the modern myth of the divine feminine
divine bullshit and the threat to feminism
I got my period back aged nineteen, on the night of a full moon.
For three and a half years, I’d been suffering from amenorrhea, and I’d only just clocked this wasn’t something to be proud of. In my efforts to regulate my cycle, I’d done hoping, crying, and even the odd bit of praying (hello God, I’m sorry I abandoned you for girls and My Chemical Romance. Can I have my period back now?). I'd done ‘working on my mental health’, yoga, and some catch-all mindfulness. It was also mid-lockdown, and I was unintentionally following the NHS guidelines for treating amenorrhea — rest, less exercise, and a higher calorie diet.
The one thing my efforts were missing, apparently, was a full moon ritual.
After some in-depth research on Pinterest, Google, and a quick glance at Co-Star, I was ready. I’d found a few articles, complete with cutesy graphics, instructing me on the proper procedures needed to deploy the power of the full moon, regulate my cycle, and restore balance to my body. I had crystals, a bowl to put them in, and a little water. After selecting an appropriate Spotify playlist and settling into a cross-legged pose, I set out to reconnect with my ‘divine feminine’ energy and regain my period.
A few hours later, I stood up from the toilet of my childhood home, and saw blood.
It’s hard to escape the divine feminine on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter today. Referring to a spiritual energy which is soft, nurturing, creative, and intuitive, as opposed to the logical, analytical, and assertive strictures of patriarchal spirituality, the idea of the divine feminine has a long precedent in cultures around the world. In pop-spirituality and self-help communities today, the divine feminine is considered a way of reconnecting with the neglected energy within oneself and society as a whole. In an androcentric society, the argument goes, we can come unbalanced and untethered due to the hegemony of patriarchal values. In order to heal and empower ourselves, we must reclaim our inner femininity.
Side-by-side lists compare the attributes of the divine feminine and divine masculine. ‘Intuitive’, ‘empathetic’, ‘expressive’, reads one list of divine feminine attributes, whilst the masculine counterpart includes ‘logical’, ‘task-oriented’, ‘action-based’. Divine femininity is supposed to be gender neutral, a way of balancing patriarchal and traditionally female attributes within oneself for spiritual gains. But everything about it reasserts conventional, conservative gender roles in a shareable new form for the aesthetically-inclined. ‘Yielding’, ‘open’, ‘receptive’, ‘vulnerable’, continues the feminine list, its cursive captions and soft pink background blending palatably into my Instagram feed. ‘Rigid’, ‘initiating’, ‘active’, ‘dominating’, read the male equivalents.1 If the divine feminine is meant to be empowering, I don't know who for. Taken in isolation from the other attributes on the infographic, it reads more like a pastel-hued Andrew Tate post.
Whether phrased as the divine feminine or not, gender essentialism repackaged for the social media age is everywhere at the moment. Reasserting the binary distinction of male and female, side-by-side comparisons of divine feminine and masculine attributes are only the tip of the iceberg. And that online iceberg is floating in an irl ocean of terfism, trad-con revivals, and reactionary social politics.
Particularly worrying to me is the shift in how (cis) women online talk about women’s health and menstruation. One common thread on Twitter is the suggestion that if you suffer from UTIs, bacterial vaginosis, or yeast infections during a committed heterosexual relationship, then your body is rejecting your partner by sending a spiritual signal.2 A sexual partner’s infidelity or personal hygiene can impact your vaginal health, but this isn’t your body rejecting them — though if this is the root cause, maybe you should be. Yet self-help coaches and spiritual counsellors on social media have turned this biological reaction with no bearing on the emotional status of a relationship into a determining sign from an all-powerful universe.
