Dancing with the Divine Feminine: Liberation or Seduction?

Photo by Julia Caesar on Unsplash

I spent the last week¹ pulled between the endlessly charming streets of Amsterdam and a personal development event filled with workshops, masterclasses, and community gatherings on topics ranging from consciousness and love to entrepreneurship and leadership. I was there to be interviewed by its book club arm about my work on equality. I brought my daughter along because, well, she’s amazing and agreed to come, and because I wasn’t sure how much the conference would really interest me. Yet the calming effects of meditation and energy work I’ve been practicing since the current U.S. president took office had piqued this skeptic’s curiosity.

While I can’t claim to have had an out-of-body experience, I did attend sessions that wow’ed me—like public speaking with Eric Edmeades and pain relief through fascial maneuvers with Human Garage. But the most transformative was a 45-minute workshop with Rachel Pringle² called Wild Mystery. It was women-only, described as “an ecstatic, somatic, embodied intimacy ritual designed to reconnect you with your raw, instinctual self.” The practice wove together breathwork, voice release, tantric embodiment, and guided meditation “so you can access more of your truth, your aliveness, and your playful, untamed feminine essence.”

From the very first moment, it was powerful—because Pringle herself radiates sensuality, unapologetic bodily freedom, and a magnetic presence that gives other women permission to do the same. Her vitality was contagious as she gyrated, demonstrating full-body breathing techniques. She assured the packed room it was safe to scream, cry, sing, dance—even come. She repeated the word several times, as if to dissolve the taboo in real time. At the end, she mentioned her mother was in the room. When I bumped into her afterward in the speaker’s lounge, she confirmed that yes, she had indeed grown up in a very sex-positive household.

By the end of the session, after the tears and indecipherable echoes subsided, the women around me radiated the same untamed bliss that pulsed through Pringle.

So what is this so-called feminine essence—or as it’s often called, the divine feminine?

In Sexism & Sensibility, I emphasize that men and women, girls and boys, are far more alike than they are different. Research shows this to be true—the bulk of what we experience as “masculine” or “feminine” is cultural, not biological. Small differences get magnified in childhood by adults, and children themselves intensify the disparities by playing to their modest strengths. Because the brain is plastic, as neuroscientist Lise Eliot explains, “Every task you spend time on—reading, running, laughing, calculating, debating, watching TV, folding laundry, mowing grass, singing, crying, kissing, and so on—reinforces active brain circuits at the expense of other inactive ones. Learning and practice rewire the human brain.”³

In fact, boys’ and girls’ brains are remarkably alike. Most sex differences are not either-or traits but a continuum that can be strengthened or weakened. When girls, for example, are given the opportunity to practice spatial skills (often with toys marketed to boys), those small gender differences disappear.

And yet, the questions I received during my interview at this event revealed a strong attachment to differences. One woman asked: “What about sex differences? For example, women can’t work as long as men because of our hormones and other differences. Shouldn’t we honor that and embrace the divine feminine?” Another framed it in terms of roles: “I’ve embraced my masculine side. I do everything. But what if I still want a man to hold the door for me—is that sexist?” A third said, “I’m very independent, I feel whole and I’m not as focused on men and marriage as my friends. But I notice my attraction for men has gone down and that feels sad. Maybe it’s better to emphasize differences?”

I’ll get to how I answered these questions, but first let’s consider where they might be coming from.

In the U.S., I don’t usually hear these kinds of questions, likely because I’ve been speaking in progressive spaces where people recognize the limitations imposed when gender differences are overemphasized, and want answers on how to undo that. But in Amsterdam, participants from nearly 100 countries had come seeking experts who wove modern science together with ancient wisdom, spirituality, and mythology. The “divine feminine” grows out of these traditions.

Its roots are tangled but fascinating. Long before Christianity, societies worshipped goddesses alongside gods—Isis in Egypt, Inanna in Mesopotamia, Shakti in India, Athena in Greece—embodying fertility, wisdom, love, destruction, and power. Mystical traditions carried these strands forward: the Shekhinah (the indwelling feminine presence of God) in Jewish mysticism; yin and yang in Taoism; the alchemical union of opposites. In the last century, Jung reframed these energies as psychological archetypes—the anima and animus—while feminist thinkers in the 1970s reclaimed goddess imagery to resist patriarchal religion and restore women’s spiritual authority. Over time, these strands braided into today’s “divine feminine,” a spiritual language offering women a sense of strength, mystery, and connection; a sensual goddess fully in command of her power.

Photo by Mukul Kumar on Unsplash

So is the divine feminine a tool of liberation—or another gilded cage?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, captured the imagination of women worldwide with Women Who Run With the Wolves. Using myths and folklore, she described the “Wild Woman archetype,” representing the instinctual, untamed, creative, and intuitive aspects of women that Western, patriarchal culture had deemed unreliable or dangerous. For many, like me when I read it at 23, her work was liberating. It felt like permission to reclaim vitality and strength buried but still alive in the female psyche. And it celebrated a women-centered cultural inheritance as an alternative to male-dominated histories and religions. Reconnecting with this archetype, Estés suggested, allows women to live fuller, more authentic lives.

And yet, whenever we romanticize certain qualities as inherently female (or male), we risk slipping into essentialism—dressing old stereotypes and limitations in spiritual clothing. The book is written largely through a cisgender, heterosexual lens, with little (no?) acknowledgment of nonbinary, trans, or queer identities. The seductive appeal to a universal “female essence” found in the book and maybe too at the event in Amsterdam, doesn’t account for the diverse ways people experience gender and can be mistaken for a universal truth about “what women are.”

