Breaking Barriers with Caleb Thomas

Becky Mollenkamp: Hi, Caleb, thank you for being here. I’m excited to chat. You are the second man I’m having on this season. I’ve gotten to know you a bit on social media and feel really good about the way you’re showing up in the world. I’m excited to have this conversation. I think we need to have more conversations about feminism because nothing’s going to change without y ‘all. I start every episode by asking about your relationship with feminism. And I’m particularly interested in the answers from our men this season. 

Caleb Thomas: So I have always thought of myself as a feminist, even growing up and everything. I just feel the whole idea of feminism just makes sense. I’ve always been kind of egalitarian too, and just the way that I think of and approach politics and everything. And so it never made sense to me why we would have all of these weird, rigid, hierarchical exclusionary gender roles. And so even when I wouldn’t have necessarily used the word or identified with it, I would probably say that I was mostly, at least in thought, a feminist. Feminism just makes sense in a world where like we’re there’s seven or eight billion of us, and that’s it. That’s all we know that we’ve got. So it just makes sense that all people should be able to have a good life and have equal representation and protection and yeah.

Becky Mollenkamp: That’s interesting because at some point, whether it’s in this part of the conversation or a separate conversation, we’re going to talk about your background as a Pentecostal, as somebody who was inside of that faith, which I don’t think most of us would think as being particularly progressive nor feminist. 

Caleb Thomas: No, not in the slightest.

Becky Mollenkamp: So it’ll be interesting to hear about how you identified as a feminist. And yet we’re also living inside of that world that feels very different. So we’ll get to that. But I want to talk about photography first, because that’s your business, it’s your bread and butter. You started as a wedding photographer, I think you said, and then speaking of being Pentecostal, then you went in -house at a megachurch as a photographer and then tourism marketing. So the boudoir is only a few years old, I think. Tell me a little bit about the journey getting to boudoir and what made you decide to go that path? Because the background before that wedding may be a little, but certainly megachurch photography and tourism photography are not, you know, not logical lead-ins to boudoir.

Caleb Thomas: I started kind of doing photography, just kind of in high school, always, always loved photography, always love video making and stuff. And, my best friend and I started just doing weddings and it was like, you know, weddings are not the funnest thing ever. but always my favorite part of doing weddings was getting ready pictures when everybody’s still a little at ease and all of the anxiety and stress and everything wasn’t always caught up to them. And they’ve got the cute little different things that are built into the whole outfits and looks and everything. Something borrowed, something blue. Documenting all of that was always just super cute to me. And that’s essentially what boudoir is, the getting ready part of a wedding without having to deal with the wedding. So I paid my way through college doing wedding photography. And then got burnt out on that. I had that offer from the MegaChurch to work as their media director, and so I worked there for five years. I learned a lot in that and learned things that I would want to carry forward and not carry forward. And then my wife and I moved to 250 miles away, moved up to Seattle. And so I worked as the marketing director for a street sweeper manufacturer, which is wholly uninteresting. Then we moved again to where we are now in Bend, Oregon, and I took a job in tourism marketing. Central Oregon is known for our tourism and it’s a very beautiful location. But then the pandemic hit and my job quickly went from, hey, this is a cool, cute place to, hey, taco shop truck owner. You don’t actually have to have your nephew come stand out front with his AR -15 to prevent OSHA from coming to enforce mask mandates. So I had kind of been getting back into photography, like portrait photography for a bit, and started gravitating towards the more personally expressive photography. I would do work with fashion influencers or fitness influencers. And it felt really canned. I was like, okay, this is what fitness influencers are expected to post on Instagram. But then we’d always do more fun stuff after that. And it always would end up showing their personality and being able to express themselves and showcase their bodies that they’re proud of and express joy and effervescence. And so I was talking to a photographer friend of mine and she was just like, there’s a name for what you’re doing. She’s like, this is boudoir, it’s what I do. Shout out to my friend, Bri at Babe City Boudoir, who is an absolutely brilliant photographer. And she told me, yeah, this is a thing. This is a career path, here’s how I do it. Here’s how you should do it. And I was gradually building into that and then I started on TikTok as everybody did during the pandemic and accidentally and unintentionally one day, hey, 50,000 followers, cool. my goodness, they’re all going and hitting my book link on my website. my goodness, I have way too much to balance both this job and this job that I’m gradually hating more and more and my boss is turning to QAnon and getting more weird and awful. I could do this like full time. And so we also had our kiddo, I was spending so much time away from him for like the first two years of his life that it was missing the whole thing. We got to a point where I was just like, I can’t be around this gross conspiratorial far right nasty world of this small city. I wanted to be in the city that I lived in. I’m gonna quit this job. I’m booked up for the next several months. And if it doesn’t go right, then I guess it doesn’t go right and we figure something else out. And my wife at that time was teaching at a school, so a culinary school. So we had a bit of a safety thing too. So I did it. That was in September of 2021 and everything’s still going good.

