On The Divine Feminine, and What We're Actually Trying to Talk About Here

Suggesting to gender-marginalized people that they use discernment about what gender archetypes we consume and where those are coming from is NOT internalized misogyny. It's like a suggestion that you know the ingredients of a food that you're going to consume. It's not telling anyone to go on a diet or not enjoy food; it's just suggesting that we know what we're nourishing our systems with & know what we're putting into our bodies.

"Divine Feminine" is a neutral-value concept. What we are critiquing is "spiritual" people who don't realize how or when their beliefs prop up patriarchy. Also, Divine Feminine concepts are not uniform cross-culturally, because gender values/expectations aren't (thank you to my actual, pretty agender by a lot of US standards, mother! for driving that point home). But New Age bullshit tends to water everything down then condense the Greatest Hits into something that in fact supports conservative ideology. Your husband can wait on you hand and foot all day but if you're not doing the appropriate work to challenge why he doesn't have the same concept of domestic labor you do, and if he doesn't understand the urgency of why he should, it's not radical. It's just "women belong in the kitchen" or some other modernized girlboss version and that's fine if it works for you, but stop pretending its subversive, and recognize when it's fully in service to white cis/het/normative capitalism.

We're also tired of being sold expensive retreats that teach us to get in touch with all of this, and then upon returning home things are immediately the same because power structures aren't actually challenged and long-term sustainable ways to change power dynamics aren't ever brought up. We are tired of things that fail to witness the nuances of the diversity of our experiences and instead just make more white women coaches money when nobody is talking about the potential for deep community care in the "Divine Feminine"--what happens when each of us stands up and says, you cannot come into this protected space and wreak violence against our loved ones, our babies, our elders or ourselves, and when you do you harm all of us.

We are tired of having oppression sold back to us time and time again, in insidious attempts to repackage it, with almost the same people benefiting off it every time. And being "Divine Feminine" does not mean we get to refrain from making our hands dirty while others do the work, though they should indeed be picking up the slack by now. All people need to be doing the work of talking about/embodying power and how it's held in society and relationships. Even if it seems like it's only on the personal, everyday level.