Scrolling in search of the ‘divine feminine’
Spirituality in the age of the internet is tricky work. And the ‘divine feminine’ has become an inflection point.
By Gina Rushton
The beautiful, softly spoken woman on my screen knows I’m tired. And she’s here to help. It’s time, she says, for me to become a “passenger princess” in my own life. Everything is going to be taken care of, if I just relent to the natural order in which women receive and men provide. We are all born with inherent value – phew! – but men have to earn their worth, to climb the metaphorical mountain of life, through effort. Women are born at the top already. My purpose in life is not to climb, it is just to remember my own worth and trust that if I fall off the side of the mountain, “the masculine will catch me.”
Video after video on social media — across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — has taken on a curious veneer, where concepts like the ‘divine feminine’ are splintered off from their original spiritual meanings and given a new — potentially damaging — spin.
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Ideas about balancing different energies or traits have long underpinned various religious and spiritual schools of thought, from the Yin and Yang of Chinese philosophy to the Shiva and Shakti principles of Puranic Hinduism. The ‘divine feminine’ is broadly a gender-neutral idea, said to relate to ideas of intuition, creativity and emotional connection, which is present in everyone. But on social media, these rich and nuanced concepts are often pared back, repackaged, and sold as ‘lifestyle hacks’. Stripped of context, they risk becoming tools that reinforce old hierarchies, instead of opening space for new ways of being.
“Men are initiators and women are the reciprocators,” the women in these videos tell me. Tapping into my ‘divine feminine’ would involve letting go, trusting, listening, intuiting and most importantly, surrendering — which should be innate to me as a woman. All I have to do is accept. Of course, running a household or opting out of a career is not inherently problematic — but this content frames it as biologically inevitable.
The divine feminine can, of course, be profoundly empowering. Many spiritual traditions hold feminine archetypes that embody rage, creativity, and resilience. But online, these ideas are often hollowed out, turned into scripts about passivity and surrender.
Many spiritual traditions hold feminine archetypes that embody rage, creativity, and resilience. But online, these ideas are often hollowed out, turned into scripts about passivity and surrender.
Feminist anthropologist Dr Emma Quilty, the author of Witch Power: Hexing the Patriarchy with Feminist Magic,has studied the intersections of spirituality and the internet throughout her career. She describes videos of “trad wives masquerading as witches” as “more believable and palatable” than content in which women are explicitly asked to submit to a hierarchy, in which they’re at the bottom. Of course, this doesn’t happen in isolation. They come hand in hand with bigger, more insidious political currents. Around the world, particularly within conservative and nationalist communities, parallel threads valorise traditional femininity.
Wellness content, which often shares a pipeline with spirituality videos, can also work to funnel people towards misogyny. Men who start consuming benign podcasts and videos about cutting out carbohydrates and alcohol and “finding their focus” can find themselves watching Andrew Tate videos, or ‘red pill’ content.
It’s happening at a time when the consequences couldn’t be more important. Groups like the Proud Boys, self-described “Western chauvinists,” rail against feminism and yearn openly for a time when women were homemakers with fewer rights and less civic presence. Analysis from Media Matters shows TikTok’s ‘For You’ page pushes users from “tradwife” content toward far-right conspiracy theories. Content is not siloed — these videos circulate as broader efforts to roll back gender roles gain momentum. Earlier this year, a 30-country study from King’s College London found Gen Z — TikTok’s biggest user group — is more divided on gender than any other generation, with sixty percent of Gen Z men saying men are being asked to do too much for equality and a quarter believing a stay-at-home dad is “less of a man.”
While wellness and conservatism don’t necessarily go hand in hand, a certain group of people have weaponised the idea, for example, that the womb is the “seat” of a woman’s power. Beyond the bio-essentialist ideas that it carries about what it means to be a woman, it outsources agency. This rhetoric is not far from ancient propaganda: Hippocrates claimed women fell ill because their uterus wandered the body searching for moisture, conveniently soothed by semen. By the nineteenth century, “hysteria” (from the Greek hystera, womb) was labeled a psychological disease. In 2025, echoes persist: if the womb is not fulfilling its God-given purpose, it wreaks havoc.
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It’s happening at a time when the consequences couldn’t be more important. Groups like the Proud Boys, self-described “Western chauvinists,” rail against feminism and yearn openly for a time when women were homemakers with fewer rights and less civic presence.
It is a form of internalised oppression,” says Louise Omer, author of Holy Woman, a book that explores being a woman in a patriarchal religion in which power and authority is depicted as masculine.
Omer was a Pentecostal preacher before leaving the church and her marriage. She says idealising femininity and positioning women as inherent receivers “conveniently encourages women to accept their exclusion from leadership and decision making.”
“Women painting themselves as biologically more suited to receptivity rather than vigour and action allows them to embrace submissive tendencies, to even feel as if they have chosen them.”
But, as we wade through the broken promises of mainstream, neoliberal feminism, which promised empowerment through capitalism and careerism but delivered burnout, it’s profoundly understandable. Women were sold the idea that leaning into masculine traits and climbing the corporate ladder while “having it all” would work. Over and over, women in these videos say they are tired: tired of hustling, tired of dating, tired of life. The fantasy of passivity is tempting, especially when statistics show women still perform the majority of unpaid domestic labor after full-time work. Who wouldn’t, at least on some days, happily forfeit the scramble of trying to have it all, to lean out of the hustle?
Importantly, though, the effect of such content can have influences beyond your own life and circumstances. It can be politically neutralising — after all, if you’re relinquishing power in the decisions within your home and relationship, you’re hardly going to be trying to change things beyond it.
“Women who aren't connected with a sense of agency and their capacity to make change therefore maybe don't take to the streets or write letters to the government in response to [fascist and retrograde policies],” she says.“Maybe you don’t step up, stand up, push back and say ‘no’ because you’re receptive and receiving, you know?”
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Ironically, it’s in the face of exhaustion that the wisdom of divine femininity — in its true, raw form, not its manipulated one — can be a balm. In the years since she left the church, Omer has been drawn to the Gaelic myth of the Cailleach. She’s a crone whose craggy face could not be further from the taut and glazed complexions of influencers, said to have dwelled in mountain caves.
“She is a hag and she’s all about angry storms, winds and flashing rain,” Omer explains. “I love her because I’m still trying to meet my own rage and respond in a way that is powerful and isn’t just being a people pleaser and building resentment.
“The divine feminine to me is a way that offers women power. But [this content online] is the total opposite.”
