The “feminine energy” to “tradwife” pipeline

In many yoga and spiritual circles, we’re hearing more and more about the “divine feminine” and the “sacred masculine.” These words are often offered as tools of empowerment, healing, and reconnection to some primal truth. But what if the language we’re using to “liberate” ourselves is actually funnelling us into smaller and smaller boxes and, in some cases, straight into dangerous ideological territory?

I recently started studying the Shiva-Shakti tradition, which in some interpretations refers to masculine and feminine energies. But the truth is, the way we interpret those energies today is deeply shaped by modern culture; not ancient wisdom. We’re projecting contemporary gender roles onto spiritual language and calling it eternal truth.

There is nothing factual about these definitions. They are constructs. Culture. Conditioning.

A yoga teacher once told me I should be more proud of being a woman (and move into my “feminine energy”), and suggested I start wearing dresses: as if reclaiming traditional femininity was a form of empowerment (completely forgetting dresses aren’t inherently feminine, but again a construct of time and culture). For them, dresses symbolised pride, softness as strength, a return to the sacred feminine. But for me, dresses don’t feel like pride. They remind me of a time I felt I had to perform straightness to stay safe, to be acceptable. For queer women (especially those of us who don’t conform to traditional gender expression) “feminine embodiment” can feel less like a spiritual awakening and more like a costume party where we’re not really invited to.

In fact, I was once quietly pushed out of a women’s circle; not officially, of course, but through whispers, exclusion, and cold shoulders. The consensus, I later found out, was that I had “too much masculine energy” and that maybe that’s why I was bisexual. That kind of thinking isn’t just narrow-minded: it’s violent. It treats queerness and gender complexity as symptoms of a spiritual imbalance rather than valid human experiences.

Yes, gathering as women can be sacred. I love a woman’s circle when it’s about shared experience and support. But when we begin prescribing what womanhood is, we are creating rigid templates that erase the very people we claim to empower. And those who don’t fit? We’re made invisible or worse: spiritually pathologised as imbalanced.

Conspirituality and the rise of the “tradwife”

This isn’t just about bad vibes or exclusion. It’s a political issue.

There is a growing phenomenon known as conspirituality—where New Age wellness, yoga, and spirituality become entangled with conspiracy theories and far-right ideologies. This trend is explored in depth by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker in their book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. Figures like Christiane Northrup, Kelly Brogan, and JP Sears began in wellness or personal development spaces, only to shift toward anti-vaccine, anti-LGBTQ+, and ultra-traditionalist rhetoric. Even influencers like Teal Swan, once considered edgy and alternative, often toe dangerously close to the line between empowerment and authoritarian dogma.

The spiritual rhetoric of the “divine feminine” often gets hijacked in this shift. What begins as “honouring the feminine” becomes a recruitment gateway into “traditional values.” Suddenly, women are being told that their deepest fulfilment is in submission, homemaking, and hyper-femininity; a movement now branded as “tradwives.”

This pipeline is seductive because it cloaks itself in beauty: soft dresses, rose petals, sisterhood, safety. But what’s really being sold is control: over gender roles, over sexuality, over what it means to be a woman.

And let’s be honest, this pipeline doesn’t start on the far right. It starts in your favourite women’s circle. In your yoga teacher training. In Instagram posts about “feminine magnetism.” The shift from sacred femininity to anti-feminism is not a leap. It’s a slide; quiet, slow, and paved with affirmations.

Language as a spiritual trap

Spirituality is meant to dismantle illusion, to help us see beyond the stories we’ve been told. But here’s the irony: when we take symbolic language like “masculine” and “feminine” as literal truth, we create new illusions. We start mistaking metaphors for facts, forgetting that these are just labels (language tools) not reality itself.

Alan Watts, the British-American philosopher who brought Eastern wisdom into Western discourse, often warned about this trap. He explained that language is like a menu, not the meal; it points to reality but is never the reality itself. We confuse the map for the territory, the word for the thing. When we speak of “masculine” and “feminine” energies as if they are fixed cosmic truths, we fall into the exact illusion spirituality is meant to dissolve.

