Divine Feminine Energy is not the empowering narrative you think it is.
July 17, 2018 8:35 AM   Subscribe

While the idea that women are innately nurturing and emotionally sensitive might sound harmless, these ostensibly positive stereotypes are hard-working components in the overall narrative that women are irrational, intellectually inferior, and servile beings who are most at home in the domestic sphere — the exact logic that’s always facilitated women’s oppression. And however innocuous it seems on the surface, this kind of benevolent sexism actually causes more harm than overt misogyny.
For the love of goddesses, stop deifying women
posted by griphus (46 comments total) 55 users marked this as a favorite
 
To add to the list of problems with deifying women and saying that they are naturally nurturing and emotionally sensitive, this can cause emotional distress to women who aren't naturally that way and feel that they are somehow inferior women because they don't immediately bond with their newborn.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 8:55 AM on July 17, 2018 [40 favorites]


This is a good article and sums a big portion of my problem with the New Age movement in general, but also my reaction is mostly: Oh thank God this seems like the appropriate thread where I can throw in this delightful feminist Thelema shirt that I found the other day and haven't been able to show to anyone yet.
posted by WidgetAlley at 8:58 AM on July 17, 2018 [11 favorites]


Indeed. One either believes in gender essentialism or not...
posted by PhineasGage at 9:03 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Wow, some great lines in this piece! I belong to a Unitarian Universalist congregation and boy howdy are the purple crystal Cherokee hair tampon womyn all about these shenanigans. (Southern lady drawl)...Bless their hearts.

Highlight of the piece for me: Progress depends on viewing women neither as goddesses nor animals, but people: farting, fucking human beings as capable as men of heroic bravery, hilarious witticisms, and stoic trash removal as we are of robbing our roommates, ghosting our oldest friends, and kicking ice under the fridge.
posted by SinAesthetic at 9:10 AM on July 17, 2018 [54 favorites]


Great article, thanks for posting.

First two fairly inconsequential thoughts - links in the article are underlined and when you hover your mouse over them the underline turns into a little moving wave, which I've never seen before and for some reason I just think it's really nifty; one of the links is to a GoodMenProject article about "8 Reasons Men Should Worship Goddesses" and Reason Number One is "Goddesses Are Hot" which . . . . . dude, c'mon. *Picard facepalm.jpg*
posted by soundguy99 at 9:15 AM on July 17, 2018 [16 favorites]


This is also by the creator of the amazing, and obviously deeply NSFW critiquemydickpic.tumblr.com.
posted by ITheCosmos at 9:22 AM on July 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


This is excellent. Thanks for posting!
posted by ChuraChura at 9:55 AM on July 17, 2018


Nurturing, patient, beautiful goddesses? Some goddesses maybe. Give me some of that Inanna sacred feminine goddess energy instead:
Be it known that you crush heads! Be it known that you devour corpses like a dog! Be it known that your gaze is terrible! Be it known that you lift your terrible gaze! Be it known that you have flashing eyes! Be it known that you are unshakeable and unyielding! Be it known that you always stand triumphant!
From the Exaltation of Inanna, by the priestess Enheduanna, the first named author, who was a woman.

As a kid, I read a lot of mythology. I did not see so many of these nurturing, caring, soft goddesses that exemplified this particular concept of "Sacred Feminine." I saw Athena and Artemis, Inanna and Bastet, the Morrigan and Kali. Why erase these equally important aspects of the "Sacred Feminine"? Why construct a "sacred" narrative that excludes them? Why limit even the divine expressions of the many different ways to be feminine, excluding all the violent blood and guts, the fury, the terrible and awesome aspects?

Obviously the answer is that there's a narrative that serves the oppression of women, and showing all these different ways to be a woman, divine or not, doesn't serve that narrative.
posted by yasaman at 10:03 AM on July 17, 2018 [86 favorites]


OK - this is super surface Divine Feminine 101, because if you just scratch a little off the surface, you find the Goddesses Pele and Chantico of volcanoes and destruction. Cailleach (the storm hag) and Tsovinar who made the rains fall with her fury.

