Why the feminine divine is a trap
I don’t know what I did, or which link I accidentally clicked on, but my Instagram algorithm has started showing me a lot of videos about the feminine divine. Mostly, they’re videos instructing women how to sit in their feminine divine, give in to it, or be in their feminine energy. For the record, these videos all promise the greatest of fulfillment and reward once you can do these things.
It isn’t just Instagram either because at various points in my life, I have been unfortunate enough to sit with people who say the words, ‘feminine divine,’ without irony. I try not to roll my eyes and work even harder to keep my face still, but it’s often a futile endeavour. I once thought that those who peddle the divine feminine are the types who collect crystals, meditate, and say things like ‘I’m vibrating on a higher frequency.’
Which is fine if that’s what you’re into, it’s just not something I’m partaking in. However, it’s disconcerting to see waves of social media content that promise big rewards for feminine behaviour. That feels like a trap to me.
In case you have been fortunate enough to miss this, the feminine divine is a spiritual concept that promotes feminine traits, such as intuition, empathy, and nurturing. It’s all about women being goddesses and submitting to their natural qualities, in order to truly be powerful in themselves. There’s a lot of self-love rhetoric thrown in as well and it’s very ‘Mother Nature’ themed. Which translated to modern times is Instagram videos of women in white dresses with herbs in their hair, chubby babies on their laps, while their husband who just so happens to look like a lumberjack, calls her ‘my queen/goddess’ in the background. There is inevitably a long caption about how these women have given in to their feminine divine and life is now amazing.
There are a thousand and one problems with this Instagram fairy-tale, but for the sake of brevity, let me just name a few.
Firstly, it requires women to embody traditional, stereotypical female behaviours. It doesn’t talk about ambition, hunger, passion, or drive; those things are generally deemed to be masculine. Rather, it’s modelled on ‘mother nature’ and the word mother comes first. It requires women to be soft and kind and gentle. It also makes gender a horribly binary thing, which we all know it is not.
Secondly, if the rhetoric sounds like it might exclusively benefit men, the chances are it will exclusively benefit men. We have a responsibility therefore to test it, tear it up, scrutinise. The deeper I go into the divine rabbit hole, the more men I find peddling it, which also tells you everything you need to know. There was one man on Instagram selling courses on how to sit in your feminine divine so you can find your ‘King.’ He has 466 thousand followers. It’s honestly offensive. I digress. The point being, if a man is promoting something to do with women, I always question it. Especially if that end product is to ‘find you a man.’
Lastly, if we are to believe in the feminine divine, we must too then believe in the masculine submissive. The idea that men submit to their goddesses, tap into their intuition, approach life in a softer, more empathetic way. Which we don’t have in our society. In any society, in fact. Men are not yielding to women and therefore asking me to be soft and nurturing, in the face of men who are not practicing the same traits, is nothing but a trap.
What you are actually doing is telling women to stay at home, look beautiful, and raise babies. That is what today’s feminine divine peddles. No one is asking the men to sit in their masculine submissiveness. They’re not selling courses on how men can yield to their goddesses. Nor are there videos teaching men how to yield in order to find their goddess.
The work, the onus, is once more put on women. I already have so much to do, I’m most certainly not adding ‘finding my feminine divine’ to this list. This isn’t about goddesses or inner peace, it’s about submitting, as per usual, to men. It is about upholding societal tropes. Maintaining a system that has been in place since Adam blamed Eve for eating. It is the modern equivalent of a Victorian mother and a 1950s housewife. It is barbed wire. A cage. A ploy. A net.
By proxy of being/identifying as a woman, you are already sitting in your feminine energy. You really don’t have to do anything at all. And you definitely don’t need a man on Instagram telling you how to be a woman, especially, when he’s profiting from it.
Stay loud. Stay wild. Stay unfeminine. Stay masculine. Stay rowdy. Stay out all night. Stay up. Stay bitter. The best is yet to come. The best is yet to come. It will be wild and messy and glorious, so say it with me, the best is yet to come.
You hit this nail right on the head! I won't go too deep into this, but I find the reduction of the 'feminine divine' (I've heard it said as 'divine feminine') to these soft, sugar, spice and everything nice to be sacrilegious of the true feminine. If you look at the goddesses worshiped in ancient societies (as well as some feminine archetypes like the huntress or the sage) many of them embody traits we see as masculine. Many of the goddesses have been depicted as dark, wrathful, wild, and unyielding, making much of the discussion surrounding the divine feminine in the mainstream social media space as nothing more but a continuation of the patriarchal (and often religious) reduction of feminine nature into something more manageable and easily exploited. In short, it's disgusting.
Thank you for this, it articulates things I have felt for ages but struggled to put into words. I am a sex coach and the amount of 'divine feminine'-talk in this space is off the charts! As you express - maybe if men were eagerly stepping into the 'worship your goddess' role in a respectful and nourishing way, it could be something to explore... but generally they are not (with some rare exceptions).
I do think there is some value in considering what 'divine feminine' business coaches have to say - turning away from the structures of aggressive capitalism and competition in business, which burns us out (whatever our gender - although women get the brunt of it with typically more care-giving and housework and life admin put on their shoulders too). But it goes way too far with what ethical marketeer Kelly Diels calls the 'Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand' - typically a White, slender, conventionally attractive woman with an instagram reel of aspirational shots implying great wealth, and promising if you follow her teachings about 'doing business in a feminine way' you'll get the same. But then using the same pressure selling tactics as other businesses.
As someone who's been in the sexual space for work for over 20 years, I actually think our energy is genderless. The more we can just be together as 'beings', the better.