This is not a pipe, Magritte reminds us, and “feminine” is not a force. It’s a word.

Ask yourself: why is “feminine” always linked with being passive, receptive, soft – when in truth, women statistically do more labour (unpaid included), shoulder more caregiving, survive more violence and often make the hardest decisions? And why is “masculine” associated with direction and discipline, when what we so often see is men cracking under the weight of emotional repression?

Men are taught that anger is the only acceptable emotion. Vulnerability, sadness, grief, fear; these are labeled feminine, weak, unmanly. So instead of processing these feelings, many men bottle them up until they explode, too often in violence towards women. Domestic violence, mass shootings, bar fights, sexual violence, online harassment; these aren’t random. They are the result of a culture that denies men a full emotional range and glorifies aggression as masculine strength.
So much of what we call “masculine” is actually trauma and repression.

What we call “masculine” and “feminine” are often just projections of historical gender inequality, rebranded as spiritual insight.

And for queer people (especially non-binary folks) these binaries are not just wrong. They are erasing. When we suggest that energy has a gender, or that certain behaviours belong to certain bodies, we deny the lived realities of those of us who exist in-between, across, or entirely outside those boxes.

Spiritual Binaries and the fascist drift

We can’t separate the rise of “divine feminine” and “sacred masculine” language in spiritual spaces from the broader global shift toward authoritarianism. Around the world, fascist ideologies are resurging, rooted in traditionalism, gender essentialism, and the erasure of difference. And spirituality isn’t immune. In fact, it’s often part of the pipeline.

Fascism thrives on fixed roles: men lead, women nurture, queerness is deviant, and ambiguity is dangerous. When spiritual teachers romanticise “feminine surrender” or “masculine purpose,” it can sound empowering, but it mirrors the same ideals being pushed by far-right groups under the guise of returning to “natural order.”

Take Laura Eisenhower. Once known for her work in astrology, divine feminine teachings, and “goddess empowerment,” she has since shifted toward spreading conspiracy theories, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, and nationalist spiritual ideologies. Her message now blurs cosmic language with right-wing extremism; offering a vision of “awakening” that excludes anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow, heteronormative mold.

I’ve felt this firsthand when I was excluded from that women’s circle for being “too masculine,” and being queer. The message was clear: there’s only one way to be a woman, even in sacred spaces.

That isn’t healing. That’s policing. And that’s how modern fascism works, not just through overt violence, but through quiet conformity. Through the pressure to fit in, to perform purity, to erase what doesn’t align.

Towards a spirituality of liberation

If spirituality is about anything, it should be about liberation. It should be about complexity, fluidity, and curiosity. It should be about truth, not tradition for its own sake.

The danger isn’t just in exclusion. It’s in alignment. When we start believing that femininity is a fixed set of behaviours and not a cultural construct, we open the door to political ideologies that seek to place women back in their “natural” roles: obedient, devoted, domesticated.

We deserve more than that. We are more than that.

So let’s stop mistaking the metaphor for the message. Let’s stop building temples around outdated roles. And let’s start creating spiritual spaces where everyone (no matter their expression, orientation, or identity) can breathe.

Because the sacred isn’t soft or strong, masculine or feminine.

It’s free.

My interpretation of Shaivism

I initially had my doubts about studying Shaivism, worried that the gendered aspect would be too much about binaries. But I believe the Shiva-Shakti tradition is often misunderstood through the lens of modern gender roles, but in its original Tantric context, it’s not about embodying masculine or feminine traits; it’s about recognising that you are everything all at once. Shiva and Shakti are not man and woman, but cosmic principles: stillness and movement, consciousness and energy, inseparable and interdependent. Tantra teaches that duality is an illusion and that the goal is not to become more of one thing, but to awaken to the wholeness already within you. The modern tendency to frame spiritual growth through gendered polarities often misses the point entirely, because in this tradition, you are not here to choose a side. You are the field in which both arise and dissolve.