Don't for a moment forget all of our goddesses of war and death: Pakhet (Egyptian), Badb (Celtic), Chamunda (Hindu), Inanna and Ereshkigal (Mesopotamian), Agasaya and Astarte (Semitic), Mictecacihuatl (Aztec) Magwayen (Philippines), Macaria and Lethe (Greek), Freya and Hel (Norse), Hine-nui-te-pō (Maori).

We pick and choose what we see, but they're not all fertility and nurturing by any means.
posted by Sophie1 at 10:06 AM on July 17, 2018 [52 favorites]


I appreciate the article pointing out that if you scratch this shit with so much as a fingernail, nine times out of ten you find a TERF.

I tell you, finding out about trans periods recently was a bit of mind-blower. I can't imagine the mental gymnastics these sorts would undergo.
posted by kafziel at 10:08 AM on July 17, 2018 [30 favorites]


Shout out to Slepnir's mum.
posted by Artw at 10:09 AM on July 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


I am extremely suspicious of guys who come from a Western background and suddenly go all in for the Divine Feminine. It's a level of creepiness that somehow excels the ordinary lout's. Basic patriarchal demands are for your body and your silence, not your soul. Saying a woman should have this kind of divine nature is to require that she should be GGG on a spiritual level, which is frightening. "Sacred passage," my ass.

I appreciate the article pointing out that if you scratch this shit with so much as a fingernail, nine times out of ten you find a TERF.

I am tragically disappointed in Nina Paley's recent turn because her animation and artwork is so stunning. (She created a set of dancing goddess figurine GIFs for this movie, which were adorable and briefly viral.)
posted by Countess Elena at 10:20 AM on July 17, 2018 [9 favorites]


I appreciate the article pointing out that if you scratch this shit with so much as a fingernail, nine times out of ten you find a TERF.

Which is also bullshit! Go back to the worship of Inanna-Ishtar from over 4000 years ago, and her priesthood was full of people we'd call trans or nonbinary or intersex today! (Disclaimer: it is, as ever, tricky and difficult to ascribe modern labels of gender to ancient peoples when we have incomplete information and are coming from a wildly different sociocultural context. But the evidence is there.)

Always look to see who, exactly, these new narratives exclude and include. Because so many of the different ways to be a woman have always been there, all along, and it matters which ones we elevate and which ones we erase or ignore.
posted by yasaman at 10:23 AM on July 17, 2018 [27 favorites]


http://goddessschool.com/projects/melissam/Freya.html

Freya was goddess of love, war, treasure, cats, witchcraft, and probably more.

I agree that god/goddess essentialism is creepy in any number of ways.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:26 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


As a contradictory ball of identities, I find nothing innately wrong with the Divine Feminine as long as you take all of it. Femininity is far more than planting healing flowers and midwifing the birth of gods FFS. I am starting a program next January looking at the Divine Feminine (which includes trans women BTW) and it doesn't shy away from her much more destructive, angry side.
posted by Sophie1 at 10:27 AM on July 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Which is also bullshit! Go back to the worship of Inanna-Ishtar from over 4000 years ago, and her priesthood was full of people we'd call trans or nonbinary or intersex today!

Or even the worship of the mother goddess Cybele 2000 years ago.
posted by sukeban at 10:29 AM on July 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Back in my pagan days, I almost got into a fist fight because some Big Name Wiccan told me that without Motherhood, that I could never know the fullness of the Goddess. Regardless of what goddesses I name dropped or how much I tried to articulate how restrictive the narrative of fertility and womanhood were, she would not accept that you could fully know divine womanhood until you birthed a child. When I told her I had my tubes tied at 21, because I did not ever want to be forced to have a child, she called me a "False Woman" and said that I was broken by the patriarchy. That's when I threw a glass at her head.

Later, she also said that my violent reaction to her words was proof that I wasn't a real woman and I needed to spend time with the Mother to heal my soul if I ever wanted to progress as a person.