Becky Mollenkamp: I want to talk a little bit more about social media. But before we do that, I feel like boudoir is so common now that people probably have an idea of what it is. But just for folks who may not know, like what is that art form in particular? Like what makes something boudoir versus some other type of personal photography?

Caleb Thomas: like to say that Boudoir is a genre of photography that’s all about empowerment, self-love, and the reclamation of your agency, identity, and sensuality. So a lot of times folks will think, okay, boudoir photography is just pictures of you in your underwear. But I like to say that boudoir is more of like an intent, the objective more of the goal. I’ve had clients in everything from mechanics overalls to nothing at all. And so it’s more kind of that intent of celebrating self celebrating and reclaiming the narrative around your body. Our society tells us, particularly women, your body is to service men. Your body is to service the patriarchy and you don’t get to make your own identity. Boudoir challenges that. No, I get to stand in my own power and stand in my own strength and stand in my own body. And you can’t tell me not to. 

Becky Mollenkamp: I remember the last time we talked, you mentioned too that society hates women and women’s bodies, which I wrote down because I was like, uh-huh. I’m guessing at least a component of what appeals to you is that part of the empowerment of the fact that this photography, like you said, it’s an intent more than even about the outcome. The outcome’s important. They want beautiful photos, but it’s also about the experience itself and the way it makes women in particular feel. Is that like a big part of what makes you love this type of photography? 

Caleb Thomas: Definitely. I try to really like have a full, crafted experience that’s protected and, and pretty specific in the way that I want someone to move through this whole process, where there isn’t even an opportunity for anybody around them to say this is weird. Why are you doing this? We always start with hair and makeup. Hair and makeup is included in all of my sessions. And even if it’s just wanting to sit down and get your face massage or something, if you don’t like the whole idea of full glam makeup, I feel that sitting down and getting pampered is super important. I will model all of the poses that my clients get into. I’m not going to ask somebody to do something that I have not gone through myself. Through that whole shoot process, it’s at their speed, it’s at their comfort. We get really deep. We cry at least once a shoot because it’s just so beautiful and powerful. And there’s always this one moment that is probably why I do this, where we get a picture and I turn my camera around and show them the picture on the back of the camera and they’re like, that’s me. And it’s not, I didn’t realize that that was me, but it’s, of course that’s me. It’s never one of those 80s movies where the nerd takes off their glasses and then they’re pretty, but it’s yeah, of course that’s me. I knew that. I just didn’t remember right now. That moment right there is probably the biggest reason why I do it.  I think a lot of that is rooted in the fact that I was raised in the Pentecostal world. I was working in a church and I have a bigger body and never felt comfortable in my own body as well. I feel that solidarity of throwing off the shackles of these kind of narratives that we’re all told to believe about ourselves, but particularly women. There’s something so empowering and liberating and stunning about that.

Becky Mollenkamp: You’re taking me right where I want to go because there’s obviously an elephant in the room, which is you are a man, I believe a Cishet man photographing most of your subjects are women. I don’t think you work with a lot of Cishet men, if I’m not mistaken.

Caleb Thomas: I think maybe a dozen total in my whole career.

