why the internet is being weird about your luteal phase

On the cult of divine feminine and the conspirituality-to-alt-right-pipeline it fuels.

Every time I open my Instagram Explore page, a 20-something-year-old woman with a soft, raspy tone in linen clothes and sipping herbal tea is reminding me that she is in her “balance my cortisol” or “heal my hormones” or “work out according to my menstrual cycle” phase to finally “step into her receptive, soft, divine feminine energy.”

When I first came across this kind of content (probably sometime in early 2022 coinciding with the rise of the soft girl aesthetic), I welcomed this sort of thinking. I thought it was an essential reset to hustle bro culture. It was time to get back to nature, finally. This was also the time I started practising paganism and spent a lot of time consuming witchtok content to understand the lore, schools of thought, and others’ rituals. So I felt drawn to the language of witchcraft, ancient paganism, and goddess archetypes that are heavily (mis)used in this type of content.

Four years later, as a practising pagan, I don’t feel so warm towards the internet’s cult of the divine feminine. Because when you strip away the linen fabrics and the anti-establishment language, the internet’s version of the divine feminine isn’t a spiritual awakening at all. It is a classic trap of the conspirituality-to-far-right-propaganda pipeline.

If a trad-wife influencer like Hannah Neelman (aka Ballerina Farm), Candance Owens or The Transformed Wife posts a video telling a modern woman that her highest calling is to stay home, cook from scratch, and unconditionally submit to her husband because “the Bible demands it,” a feminist like me and you would instantly reject it. We recognise it for what it is: good old patriarchy.

But when the same message travels through the filter of the new-age wellness industrial complex, it becomes palpable. The woman on the screen isn't telling you to submit to a man; she is telling you to “step out of your hyper-independent, wounded masculine energy.” She isn’t telling you to give up your career and financial independence; she is inviting you to “allow the divine masculine to provide and protect so your over-stimulated nervous system can finally heal from the trauma of the corporate grind.” The result of the trad-wife influencer submitting to her godly man and the divine feminine letting herself be pampered by her divine masculine is ultimately the same: women retreating from the public sphere, surrendering their financial autonomy, and centring their lives entirely around domesticity.

Now, the cult of the divine feminine speaks to you because it addresses and exploits a very, very real pain point of modern womanhood. We are exhausted. We are burning out under late-stage capitalism that demands 60-plus hours of linear, uninterrupted productivity while offering zero structural support. And patriarchy wants you to believe that this is because you have faltered away from who you are meant to be — tuning into your divine feminine in the kitchen, nurturing the future generations — and not because capitalism has systematically traded away our communities, third spaces, support systems, and sense of selves to benefit the “free market.”

The cult of the divine feminine takes the very real issues like the lack of research in women’s hormonal healthcare for diseases like PMOS, endometriosis, and menopause complications and repackages it into an individual failure. They say that your hormones are haywire because of the sin of neglecting your biological reality of being a divine feminine and sell a 4-week guided workshop to reverse your testosterone levels and embrace your femininity.

And as we move down the pipeline, this blame manifests as an obsession with biological optimisation, and to excel at this, we must obsessively track our internal metrics, sync our workout routines and diets to our hormones, and eliminate anything synthetic from our lives. One common tip shared by the divine femmes that tipped me off that this cult is on the alt-right pipeline is how many of these gurus are against birth control.

For decades, the religious right has waged a war on contraception from the outside, attempting to restrict access through policy, judicial overreach, and moral shaming. But the new age wellness gurus have had more success in getting young women to give up their reproductive safety nets as toxic sludge that ruins your feminine intuition and clips the wings of your inner goddess.

Now, this is not to say that birth control doesn’t have side effects. But these are individual effects one needs to discuss with their medical practitioners, and birth control pills continue to be the least invasive and most accessible form of birth control women can control. And might I add, once you accept the narrative that birth control is toxic, it is an easy slippery slope to anti-vax rhetoric and raw-milk proselytising.

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But what I find even more tragic about the cult of divine feminine is how profoundly it misunderstands the very lore it counterfeits. The sacred masculine and feminine were never supposed to be a rigid, binary where women must be soft and receptive, and men hard and providing. If we look at the pagan mythologies where this binary comes from, the sacred feminine and masculine were never viewed as a gendered division of labour. They are psychological forces existing simultaneously within all of us.

Let me explain through the lore of some of the deities I invoke. Freyr and Freya, Shiva and Shakti.

In Norse mythology, the twins Freyr and Freya are dual reflections of the same cosmic currents: fertility, abundance, agriculture, magic, war, etc.

Freyr, the god, rules over sunshine, rain, and agriculture. He is also a fierce warrior. Freya, the goddess, is the archetype of desire, beauty, and powerful Seiðr magic, but she is also the leader of the Valkyries, riding into the battlefield to claim half of the dead before Odin, the king of the gods, even gets a choice. They are a fluid, overlapping continuum. And they represent the reality that power, fertility, nature, and vulnerability cannot be neatly segregated by sex.

Closer home, in ancient Vedic philosophy, the deities Shiva and Shakti can be equated with the divine masculine and feminine. Shiva is pure, unmanifest consciousness. He is still, silent, and witnessing. Shakti is the dynamic force of the entire cosmos. Without Shakti, Shiva is inert. In fact, one of the most powerful representations of this balance is Ardhanarishvara, a composite deity who is half-Shiva and half-Shakti, split right down the middle. It is an explicit declaration that every human psyche requires both the stillness of consciousness and the raw, untamable energy of creation to be whole.

When the wellness industrial complex reduces these gender-transcendent ancient concepts down to a checklist of biological optimisation and submissive behaviours, it is committing a form of spiritual vandalism using the rhetoric of benevolent sexism.

Unlike hostile sexism, which abuses power and overt misogyny to keep women in their place, benevolent sexism arrives with a gentle smile and a warm cup of herbal tea. It characterises women as naturally pure, uniquely nurturing, spiritually superior creatures who are simply too delicate for the harsh, competitive realities of the public world. By framing women’s vulnerability not as a systemic disadvantage but as a sacred trait to be sheltered by a divine masculine provider, these cults make subordination look like an honour. And the reason it is an incredibly insidious strategy is that it disarms our defences. It allows us to feel deeply cherished and spiritually elevated while we are actively being escorted out of the rooms where political, economic, and social power are held.

Beyond the socio-political implications, the spiritual math of the cult of the divine feminine doesn’t make any sense. If the divine feminine is strictly gatekept by a flawless 28-day cycle synced with the moon, perfect hormone levels, never feeling any negative emotions and compliant softness, then who actually gets to be a goddess? Why does the cult cast out post-menopausal women, hysterectomy survivors, and the millions of women dealing with severe reproductive illnesses?

At the end of the day, I want to remind you that we are allowed to be exhausted by late-stage capitalism. We are allowed to demand better, more rigorous research into women’s healthcare. But we must refuse to let internet grifters and right-wing opportunists weaponise our burnout to build a new cage by perverting the concepts that were once designed to liberate us. Both the divine feminine and divine masculine reside within you. And the way for you to feel more connected to them is to log off and engage in activities that helps you feel more connected to yourself.