Men have said evil and hateful shit to me all my life, but women, particularly 'enlightened' ones, they are the ones that make my fury and rage boil over.
posted by teleri025 at 10:39 AM on July 17, 2018 [70 favorites]


While the idea that women are innately nurturing and emotionally sensitive might sound harmless

I suppose it might, to people who have never questioned the rule that women belong in the kitchen with babies?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:43 AM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Of related interest: Aparita Bhandari, "The Goddess Complex" (Hazlitt, 4 January 2017) -- "Growing up with the goddess figure as part of my South Asian tradition means I have a complicated relationship with repurposing the term as a symbol of female empowerment."
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:47 AM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


I appreciate the article pointing out that if you scratch this shit with so much as a fingernail, nine times out of ten you find a TERF.

I don't know the demographic data but it feels important to say that there are many, many trans people of all genders who practice some kind of earth based spirituality, witchcraft, and/or polytheism. And that there's also a lot of cis women who are highly dedicated to creating ritual spaces that are welcoming of trans women. (And also witches who organize feminist rituals for folks of all genders.)

Also, there's a rich and vibrant history of conversation among Pagans, polytheists, and witches about gender and social justice.
posted by overglow at 11:08 AM on July 17, 2018 [12 favorites]


One of my favorite stories of Freya is about what she does with her half of the Einharjar (slain in battle). As part of the Vanir treaty with the Aesir, she gets first pick and she selects those who have left family behind, so she can reunite them in her Hall when the families die. She chose to do this because she knows loss, having lost her husband Od before the treaty was put in place.

I wish more stories about the gods acknowledged the Einharjar don’t just end up on Valhalla.
posted by Deoridhe at 11:13 AM on July 17, 2018 [17 favorites]


Maybe tangential with the original topic, but related to the way the comments have gone, Eidolon published an article recently about trying to apply modern trans narratives and identities to ancient myth and literature, specifically Ovid's Metamorphoses.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:23 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


I’m really happy to see trans inclusive archetypes emerging.

The divine woman bullshit of the 1990’s really completely fucked my life up to the point that I will never be able to be a trans witch or any of that. My own personal feels are “fuck that noise, I WANT SCIENCE” in my own daily information feeds and internal validation streams.

However, that said I understand that the power of an archetype is the eventual power of a social norm so even though I think divine feminine stuff is garbage because my own damage, I appreciate the fuck out of people who are reaffirming trans inclusive narratives into these myths.
posted by nikaspark at 11:34 AM on July 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


This is going to sound like a dissent, but it isn't - I think there's something to be said for honoring qualities like nurturing and emotional sensitivity and such themselves, independent of a given gender identity. Because they're good qualities for anyone to have, regardless of their gender.

The fact that those qualities have traditionally been coded as "feminine" for so long complicates things; some people say they're downplaying women when what they're really thinking of is "passivity", and they completely overlook the fact that there are plenty of aggressive women. Other people want to uplift women, and they get bogged down in "these are the characteristics traditionally 'female' and hey, they're good! Let's honor that!" And they completely overlook the fact that not all women are like that.

It's possible to honor women without requiring them all to march in lockstep, absolutely. I think the way to reinforce that, though, is to make a case for honoring those characteristics independent of women; it's a very promising middle ground, I think.

Then again, I also thought Willow on Buffy had a great name for people like this - "Blessed-wanna-be's".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:37 AM on July 17, 2018 [19 favorites]


teleri025, I’m sorry to hear that. What on earth would that woman make of Artemis? Or Athena?
posted by Countess Elena at 11:55 AM on July 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was young and not as conscientious of cultural appropriation as I am now, but the only goddess I ever identified with in my gothy youth* was Kali precisely because she was fierce and powerful. I had no interest in benign Earth Mothers.

*lights clove cigarette, plays "Dominion" by Sisters of Mercy
posted by Kitteh at 12:01 PM on July 17, 2018 [12 favorites]


Also studied mythology, wrote my Masters thesis on cosmogonies (creation myths & models).