Becky Mollenkamp: That’s a thing that I’m sure you have to confront, I am a man photographing women in very vulnerable situations. They’re usually wearing less clothing. They’re trying very often to do more sensual kinds of poses. And that could be a real challenge, I would think. I hear you saying that you find some points of understanding. Obviously, you can’t know what it’s like to be a woman living in this world. And I know you don’t claim to. You do talk about living in a larger body, some experience with purity culture and some of the shaming that could come inside of that. How do you go about creating safety for women in this scenario where I think women might often be, at least at the beginning, a bit nervous to say, I’m not sure if I want a man to photograph me like this. Or can I get comfortable enough to let this man photograph me the way I want to be seen?

Caleb Thomas: First and foremost, whenever I have someone who’s even remotely like, I don’t know if I would feel comfortable with a man. I’m like, okay, we won’t. And I have a list. Here’s five other amazing women photographers that I think you should work with. I have referred probably dozens at this point of people to my photographer friends who I know will do an amazing empowering job and who see this work in the same way that I do. And then like through the whole shoot process, I’m just goofy, I’m lighthearted. We do a little self deprecation all the time, it’s always fun. And I always just aim to ensure that my identity is never utilized in a way to make any sort of power imbalance. Because there is inherently a power imbalance built into this, because I am a Cishet white man in America in the 21st century. And so along with that identity comes hundreds of years of baggage. I think that at the very least acknowledging that yeah, I’m a dude here. I’m not going to feel 100% what you’re feeling, I’m not going to know what this will do for you or what this won’t do for you or like if anything is triggering or anything because, as best as I can be, I like to be very informed about traumas and ways that men behave that are gross and upsetting. And so I try to just keep it a place where it is never about me. In fact, there’s a quote from an ancient Spartan king. He was asked by a younger prince about the secret to having a long reign. He said, by not putting undue importance on self-advantage. And so that’s something that I always try to put into my work is that I’m not doing this for self advantage. Obviously I want to feed this kid. So that’s a big part of monetizing my work and having people pay me for it, but also at the same time, not doing it as a way to gratify myself or anything like that. And I want to be able to essentially take my position and my role in my identity as a cis het white man in America in the 21st Century and see that space that I’m granted by that identity to other folks with other voices, with other identities because it doesn’t need to be about people like me anymore. And I think that that intrinsic battle to de-center cis het white men in America in the 21st Century is a battle that we’re going to keep fighting.

Becky Mollenkamp: Do you hear from clients, maybe who do decide to work with you, but do you ever hear anything about the kinds of trepidation that they may have had or concerns or just anything where they’re like, I was a little worried about this because you’re a man.

Caleb Thomas: I used to a lot more. But any more the people who are booking with me know my vibe a bit more. But especially at the beginning when I went full-time, I would as often as I could have my wife come to the shoots with me. And we always have hair and makeup people there, and so there’s never a point where we’re just alone. There was always insurance to make people feel more comfortable about it. I like to quote Hank Green where he said that his presence online is aggressively non-sexual. I go with that as well because it’s not a sexual thing. It’s an empowerment thing. It’s a reclamation thing. And I think that once that’s centered, then folks can feel a little safer and a little less on edge.

Becky Mollenkamp: You mentioned your wife coming on shoots and you told me before that your wife is hella feminist. Has she been part of your journey to feeling more comfort and being able to do this work in a way that feels, you know, like you said, decidedly unsexual, but also just very like empowering for women. What kind of unlearning and learning have you had to do to feel that you can do this work in a way that honors women?

