Goddess and gender identity
This is a post that I've been mulling over for, oh, at least a good 6 months. Possibly longer. I'm still not sure that I'm going to be expressing well what it is I want to say, so buyer beware, OK?
The surge, in recent years decades, of pagan, wiccan, neo-pagan and modern "Gaian Earth Mother", as well as more controversial views of Mary, Mother of Jesus as an essential feminine icon within Chrisianity, otherwise dominated by masculinity, has bothered me for a while. Not insofar as I question others' right to believe what they believe, but because I find the introduction of femininity into religion as an explicit aspect of God or spirituality is a very difficult thing to deal with. It's not that I have a problem with a feminine side, nor with a counterbalance to the traditional masculinity that the western religions have long represented, but that I feel a feminine god figure does us all a disservice, and attempts to supplant one piece of gender dominance with another. Hardly a good solution to the polarisation of the sexes that we find ourselves living with.
I won't bore you all with my take on precisely what different, feminine based religions or religious beliefs represent - I'd likely only get it wrong, anyway - but I do want to explain why I find this explicit femininity so difficult to deal with. It seems, to me, that rather than simply allowing an expression of caring and love within our religions, we're instead falling back on rather archaic gender roles once more. Father is strict and angry, mother is loving and giving. We don't say "father can be loving and giving, and mother can be strict and angry sometimes," we instead take our traditional understanding of religion as a source of authority, gender it, and push back against the authoritarianism by throwing in the other gender. I can't be a caring, gentle man without being feminine, a woman can't be butch and strong without being masculine. Why haven't we moved past those labels of gender and sex already, and why do we have to move from one extreme to the other in our understanding of the divine?
I'll admit right here, that my conception of God has always been as a male, but at the same time that conception is dominated by aspects that most of us would consider to be primarily feminine (probably because that's mostly how I relate to the world). I don't consider my belief in an explicitly male God, and an explicitly male Jesus (and an explicitly "what-the-fuck?" Holy Spirit, since you ask) to make my faith patriarchal and masculine. God, as I understand Him, isn't limited to a fixed range of emotions or dominated by an aggressive, authoritarian aspect simply because He chose to reveal himself (to me, insofar as He has) as a man rather than a woman. What a horribly limiting way to look at the world and, while I'm at it, what an offensively stereotypical way to talk about all men and women.
I've felt, for a long time, that the "celebration of the feminine," that more "new age" faiths (for want of a better term that won't take up a couple of paragraphs) often seem to advocate demeans men as incapable of nurturing behaviour, and talks about women as primarily mothers; baby-making machines, whose primary role is and forever more shall be to bring forth new life out of themselves and nurture it to grow. The focus upon this aspect of women in my opinion is as restrictive as the focus upon men as authoritarian, distant, conventional father figures, and it's about time we moved past this oversimplified and limiting understanding of the divine, to say that male figures can be loving, female figures can be strict, and however we conceive of the divine in our world, it encompasses a whole lot more than just traditional masculine or feminine aspects.
I don't object to the idea of a Goddess, or a "Mother Earth," per se, but I do find what seems to be an overemphasis of this femininity that is excessively tied to child rearing to be a very difficult thing to respect, it jars so strongly with my personal experience of how gender (the roles that we expect each sex should be performing) does not necessarily match with sex.
Cross posted to Street Prophets.
The surge, in recent years decades, of pagan, wiccan, neo-pagan and modern "Gaian Earth Mother", as well as more controversial views of Mary, Mother of Jesus as an essential feminine icon within Chrisianity, otherwise dominated by masculinity, has bothered me for a while. Not insofar as I question others' right to believe what they believe, but because I find the introduction of femininity into religion as an explicit aspect of God or spirituality is a very difficult thing to deal with. It's not that I have a problem with a feminine side, nor with a counterbalance to the traditional masculinity that the western religions have long represented, but that I feel a feminine god figure does us all a disservice, and attempts to supplant one piece of gender dominance with another. Hardly a good solution to the polarisation of the sexes that we find ourselves living with.
I won't bore you all with my take on precisely what different, feminine based religions or religious beliefs represent - I'd likely only get it wrong, anyway - but I do want to explain why I find this explicit femininity so difficult to deal with. It seems, to me, that rather than simply allowing an expression of caring and love within our religions, we're instead falling back on rather archaic gender roles once more. Father is strict and angry, mother is loving and giving. We don't say "father can be loving and giving, and mother can be strict and angry sometimes," we instead take our traditional understanding of religion as a source of authority, gender it, and push back against the authoritarianism by throwing in the other gender. I can't be a caring, gentle man without being feminine, a woman can't be butch and strong without being masculine. Why haven't we moved past those labels of gender and sex already, and why do we have to move from one extreme to the other in our understanding of the divine?
I'll admit right here, that my conception of God has always been as a male, but at the same time that conception is dominated by aspects that most of us would consider to be primarily feminine (probably because that's mostly how I relate to the world). I don't consider my belief in an explicitly male God, and an explicitly male Jesus (and an explicitly "what-the-fuck?" Holy Spirit, since you ask) to make my faith patriarchal and masculine. God, as I understand Him, isn't limited to a fixed range of emotions or dominated by an aggressive, authoritarian aspect simply because He chose to reveal himself (to me, insofar as He has) as a man rather than a woman. What a horribly limiting way to look at the world and, while I'm at it, what an offensively stereotypical way to talk about all men and women.
I've felt, for a long time, that the "celebration of the feminine," that more "new age" faiths (for want of a better term that won't take up a couple of paragraphs) often seem to advocate demeans men as incapable of nurturing behaviour, and talks about women as primarily mothers; baby-making machines, whose primary role is and forever more shall be to bring forth new life out of themselves and nurture it to grow. The focus upon this aspect of women in my opinion is as restrictive as the focus upon men as authoritarian, distant, conventional father figures, and it's about time we moved past this oversimplified and limiting understanding of the divine, to say that male figures can be loving, female figures can be strict, and however we conceive of the divine in our world, it encompasses a whole lot more than just traditional masculine or feminine aspects.
I don't object to the idea of a Goddess, or a "Mother Earth," per se, but I do find what seems to be an overemphasis of this femininity that is excessively tied to child rearing to be a very difficult thing to respect, it jars so strongly with my personal experience of how gender (the roles that we expect each sex should be performing) does not necessarily match with sex.
Cross posted to Street Prophets.