.More prominent on video-based platforms like TikTok and Instagram is ‘cycle-syncing’ or ‘living by your cycle’. Cyclical living refers to living by your body’s natural cycles — the seasons, the cycles of the moon, and most commonly the menstrual cycle. Cycle-syncing influencers encourage women to eat, exercise, and plan their lives around their menstrual cycle. Contrasting the 28-day menstrual cycle to the 24 hour hormonal cycle of cisgender men, cycle-syncing is supposed to help women optimise their health and happiness through monthly lifestyle changes.
I do think there’s value to cyclical living — eating seasonally, for example, and I’ll always advocate being more aware of your body's natural rhythms. But there’s something prescriptive about cycle-syncing and its repeated assertion of gender difference that worries me. As in the case of the UTI theory, living by your cycle involves giving up control of your emotional and physical life to the greater force of ‘femininity’. Even if you feel like lifting weights during your menstrual phase, you have to be doing gentle yoga instead. And God forbid you eat the wrong sort of food. Watching day in the life videos by cycle-syncers, I can’t help but feel they’re not living by their cycle, they’re controlled by it.3 There’s a notable overlap between their content and that made by stay at home girlfriend influencers — repetitive shots of housework in an already spotless house, pastel coloured lounge fits, the outside world only glimpsed as the door swings shut behind their suited breadwinner at the end of the video.
In its most extreme form, cyclical living reasserts the public/private distinction between men and women. One video by Instagram life coach and stay at home mother Devan (@thedigitalrn) shows Devan prepping dinner, soundtracked by folksy female vocals. The reel, which has 361k likes, is captioned ‘Unpopular opinion but, women belong in the home. *In the most honorable way. Our monthly hormonal cycles are conducive to cooking, baking, errands, nurturing and so on. They are not made for doing ALL of that on top of a 40 hour work week.’4 That asterisk is doing a whole lot of work to keep Devan in the twenty-first century.
It’s not just stay at home momfluencers and alternative medicine practitioners suggesting that women’s bodies make them unfit for work. Younger women, who faced the exhausting demands of girlboss feminism and then saw its demise as reactionary politics became the norm, are also turning back towards the home, albeit with a dose of Gen Z irony. With hypergamy the buzzword of the moment, the traditional path of sexual and financial dependence is re-gaining popularity. Whole swathes of the internet are devoted to teaching young women how to find a rich husband, or preaching the value of a dependent life. ‘girls were not put on this earth to work they were put on this earth to do arts and crafts and drink colorful beverages’ reads one tweet with 33.6k likes, whilst the ‘acting dumb in [rich area] to find a husband’ trend has thousands of contributions.5 A step on from hypergamy, other influencers are suggesting that sex work is the only way for women to truly connect with their divine feminine energy outside of marriage.
I’ve made many a joke about being an airhead, a bimbo, how I do not dream of labor. I’ve been known to suggest printing more cash in times of economic crisis, and I’d quite like it if my partner made enough money to support my passions. But in the last few months, something online has shifted. Increasingly stripped of irony, such statements now sound deadly serious, reasserting the age old idea that women are not capable of work outside the home, but are delicate roses or fragile china dolls, fit only for the kitchen and the bedroom. There’s nothing radical about this, no echoes of feminist theory; no suggestion that unpaid household labour should be compensated, that childrearing should be socialised. Only the repeated assertion that housework is empowering, divine, goddess-like, that self-infantilisation and turning away from the public sphere is ‘enough’. Some true, purer form of femininity.
The divine feminine, cycle-syncing, hypergamy, the power of the female body — these ideas have long historical and spiritual precedents, but they've become the preserve of self-help coaches and Instagram influencers preaching the power of products to change your life. Buy this and it will help your sex life. Pay me and I’ll save your relationship. You're just a one-on-one consultation and a subscription service away from spiritual enlightenment.
Try this moon ritual, and everything will be okay.
