, which is fruitful and multiplies and without which there can be no freedom. The Orthodox Church achieves this; it is the Body of Christ, and it rises from the dead. If anyone is to be known as a member of this Church, he or she will do so likewise, that the name of Christ, who does not dissociate from His Body but identifies with it, may be recognized and glorified as belonging to the source of life.