Caleb Thomas: My wife is literally one of the coolest people ever. My God, she’s so cool. She’s just the best. And she has a very feminist mom, very feminist grandma, comes from a line of these women who are just badass and take control and run the damn tobacco farm in North Carolina because their husband’s off at war or whatever. Growing up, my mom was the leader of the house as well, but that kind of, my family was a little more of a role thing within my Christian culture. Whereas my wife, Devon, her upbringing was based on the fact that, we’re here, we’re doing this, doesn’t matter that we’re women in this man’s world. We gotta do what we gotta do and if the men are pissed about it, fuck off. Watching her move through the world has always been so badass. That’s so amazing. Witnessing that and taking a lot of the built up expectations of gender roles and identity roles and all of these things that I didn’t necessarily buy into that I didn’t necessarily think that was a requirement of me, but still having that in the back part of my brain, that’s where eventually you’ll probably land in these kinds of rules. Being in a relationship with someone who’s like, no, we don’t have to expect weird things out of each other. We can just talk about the things. It was just like, this is freeing and liberating. And talking through the whole idea of, I will be around women who are not you in less clothing. Is that an issue for us? No. Neither of us are particularly interested in other people in any sort of romantic way. We feel we hit it right this time. That trust, that implicit unquestioning trust that we have with each other. Being around people of the opposite gender is not a threat. And so I think a lot of that just like security and like self -assuredness was like able to kind of give me permission to be like, okay, this is where I think I can kind of develop my skill and develop my career and move forward in this. So I’m gonna give it a shot. And she’s like, hell yeah.

Becky Mollenkamp: You work with folks of all sorts of intersecting identities, women of color, LGBTQ folks, obviously around size, maybe also disability. Have you been doing work for your own edification and also just for the to help your clients and to better understand your clients to learn about intersectionality and the various forms of oppression these folks face. I’m thinking most especially probably, although I shouldn’t because I think it’s for all the folks you’re photographing, but I certainly know that feeling of being a large, a person in a larger body and thinking about photography and getting photographed in this way. And I know that you said as someone in a larger body, you have that understanding too. But I would imagine also for folks with disabilities or LGBTQ or anything that there are very specific issues and challenges and so I wonder how you manage those things or what you’re learning to be able to show up for them in a way that doesn’t cause harm?

Caleb Thomas: So I think what a lot of times folks will think is like, okay, I’m getting pictures. I want to make sure that I’m looking skinny, that if I have a mobility aid, I want to hide that. If I have a sensor that’s on my body full time, I want to hide that. Maybe I don’t want to look as dark or can you smooth out this? I don’t want my birthmark to show. But what I always challenge my clients to think of is that. When we’re doing this, we’re not excluding parts of ourselves. We are learning to celebrate all of ourselves. And so I did a shoot with a client and she was about to postpone because she had a heart monitor that she had to have full time on her body for like a month because she was having some heart issues. And so she was like, well, I just would feel so weird about it. And I’m like, why? That’s part of you right now. That’s cool. And so she was like, okay, let’s do it. And so we did the shoot and like her heart monitor is prominently in it. And it was one of the most beautiful things like at the image reveal session. There’s one picture in particular where it’s kind of like the lights cascading in from the side. She’s in a V-cut bodysuit. And so the heart monitor is just like, boom, right there, center frame. And we just like, she looked at it and she was like, that’s not as scary as I thought it was. That’s not as ugly as I thought it was. That’s not as gross as I thought it was. And we just sat there and cried because like, it’s a part of you. Like all of these things are a part of us. We are the sum total of everything that we are, everything that has happened to us. And those things don’t have to be reflected upon badly. We can say, we can challenge those things that are like, well, you don’t want to show that. And say, fuck yes, I want to show that. Fuck yes, I want to center this. Fuck yes, I am here because of all of these things that have happened to me. I am here because of who I am. And I think that needs to be celebrated and shown and the power that you can get out of that, the power of saying. Fuck that idea of not showing my arms. Fuck that idea of saying that this birthmark is hideous. There’s power in that. And there’s, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the model Iskra Lawrence. She was, when ARI, the American Eagle Company, ARI, did their whole non, no airbrushing campaign, like in the early 2010s, she was kind of their face of that. And she did a Ted Talk where she said our insecurities make us motivated consumers. And I think that so much of our society’s minor shames about body, about image, about things that are out of our control, about these things that are part of our identity is a way of serving capitalism, is a way of serving our economic system. Because if we think, okay, well, if I just get this one product, then that will make me feel more comfortable and that will make me feel more valid. But when you challenge that and when you say, no, I’m good as is, then you take a lot of that power away from all of these interests that want to hold people back.