There was no gender initially, and in every single creation myth you find that glorious primordial essence that contains all things, i.e. diversity. We moderns can't say for certain what the lost beliefs were truly about, so when people go "oh gosh don't sanctify such-and-such!" then they're talking about things that are in their minds and beliefs.

That can be just as empowering as it can be disempowering, as anyone on the "right" (Adam) and "wrong" (Eve) end of the Christian creation myth well knows.

I've never understood why people have to hold up one versus another for anything. Rainbows are sacred in pretty much every belief system, for one thing. Who goes around saying that the red in a rainbow is inferior to the blue? No one, that's who. Humans understand that rainbows are diverse, we can do the same thing for humans, deities, plants, et cetera and so forth.

As for emotional goddesses, geez, read some mythology. Any mythology not pressed and strained through contemporary Occidental blandness. Kali is another good one – happy to see the Wikipedia entry has evolved to be truer to her source than it was before.
Two of these hands (usually the left) are holding a sword and a severed head. The sword signifies divine knowledge and the human head signifies human ego which must be slain by divine knowledge in order to attain moksha. The other two hands (usually the right) are in the abhaya (fearlessness) and varada (blessing) mudras, which means her initiated devotees (or anyone worshipping her with a true heart) will be saved as she will guide them here and in the hereafter.

She has a garland consisting of human heads, variously enumerated at 108 (an auspicious number in Hinduism and the number of countable beads on a japa mala or rosary for repetition of mantras) or 51, which represents Varnamala or the Garland of letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, Devanagari. Hindus believe Sanskrit is a language of dynamism, and each of these letters represents a form of energy, or a form of Kali. Therefore, she is generally seen as the mother of language, and all mantras.

She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities—she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her.
I saved my facile retort for the end: For the love of goddesses, stop deifying women
For the love of fuck, stop telling people what they should or shouldn't believe in. Stop assuming that you can impose your worldview onto others. Stop colonializing, for fuck's sake. Start realizing that you don't know everything and haven't conceived of every possible worldview, nor can you ever.
posted by fraula at 12:46 PM on July 17, 2018 [13 favorites]


teleior25, I can't believe the sanctimonious assholery of that woman and I'm sorry she was so hurtful, but damn, I'm glad you threw a glass at her head. I live in the Bay Area and that self-righteous goddessery with all its feminine stereotypes was all around me and drove me nuts but I could never fully articulate why and this thread nails it. I too had been searching for a positive female role model when I felt there was so much degradation, but this just felt like another mental prison.

ugh. Thanks for pitching that glass for all the ladies! haha.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 1:04 PM on July 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Yeah, I’m kind of frustrated by the “don’t deify women! Treat them as shitty too!” idea. Like, here’s a suggestion, I will move to culturally ensconcing the shitty things women can do after we’ve had, say, a hundred years of dudes sincerely exalting the good things we can. There’s no reason deifying the feminine /has/ to come with being shitty to women just because it historically has.

However, my fellows above are correct that if you’re going to honor lady goddesses, you’re getting war goddesses too. Im not sure where the “the goddess is only peaceful” nonsense came from, but definitely not any mythology I know.
posted by corb at 1:07 PM on July 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


agreed corb. Why does it have to be a binary choice between exaltation and degradation? LIke those are the only options and women are one dimensional either way?
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 1:09 PM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'll second the notion that 1990s neo-pagan attempts to coerce everything onto some sort of cosmological gender polarity, as if a tree or hammering a nail can be given a number on a scale from 0 - 10, really screwed with me when I was first coming out and trying to work with that.

Durga's literary battles with demons are as bloody as Kill Bill and have the fluidity of identity of Steven Universe. They include the following exchange:

Shiva: "Good job, now kill the rest of them for my pleasure."

Durga: "Would you kindly take my ultimatum to the King of Demons? Surrender the lands you have taken and return to your proper homes or be destroyed."
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:39 PM on July 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Im not sure where the “the goddess is only peaceful” nonsense came from, but definitely not any mythology I know.