Vulnerable women, such as those with eating disorders or coming out of difficult relationships, are particularly prey to the myth of the divine feminine. ‘Feminine spirituality’ promises healing, hope, internal strength, empowerment in one’s self and relationships. Some of these claims may come from a place of genuine spirituality. Others are just pseudoscience scaremongering phrased as self help. Two years ago, I suffered a year of recurrent UTIs and kidney infections. Had I been told my body was spiritually rejecting my partner, I’d have probably believed it — because I was willing to believe anything. Except ending a healthy relationship for no reason wouldn’t have addressed the underlying cause: a gut microbiome damaged by a too-strong course of antibiotics and the stress of lockdown. Similarly, I can see myself falling for the cycle-syncing story, the myth that women are still controlled by their biology, regardless of societal conditions — the lack of menstrual leave in almost all nations doesn’t seem to factor into the squeaky-clean Instagram vision. It would be easier, maybe, to accept my female fate, to take to my bed and swoon like a Victorian heroine. Except there is no room for me in the conventional cycle-syncing story — chronic illness means I don’t have regular periods, or consistent menstrual cycles. Letting my womb control my life would mean giving up and giving in, letting my pain dominate me.
I strongly believe we should be more in tune with our bodies, but not all bodies are the same. I was recently diagnosed with PCOS, a condition affecting 4-20% of reproductive-aged women worldwide.6 One popular cycle-syncing website describes ovulation as a time of clear skin and confidence — not exactly my experience, and definitely not everyone’s.7 Part of the reason I’ve held off hormonal treatment for my symptoms is the pervasive narrative online that birth control is a con designed to control women’s bodies. I’ve even seen people claim that women only suffer labour pains because they’re disconnected from their wombs and divine femininity. Tell that to the thousands premodern women who died in labour, or lived in agony due to botched births. Tell that to anyone with a menstrual disorder, anyone who suffers from infertility.
Yes, there are problems with birth control, and it is a mistake to assume all bodies can run on the 24 hour, 7 day week model, a system designed by the twin architects of capitalism and patriarchy. But reemphasising an essentialist gender binary sharply divided by biological determinism feels deeply problematic. As politicians chip away at abortion rights, roll back the meagre gains of trans people, and surveil the bodies of children for any expression of ‘deviant’ sexuality (are they really coming for the furries?), the reassertion of traditional gender binaries is more disturbing than ever. So many of the ‘divine feminine’ traits emphasised online depict women as vulnerable, easily harmed by their own bodies or others and in need of protection. Protection which errs on the side of domination — ‘yielding’ versus ‘active’, ‘vulnerable’ versus ‘dominating’. Gendered bodies, separate spheres. This is patriarchy repackaged for the social media generation, wrapped in pop-pink graphics and the language of feminist empowerment.
Dissociative feminism, bimbo-core, hypergamy and the divine feminine: all of these trends speak to the exhaustion and disillusionment at the heart of the fractured feminist movement, a movement which has come under immense strain in the past decade. When you’ve been fighting a long fight, it’s easy to give up. To let the universe, your body, or your partner, take control.
Maybe my makeshift moon ritual did help my period come back, by relaxing my body and mind, but I didn’t turn to it out of genuine spirituality. My efforts to tap into the ‘divine feminine’ came from a place of fear, a skewed sense of being a failed woman, deficient in some fundamental way. ‘You’re a woman now’, people still tell you when you start your period, as if a bit of blood is all it takes to make a woman. As if some biologically-determined vulnerability is all it is. But it isn’t all it is. And for feminism to ever make meaningful, tangible gains, it can’t be.
https://www.littlemissdessa.com/blogs/littlemissdessa/the-divine-feminine-flowing-into-your-divine-goddess
I wrote about day in the life videos a few posts back
Thank you for this! Subscribed!
this is so excellent, thank you for this. the way it was kind of accepted in the beginning of the co-star era that you could dismiss criticism of astrology and the belief systems we derive from this specific kind of divine feminine spiritual scene as “attacking women’s interests” i think got us to this boom cycle of girl-coded essentialist mumbo jumbo. afraid the girlies who would benefit most from your very careful thoughtful writing are sadly not reading things longer than video captions