One woman from the event told me she worried that insisting girls and boys are the same is doing more harm than good; that we should celebrate their differences because they’re “so complementary when they come together in love.” I wish I’d asked her more about what she meant. It sounds poetic, but is it just another version of men lead/provide/protect, women follow/support/nurture? I thought of how when I’d told Pringle her husband had opened a bottle of water for me because I couldn’t (in my defense, I’d opened several others but this one wouldn’t budge), she looked at him and beamed: ‘If anyone could do it, it’s him.’ Was this what that woman had meant by complementary love? Did Pringle feel an instinctive admiration for her husband’s/men’s greater physical strength—or was she making a conscious choice to flatter him out of love?

Either way, I’d argue that so-called feminine and masculine qualities are just as complementary and necessary within each of us. When we divide them by sex, we risk cutting off important parts of ourselves. Gender is a spectrum from the very masculine to the very feminine, and most of us move fluidly along it, shifting with circumstances and stages of life.

Thinking more about those questions and comments I got, I get the sense we’re not actually that far apart in how we conceptualize femininity and what we want for women. That woman who spoke of complementary love told me she didn’t want embracing her feminine side “to harm my worthiness of being taken seriously.” Taken together, I hear in their words a hunger for wholeness, for balance, for a world where qualities like empathy, intuition, and care are as aspirational as reason, strength, and competition. Their concerns echo the Jungian belief that modern society had grown lopsided—overvaluing traits coded as masculine, and undervaluing those coded feminine. Jung himself didn’t use the language of the Divine Feminine, but his ideas of the anima and the Great Mother archetype seeded much of that later discourse.

From that perspective, the rise of interest in the Divine Feminine can be seen as a collective yearning to restore balance. A wish for expressions of femininity to be valued rather than be taken advantage of or boxed into certain roles (e.g., you’re better at nurturing so you do the emotional labor), or used as proof of incompetence. The women wanting to embrace difference were tired of doing it all and being it all; they want help and they want to be held; they’re sick of the male-centric value system that considers all things feminine vapid and superficial.

Their questions carried exhaustion, longing, ambivalence. Here’s the gist of how I answered them:

I have embraced my masculine side. I do everything. What if I want man to hold the door for me—is that sexist?

That’s benevolent sexism, based on the ideal knight, ready to help the weak—the weak woman who can’t open doors herself. Holding a door or paying a tab isn’t the problem, but why should it hinge on gender? Men crave kindness too [many men in audience nod]. Courtesy isn’t sexist. Limiting people to gendered roles is. Chivalry isn’t about innate differences; it’s about social codes of politeness—and power.

We can’t work as long as men because of our hormones and other differences. Shouldn’t we honor those differences?

I don’t know of any research that says women can’t work as long as men. And also, have you met women?? If anything, women’s endurance and stress response often match or exceed men’s, and studies show they routinely handle a “double shift”—working a full job and then taking on the majority of household and caregiving duties.

“I am very independent but my attraction for men has gone down and that feels sad. Maybe it’s better to emphasize differences?”

Maybe what you’re feeling is choosy. If you can rely on yourself, then you can afford to be more discerning and may only be attracted to men who live up to your standards; men who are willing to pull their emotional weight in a relationship. So you’re right, there will be fewer men you’re attracted to and that’s probably a good thing in the long run.

As for emphasizing differences, sexual dimorphism is often used to keep women in their place. Passivity in women is often framed as attractive because men are supposedly active and strong. Or take the idea that shaving is appealing to men because it emphasizes women’s greater softness and purity. Let’s be clear: women and men were hooking up long before razors were invented.

[50% off a one-year subscription by purchasing a copy of Sexism and Sensibility. That’s a book and a subscription for less than the subscription alone. Just email your receipt—I’ll send you the link.]

Perhaps we should think of femininity and masculinity as spiritual aspects of ourselves, as captured by the term, “two spirit.” Drawn from indigenous cultural understanding of gender, it suggests people possess both a male and a female spirit, and their identity is determined by the spirit most dominant within them, not by their bodily form.⁴ More women might express a feminine spirit and more men a masculine one but that is by degrees. It’s problematic when reified into ‘man’ and ‘woman.’

And still, I can’t dismiss the power of what I saw in Amsterdam—the ritual, the raw release, the sense of women slipping out of the tight seams culture stitched around their bodies and voices. Something real was happening, even if the frame of “feminine essence” risks narrowing as much as it frees. Perhaps the challenge is not to abandon the divine feminine, but to hold it lightly. To see it not as a prescription for what women are, but as a permission slip for what all of us — women, men, and everyone beyond those categories—might reclaim. When we treat the feminine as a shared symbolic vocabulary instead of a fixed essence, it becomes not a box but a doorway: an opening into fuller, freer ways of being.

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You might also like:

1. I started this on the plane home from Amsterdam but then came a week of Covid (for the first time!) and a week of brain fog, so it’s been longer.

2. Rachel Pringle’s Instagram

3. Pink brain, blue brain: How small differences grow into troublesome gaps— and what we can do about it.

4. Jung’s archetype the Anima and Animus represent the unconscious inner feminine in men and the unconscious inner masculine in women, respectively.