Taoist yin-yang duality appropriated into Western occultism/paganism by orientalists, I'm guessing. I have a vague recollection that Crowley was really into "Eastern" stuff?
posted by tobascodagama at 1:56 PM on July 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Taoist yin-yang duality appropriated into Western occultism/paganism by orientalists, I'm guessing. I have a vague recollection that Crowley was really into "Eastern" stuff?

I have a strong feeling that a fair bit of "new age" pagan revival is decontextualized dharma filtered through the British Empire.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:20 PM on July 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


This maybe a little off-topic but... I'm a woman and a care worker. It pisses me off when people talk about nurses as being e.g. "angels" because it makes the very real and very hard work that goes into being good at a caring role invisible. Actually caring for people is a real skill, and keeping your cool and staying patient in the face of challenging behaviour is a skill, and saying that, oh well, women are just basically good at this kind of thing is a way of devaluing that work. All of these skills are completely looked down on and ignored and care work is obviously very low status.

It also makes it harder for people in these professions to advocate for better pay and working conditions because hey, we're just doing what women are born to do, empathise and care for people. To say nothing of unpaid carers who are saddled with an enormous responsibility and very little/no support.
posted by the cat's pyjamas at 2:33 PM on July 17, 2018 [62 favorites]


I did not know who St. Olga was, having been raised Catholic, but I was curious and so I looked her up.

Man, that really builds, doesn’t it?
posted by schadenfrau at 3:11 PM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Also this thread is fucking great.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:24 PM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


This argument usually falls down when you point out the flip side.

Like, you cannot be a man if you have not known war.
posted by lumpenprole at 3:45 PM on July 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Back in my pagan days, I almost got into a fist fight because some Big Name Wiccan told me that without Motherhood, that I could never know the fullness of the Goddess. Regardless of what goddesses I name dropped or how much I tried to articulate how restrictive the narrative of fertility and womanhood were, she would not accept that you could fully know divine womanhood until you birthed a child.

I have had almost this exact same experience, but within a fairly crunchy non-Pagan community. Same kind of self-righteous older woman. It happened to me when I was a teenager. I'm now in my 30s and I'm still just as certain as I was when I was half my age that kids are not for me, and also feel extremely secure in my woman identity.

I've had a lot of people act completely shitty to me for not having children, including family members, but by far the one that has always grated me the most was Ms. Extremely Moon Goddess (and I say this as someone who actually goes a lot for mysticism in my own spiritual practice).
posted by mostly vowels at 6:41 PM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Here's my shitty self-righteous women story: back when I was a young dyke, I got involved in ACT UP and then started working at AIDS Project Los Angeles. Upon telling two of the women I worked with on other activism I was doing, they called me, and i will NEVER forget it, a "male-coddling fembot." Suffice it to say, I stopped hanging out with them. They meant it to sting and it did, but self-righteous people are going to be self-righteous. If I listened to them, I never would have met my sweet husband and all of my very dearest friends, so fuck them.
posted by Sophie1 at 7:36 PM on July 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


It would be nice if people understood the word "deification." Those traits listed in the article are not characteristics associated with power. It is the list of qualifications an underling, nanny, or maid is expected to have when applying for a job.

These days, the model of what is presented as a strong woman is a nurse with a purse.

Women are not empowered in storytelling. It always the same rotten core of being primed to be weak and subservient, but presented in such a way that she can strut around thinking she has gotten ahead by buying the affections of a male through her labours for him, while using the justification of morality to shut out anyone who points out that she is being played for a fool. It is the same old patriarchal story repackaged to beguile the next generation.

The moral of these stories is not that women are flawless deities; it is that they are gullible rubes who you can con into putting all of their focus and energy on you while she ignores herself because she is of inferior stock; ergo, investing in her is a waste of time. She does all the heavy lifting because that's all she is capable of doing. She drowns out the blaring signs by putting a sunny spin on her miserable life, and settles to be the grunt.