Becky Mollenkamp: What’s it teaching you about society or white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, what is that do, what it’s doing to people? 

Caleb Thomas: Our entire economic and social structure is built on unjustifiable hierarchies. And so the weird ways that manifests are baffling. All of these different things that somebody else would look at a person and say I don’t see any flaws, quote unquote, that person sees themselves with all these flaws. So our system and our patriarchy and the heteronormativity under which we live makes everybody feel shitty about themselves. Not just people with traditional things that society deems as unwantable, but nobody is exempt from feeling all of these pressures from society. But we’re all told that everybody is exempt from feeling the pressures of society except us. And when we feel alone, when we feel isolated, when we feel alienated from our communities, from the product of our labor, from connection with other human beings, that’s when we are most susceptible and most vulnerable to negative messaging. Working with all of the amazing myriad of people that I work with has shown is literally everybody feels something about them is not what society says it should be. And all of it’s bullshit. And so the more that we see that shared humanity in everybody. I’m sounding like a tech bro who tried shrooms once and realized that everybody is a human. But the more that we see that shared humanity and see that shared struggle and see and acknowledge that we are enough, that we are valid, that everything about us is unique and amazing and that makes us valid in and of itself the happier and better and more egalitarian that will be as a society. There’s a quote by the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry. He says that if humanity is to survive, we will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between people and different cultures we will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear. And I think that that rings so true to my work because with the client with the heart monitor or I’m working in the next week and a half with a client who, because of the work that she has done with me and a few other photographers, is now literally a professional model who has worked for Nike and Adidas but has her face has a birthmark all over it and because of working with folks she’s able to like they know this is actually beautiful about me knowing that all of these things that are different and and what society would often deem as inferior about us are actually fucking cool and they’re super amazing and they should all be celebrated just because we’re human, because there’s only seven or eight billion of us, and because we’re fucking stardust that is here for a blip, and that we’re that pale blue dot. And there’s that astronaut who, when he was on the moon, said that seeing the Earth from the moon made me want to shake everybody and say, look at this, we’re all the fucking same. I just think that in being able to really fully celebrate and cherish all of these differences amongst all of these people that I get to work with, it just makes the experience of being human that much richer.

Becky Mollenkamp: You do sound like you’ve had a good batch of shrooms and I want some of them too. So that’s okay. I want to ask you a question that I think might be a little harder, which is what has this work taught you as a white cishet man about your privilege, your, the power that comes with that, and also the responsibility that you hold?

Caleb Thomas: So something that I always find super interesting is whenever I’m like in a group of folks and there’s like majority women or you know people of varying identities and somebody’s talking about photography some people look at me as like some sort of authority on it. I’m like, listen to them. They know what they’re talking about. And so still in our society, there is a sense that like, this is how white man is the authority in the room is the one who can speak with, with the most knowledge, with the most experience, whatever. There are experts who know way more than me. Being in this space with so many people of varying identities, it just reinforces that, yeah, I’m not the default. Society thinks that I am the default, but I’m not. So I think it just kind of keeps driving home for me that like, again, I just want to be able to see that institutional privilege and institutional limelight to folks who don’t get that just by the virtue of their identity.

Becky Mollenkamp: Has the experience revealed to you any of your own growth edges, like areas where you still have more work to do or want to do to be a better ally?

Caleb Thomas: Every client there’s something that I had never even considered. There’s a new way that they had been marginalized that I never heard of before. That sucks. If ever there is any part of me that is reactionary in the way that I see somebody. It makes me want to say, what, what? No, no. Remember that time that you were with that person and they said that this thing that you would never have thought was like an issue has impacted their entire life? Same for this person who’s saying this thing right now. Again, to sound like the tech bro on shrooms for the first time who realized that other people are humans, it just reinforces all the time that everybody in our system has varying things that hold them back and that our society tells them are wrong about themselves. And, and so to just try and shake off any sort of reactionary nature that I still have. And growing up in an evangelical Pentecostal world, my brain developed in binaries, my brain developed in blacks and whites, the good and the bad, the heaven and the hell. And so to always like, that is still my brain’s default. And I think in some ways that serves me. I have a very aggressive, okay, if some dude is creepy on the internet, bye, blocked forever kind of a policy. And so I think that serves me well. But also at the same time, like a lot of times, that is a huge issue. And so like challenging those reactionary natures and that binary thinking that is kind of still my default. 

