the hypocrisy and harm of the "receptive" feminine
Tassia Bianchini, Conception (2021)
While large parts of Western society (but not all, it’s important to remember) have finally let go of the perception that women are only for service and childbearing (those two being the same thing in that worldview), antiquated and harmful notions of fixed “masculine” and “feminine” traits stubbornly persist in the Spiritual-New Age world. Primarily well-intentioned, women’s groups tend to talk about reclaiming the “divine feminine", while men’s programs lean toward exploring and deconstructing current toxic masculine norms, in the process constructing entirely new, though equally rigid, guidelines for enlightened manliness.
The pattern is familiar and starkly consistent: the divine feminine is about embracing the things that women are often criticized for; guiltlessly enjoying pleasure and sexuality for their own sake; and being oneself — “taking up space”, it’s often called, since current society continues with its endless grinding down of women’s existence: diet culture, rape culture, glass ceilings, the perennial laundry list whose pace and ferocity have barely diminished, if at all, since we began discussing them aloud. Attempts at healthier masculinity tend to talk about care-taking of self and others, allowing oneself to feel one’s emotions, and tempering traditionally “masculine” habits and traits like emotional reactivity, anger, and defensiveness.
The work itself is admirable and important, but the constant reiteration of essential femininity and masculinity undermines it and, after even the briefest moment of consideration, upholds the very oppressive gender categorization that it purports to dismantle. Saying anything about “true nature” or how we “really are” is inherently hogwash; there is no such thing as an enduring Self, and certainly no such thing as a “type” of person who endures over generations and cultures. When we talk about masculine and feminine, we are talking specifically about cultural checklists of the last hundred years or so, the products of religion, colonialism, and racism. Dating back to the ancient Greeks and before, internal and external genitalia were not considered opposites, but rather different placements of the same things (the ovaries being the internal version of the testicles, and so on — a truth well-observed in human fetal development). “Biological sex” as a binary idea — male or female — was popularized as a response to the emerging science of endocrinology which definitively proved its untruth: that hormones (and thus so many other traits of the physical body) exist in mixtures and spectra. “Gender” as a word was only popularized during late 1900’s women’s liberation movement, when women were finally able to say that the composition of their bodies shouldn’t determine their place in society.
All this to say: when we talk about “masculine” and “feminine”, we are talking about current Western sociopolitics. Not science. Not tradition. All those shape-shifting gods impregnating one another and birthing animal offspring out of their skulls should give some indication that there is no such thing as “divine” genderedness. Concepts of yin and yang, action and passivity — these aren’t binary either. There is no such thing as only one or the other, perpetual motion and absolute zero having never been observed.
When examined with clarity and objectivity, it’s obvious that the basis of the “assertive masculine” and “receptive feminine” tropes is just heterosexual, penetrative intercourse. When women are reduced to vaginas and uteruses, then yes, of course, they are receptive of a penis and semen. But even that conceit falls apart pretty quickly: sexual intercourse doesn’t exist just so that one person can ejaculate into another, and childbearing certainly is not receptive. Childbearing is building something from nothing. It is enduring and healing from intense physical trauma. It is creating and fostering another human life with one’s own body and force of will. I can’t imagine anything quite so assertive, active, and powerful.
It’s difficult to conceive of any society in which women have been the receptive ones, excepting the actual violence of subjugation. But no modern “guru” will ever describe the “divine feminine” as victimhood: they are describing care-taking, nourishing, and generally holding everyone else’s shit together. I repeat: there is nothing passive about this “feminine” work.
The very usage of the “receptive” feminine terminology doesn’t even make any sense when considered more deeply for a fraction of a second: there’s “mother Earth” — a convenient characterization for stripping resources and “owning” land. In the modern tea ceremony community, tea itself is often referred to as “she” — a usage which literally makes me gag every time I see it — and in the same breath tea is described as teacher, guide, and giver. There is no passivity whatsoever. There is leadership, creation, and power.
The social benefit of upholding a notion of passive femininity is the same old story: it keeps women in a subservient place. When it’s someone’s job to receive something else, they are inherently powerless. They live their life at the effect of external forces. This is the same as the myth of virginity: that a woman’s entire existence, value, and self-label can change just because someone else put their penis in her. (The virginity myth intentionally erases masturbation and non-penetrative sex, causing a host of other problems in developing sexual identities.)
The purpose of any sort of labeling, including binary terms like yin/yang, feminine/masculine, is to give a us a shorthand. Labels reduce our engagement. They say, “This is what I am” so that we can make sense of ourselves and explain ourselves more easily to other people without needing to describe so many nuances and details. But accepting the constantly changing nature of reality means knowing that no label will ever endure, and in fact no label neatly applies in the first place. Think of all the social media bio lines listing out location, jobs, hobbies, diagnoses, achievements, names we give ourselves: what we call our Self is the same thing. A list of things, actions, and ideas. The Self is an empty bag. Do we choose to burden ourselves with the load of 10,000 things (helpful though they are for self-understanding, to a point), or are we willing to let it be a bit lighter?
Efforts to reclaim “feminine” and “masculine” as healthy, empowering labels fall short. It is only when we are beyond the popular usage of slurs and insults that reclamation becomes powerful. But describing someone as “feminine” or “masculine” is still very much an insult in most contexts. Toxic masculine, weak feminine — there is a socially-determined and very short-lived ideal recipe of these things that allows us to be acceptable out in the world. (Remember the gender-obsessed 1990’s and early 2000’s, when “metrosexual” and “man-scaping” were things? It’s not so different from all today’s toiletries, drinks, fragrances, and other products that are aggressively marketed as “for men”, and their pinker counterparts “for women”.) We are only at the very beginning of a long movement to disassemble these conceits. And the Spiritual-New Age community isn’t doing us any favors by upholding determinist checklists of what each one is, undermining their own attempts at mindful self-awareness by saying, “This is what you are,” instead of, “Notice what is.”
What we’re really talking about when we talk about spiritual masculine and feminine is self-awareness and self-acceptance. These things exist without gender in the first place, as all things do. Something comes into existence, and then we look at it with a ruler and say, “How close is this to my preexisting narrative of reality? What box can I put this in so I know how to interact with it?” (E.g. visible penis = boy = fire truck toys.) How strange, upsetting, and completely unnecessary it is that we take a common, variable fact of existence and call it a “feminine” trait, and then pat ourselves on the back for “embracing femininity.” Rigid, black-and-white gender roles are not to embraced. They are to be destroyed.