No god would put up with a rig that made them do all of the work. Gods delegate to others and have a giant staff of angels to keep things humming, and have no trouble throwing the spiritual duds to the demons to keep things interesting as the rebels are put in their place.

Women are not deified. They have been seen as morally deficient and weak, even she is being sold as strong. It is not as if Western society has managed to break this mindset yet because you will not get applause for breaking that barrier, but booed. It would be radically different to anything we have seen before -- and that includes people who see themselves as progressive. That woman would be universally demonized for a long time before people caught up to her.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 8:09 PM on July 17, 2018 [10 favorites]


From the article:
The problem is not that there’s a biological or spiritual barrier to men being nurturing, caring and selfless, it’s that the cultural association of these qualities with femininity has meant they’ve been systematically undervalued for eons, which makes caring work incredibly difficult for women, let alone men. Being a Nurturing Goddess often means being consigned to a precarious, un(der)paid existence lacking in necessary structural support like parental leave and funding for the care of elderly and disabled people, so the notion that anyone could embody Divine Feminine qualities after undertaking the right kind of individual emotional shift — and that wealthy men in particular have any serious incentive for doing so — is a cop out that ignores social and structural realities.
As a polytheist devotee of some pretty fierce Norse Ásynjur (goddesses), Skaði and Móðguðr foremost among them, I feel this so hard. I grew up in a New Age family, and I still bear many scars from what I eventually came to call New Age bullying (aka spiritual bypassing). To this very day I cringe inwardly whenever I hear someone say "love and light," especially if it's linked to goddesses or "feminine energy." When I first got into Paganism in the mid-1990s, I didn't find much relief. Eventually I found my way to inclusive Heathenry, which certainly has its own set of problems...but at least now when I hang out with my co-religionists I don't hear the kind of goddess talk the author refers to anymore.

overglow, thanks for linking to Rain Crowe's site. She happens to be a friend of mine, and I have always admired her work. Here's a quote from her that is featured on my blog:
"Do not turn away from the wild and holy dark, the potency of the fertile immanence. Do not tell me love and light. Spiritual bypassing is racism and colonization marketed by the religion of capitalism in the Church of Empire."
posted by velvet winter at 10:44 PM on July 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


it's all fertility and nurturing until somebody loses an eye
posted by flabdablet at 11:35 PM on July 17, 2018 [14 favorites]


Hine-nui-te-pō

"she is most often presented as a threatening, monstrous character: an old woman (ruahine, kuia) who lives at the edge of the world and whose genitals flash like lightning as her thighs open and close. Not to mention the four physical attributes which flesh her out: eyes of pounamu, hair of kelp (rimurehia), a mouth like that of a barracouta (mangā) and last but far from least, labia ridged with sharp obsidian (koi mata)."
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:11 AM on July 18, 2018 [7 favorites]


So... if we're repudiating any kind of essential alignment between femininity and emotion (vs. reason)... does that mean a woman is allowed to secretly think that logic and numbers are just as beautiful as stories; that EL requirements are too high in general; that subjective experience can be delusive and compassion cruel and unjust; and that people of all genders these days are too worried by half about their precious feelings, without being a gender traitor?

That would be cool.
posted by yersinia at 11:00 AM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


What the religious gender archetypes said to me in the 1990s was that half of the universe was inaccessible to me, unless I accepted a religious life as an othered freak or did some spiritual heroics to integrate with my "other half." And I already had a pretty good sense that my gender involved a set of arbitrary and socially constructed rules that were imposed on me through threats of violence.

More than that, my religious right relationships with other beings were supposed to into a binary of romance vs. siblinghood, depending on what flavor of anthropomorphic gender we interpret them as having. I was training as a microbiologist and daily working with species that just don't do sexual dimorphism in a way that's remotely analogous to human beings as constructed by American culture.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:33 AM on July 18, 2018


That should be "right religious relationships" or "properly polite religious relationships," as in "please ask before hugging, take your shoes off in a shoe-free household, and pick up your trash" religious relationship.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:12 PM on July 18, 2018


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