Becky Mollenkamp: I think for our bonus content, so if you’re not a subscriber of Feminist Founders Newsletter, go subscribe. We share bonus content there for every episode. We’re going to talk about your deconstruction of your faith in a CliffsNotes version because it’s only like five to seven minutes of conversation. But we’ll get the highlights for people to hear a little more about that. So make sure you subscribe. I want to switch to your business, the running of your business and talk about social media specifically, because like you said, you sort of a couple of years ago had some success with TikTok, it kind of blew up. I mean, I guess part of that was the timing because I know during COVID a lot of people who were adopters then had a lot of success. I’m sure some of it’s subject matter and I’m sure a lot of it is also just your personality and the way you show up. But tell me a little bit about what that experience of having a TikTok that kind of grew up, grew pretty quickly taught you about social media and what has that experience been like for you?

Caleb Thomas: I’ve always looked at YouTubers or something that had a bunch, like 100,000 subscribers is like, my God, they made it. If you’ve got that, then you’re in. And so getting to the point where I had 100,000 followers on TikTok, now almost 140,000 on TikTok, it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Everybody is still just an imposter at this point too. Everybody’s just trying to do their best at this point too. Nobody has this social media stuff figured out and it’s actively trying to make us not figure it out. So that way we spend more time on it and spend more frustration on it and spend more social capital on it and spend more real capital on it. And social media is inherently against anything progressive, anything like positive and biases towards reactionary content and biases towards reactionary takes and reactionary reactions. My major in college was new media communication. So like my writing intensive course for my major was about Twitter. And so I had this Pollyanna view for a long time that like social media is a great equalizer. But that’s just not true in the slightest. It is still the same classes of people that will continue to do well. And of course there are outliers. Of course there are people who will grow and people who will get some sort of notoriety, but it will always end up biasing towards the same institutions and the same structures. And like, I think that that also, you know, kind of goes into a lot of things that tech bros are excited about. I just watched a video about how tech bros in Europe think that they just invented the train again. All of these things, we’re not going to solve big, horrifying social issues by techno innovating our way out of it. We actually have to address the issues. With social media, it’s not going to bring down the repressive government of Iran and the in the Green Revolution in 2009. It’s not going to make sure that Tunisia doesn’t have any sort of military dictatorship. It’s not going to make sure that black lives matter. Because those institutions and those systems are benefited by the existence of social media. And as much as we think that social media can be a big, beautiful, changing force for good, which it can be, and I’m not trying to minimize that positive potential. But those problems will continue to exist regardless of the new innovations to the algorithm that for a month will amplify Black voices.

Becky Mollenkamp: I think we can easily exemplify what you’re saying here with the issues that you face on social media that I’ve seen you talking about, which is the content you’re sharing. You are not sharing nude photography. You’re not sharing, you know, even if it were. Ultimately, I think we need to free the nipple and it shouldn’t matter. But you’re you know, you’re showing suggestive or seductive, if we’re gonna use any kind of words, I don’t even think you would say titillating, honestly. You can see hints of the body and you can see that they’re in maybe poses that feel a little more seductive. And I think from what I can tell from what you’ve been sharing that you run into a lot of problems with the algorithms or I don’t even know if it’s the algorithms, but like whoever is deciding what content is allowed and not allowed. While meanwhile most of us are fighting off porn bots left and right, where it’s not even remotely what you’re doing. It’s very clearly, hey, come call and pay me money to see me naked. And it’s very different than what you’re doing. And to me, this all is very wrapped up in this idea of social media, TikTok, Instagram, all of them, they exist inside of the systems that we all exist in. They aren’t fighting against those systems. They are the system and it’s replicated inside that system. So again, women’s voices, voices of folks of the global majority, you know, queer voices, those are the voices that seem to get throttled down.

Caleb Thomas: I definitely benefit from my identity. Like I mentioned earlier, Brie from Big City Studios, she blew up on TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic. But as a woman who celebrates women, she has been stifled for years at this point. And so I’ve still been able to grow relatively steadily. And I think that that is in a large part because I was just a white dude. And like, yeah, but like the throttling that happens right now I’m one content violation from losing my TikTok account. And I just got out of Instagram jail like two days ago. And I think so much of that is because my content isn’t from the point of view where, ooh, look what you get to see. It’s from a, these people are standing in their power. And so it’s not like the explore page of Instagram, where if you scroll far enough, you’re going to see a porn bot or you’re going to see someone that’s exploiting the male gaze, which like, hell yeah, get your bag, buddy. Like if you can, if you can take a bunch of Internet men for a ride and get their money. I love that for you. Please do it more. But like, you know, like the content that is more centered on that titillation or that like, I get to see this. Then that’s what gets pushed more where like the reclamation of someone’s agency identity is not and like I posted. And this is nothing against either of these clients because I love them both and they’re actually best friends. I posted a reel on Instagram with a client with a bigger body. And then I posted a reel on Instagram, very similar format because they did a bestie shoot. So it was like at the same time and she has a thinner body and that one got a hell of a lot more views, a hell of a lot more interaction than this one did. And like we know why. Because again, like these social media algorithms and these social media companies and the people who run them are focused more on the getting to the spicy, the salacious, than actually focused on people being empowered through social media. Because yeah, social media is not actually about empowering or democratizing anything. It’s still about enforcing all of these different structures of power that we’ve formulated in our society over the last thousand years.

Becky Mollenkamp: I know as a woman on social media who tries to speak about empowerment and women’s rights and things like that, I know that I get a lot of really unkind things said to me by men. And this is what happens, right? When we speak up, there is this effort to try and quiet us. And a really great way to quiet women in this world that we live in is by commenting on their appearance. It’s supposed to and often does make us feel really shamey and want to silence us, right? Because it’s hard when our entire lives are spent being judged on how we look. And then when you have somebody showing up and saying, like, I actually use my voice and look what happened. I get called fat, ugly, whatever. It does make, it can make you want to silence yourself. Now, I’m curious though, your experience, because you’re showing these generally women who are in these more empowered kind of hoses and feeling great about themselves. And yet you’re a white, cis het man who’s showing those things. Are you receiving the same nasty comments that we are as women?

Caleb Thomas: So only when something of mine goes viral. Because nowadays anytime that I post, it’s just reaching my following, which is both great because, like, I have, like, on all of my social media outlets, except for YouTube, which is a whole other thing, like, over 90% women following, which is great. But when something goes viral on Instagram, the men show up. And I have just gotten to a point I used to argue with people in comments, I used to dunk on people and call people out and try to make examples of them or whatever. But I’ve just gotten to a point where I don’t think that that does anything. It might feel cathartic and like, give a little bit of schadenfreude at the moment. So I actually think I posted this on threads last night. I don’t think that you can block enough people on social media. I am a firm subscriber to the delete, block and move on, which again, I think does speak to my privilege and my identity because I do have that ability to just the majority of my content doesn’t reach those people, but I know that folks that I work with, they don’t get that privilege of the majority of their stuff, just not reaching those gross people. So I do recognize that that isn’t always possible for everybody. But I welcome the conversation about like my place in all of this, because I think that’s a very important conversation to have. But just if it’s dumb and name -calling and from a man or from, you know, a conservative, just like it’s not, it’s not worth anybody’s time. It’s not going to amount to anything.

Becky Mollenkamp: I think that might be a nice question for us to end this main part of the interview on, which is what is your place in all of this?

Caleb Thomas: I like to think that I shouldn’t necessarily have a place that like, again, that I am able to see that institutional privilege and power to other people so that other people can use the things that were given to me by the merit of me being born as a cis white dude in the 21st Century in America. I’d like to just give that up to other people because I don’t need it. I don’t need to be the center of things. I don’t need to be celebrated. All I really need out of this is just to be able to feed my kid and pay rent. Other than that, like, I don’t really need to have a place in all this.

Becky Mollenkamp: I’m only going to push back gently to say your place, I think, is around responsibility. So it is about what is your responsibility as a white Cishet man to be a part of changing these systems from which you benefit, from which your people have built and that you benefit, right? And so thinking about that and what does that look like for you? And obviously some of that is in the way that you’re showing up in your work and online and marketing and in your own home. So I think you’re doing a lot of it, but I think that to me, your role isn’t, obviously it’s not at the center, but it’s not also to abdicate any role at all. Like there is a role and it is what’s the responsibility for change. 

Caleb Thomas: If I were to say that it would be, yeah, to continue to emphasize that like, we’re not the center of this, we don’t need to be like, we can just be. And toxic masculinity and toxic whiteness, that hurts us. We don’t need to live like that. We don’t need to put that on ourselves. And to think that we do is just sad.

Becky Mollenkamp: You and I both have young sons. Yours is a few years behind mine, when they get into school and they start developing friendships and you start to see how much the world outside of what goes inside of your own home, what goes on inside your own home, the world outside of that has such an effect also. And that you begin to see the way that white supremacist, you know, heteronormative patriarchy gets its claws into men as boys. Even when you fight against it, you have the most feminist parents and still see them coming home and say, like, society really does its part. And it’s hard. It’s hard because you do see that this isn’t just harmful, like you said to women, it’s harmful to boys. Watching a boy starting to get the message he can’t have feelings is painful. It’s awful. So your son’s lucky to have you, but.

Caleb Thomas: That is like a discussion that we’ve had, like living in a state that was constitutionally whites only. The reason that Oregon joined the union as a free state was not because it was against slavery. It’s because Oregon did not want Black people in it, period, even if they were enslaved. And then living in an area of the state that is still predominantly rural and predominantly conservative and a white enclave, like knowing that we’re sending our kid to a world where he will not meet many diverse people until we go elsewhere. And luckily he’s got lots of diverse family members, so that’s always good. But we’ve definitely had discussions, are we doing the right thing by even living here still?

Becky Mollenkamp: Well, and also remember that we all live in these systems and it’s not just, I mean, our individual actions matter a lot and these systems exist everywhere. So it doesn’t really matter where you are in the U.S. Yes, there are places where it’s more extreme or perhaps just more vocal, and less other places, but we’re all in the same system. And that’s globally pretty much, white supremacist heteronormative patriarchal capitalism is pretty much the globe now. So there’s not a lot of escaping it. You do what you can. And we also have to free ourselves to some degree to say, I can only do what I can do. Because my whole point is we’re doing all we can in our home and your kid goes off and you start to say like, my God, there’s this world that’s going to help shape him, no matter how much I don’t want it to. And it’s hard and it does harm boys. And so thank you for the work you’re doing because I think it’s really valuable for helping to change some of that narrative. Your role is the responsibility piece of speaking up, of pushing back, of challenging what others are saying or the way they’re showing up. And so I’ve seen you doing it online. I know you are. And so thank you. To end this portion of the interview, I just ask, is there a nonprofit or an organization that’s doing good work in the world that you support that you’d like to shine the light on?

Caleb Thomas: I am a huge supporter of the Bend Pride Coalition. We live in a very conservative area where a lot of folks are pretty anti -LGBTQI+. So they do really good work in not just supporting the career community in the city of Bend, but also in a lot of the more rural cities around us where it’s even more conservative and even more reactionary, even more against the LGBTQIA+ community. So I love the work that they do and they are amazing.

Becky Mollenkamp: Like so many folks, I think of Oregon as Portland. And so you forget that much of Oregon is not as progressive as Portland. And so thank you for that reminder and to support what’s happening in Bend to try and protect all folks who maybe are not getting that safety in that area. So thank you for that. And thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. And again, go subscribe to the newsletter because we’re going to have a great little conversation about some of the things you’ve hinted at throughout this that I have a feeling really affect how you see the world, which is your experience of being in the evangelical Pentecostal faith for a long time. So we’re going to go talk about that now. And thank you again.