There’s a TikTok making the rounds that I can’t stop thinking about, and not a good way. The whispery voice says, over soft-focus gauze: “Signs your divine feminine is waking up. You feel weepy, but you’re not weak. You’re becoming water again.”
Water again. Are you fucking kidding me? As if we were once liquid beings who tragically hardened into people. As if femininity is a mystical force that sleeps and wakes on a lunar calendar rather than a social conditioning program installed into girls like software.
Then the video ramps up the spiritual retail. “You feel rage at systems that used to make you feel safe. You’re no longer available for crumbs in love, work, or your self-worth. You have awakened.”
And here’s where it gets interesting or infuriating, depending on your tolerance for spiritual bypassing. Buried in this dreamy invocation of the divine feminine is the same story about women that’s been keeping us subordinate for centuries. It’s just the remix with an ASMR voice.
I run a women’s intimate health company. We make doctor-formulated supplements for UTI prevention, clinically-proven products designed to keep women out of the doctor’s office and off endless rounds of antibiotics. Our packaging is beautiful because I’m a designer and I believe women deserve solutions that don’t need to be hidden under the bathroom sink like shameful secrets.
Platforms prefer the divine feminine. They’ll let you post all day about your moon cycles, womb wisdom, sacred femininity. What they won’t let you do is talk about your actual cycle or urinary tract infections in clear, medical language without being flagged as adult content.
The divine feminine is safe because it’s mystical. It’s otherworldly. It keeps women’s bodies in the realm of the unknowable. And that’s not an accident.
Simone de Beauvoir documented all of this in The Second Sex, written almost 75 years ago. Women aren’t born feminine, she argued. They’re made feminine through a process she called mutilation. Not metaphorical mutilation. Actual mutilation of their humanity, their capacity for what she called transcendence, the ability to project yourself into the world, to claim a destiny on your own terms.
The process works like this: Girls learn to see themselves as objects. They watch how women are treated, valued or not valued, and they internalize this gaze. They learn that their worth isn’t something they create through action or achievement, but something bestowed upon them by others, specifically by men. They learn to wait for validation rather than generate it. They learn, in other words, to become water. To be shapeless, adaptive, flowing into whatever container they’re given.
And then, somehow, this subordination becomes a virtue. Femininity becomes associated with all the qualities that make you easier to manage. Docility, nurturing, intuition, mystery, softness. Pierre Bourdieu called it the bent position. Arms folded, knees closed, body contracted. The posture of someone apologizing for existing. Holiness, apparently.
The divine feminine movement celebrates this subordination.
My daughter’s feed is full of tradwife fantasies and cottage-core slow living. Lanolin candles. Homemade sourdough. Women twirling in white linen in pastoral locations like an Anthropologie ad for obedience. I don’t see anyone glamorizing scrubbing a toilet or scraping something unidentifiable off a floor. Instead, we get fetishized, glamorized, and deeply class-coded activities. A mother making a Twinkie from scratch because “we don’t consume store-bought ingredients.”
As if that’s what domesticity actually looks like for most women. It must be the processed food and not the fact that unpaid domestic labor has always been how capitalism extracts value from women without calling them wage earners.
Meanwhile the women making this content are running full-scale production studios. Videos are shot in idyllic homes, in beautiful kitchens, rainbowing perfect light. They’re editing videos, managing brand partnerships, and chasing algorithms. Where’s the sweat labor? What we see is the pie cooling on the windowsill and a woman who looks spiritually hydrated.
This fantasy is why I’m loud about women’s health. UTIs are not immaculately conceived. Most of them happen after sex. 85%. Women have sex. Women enjoy sex. Women sometimes get infections. None of this fits the meadow-twirling narrative.
The TikTok video does do something clever, though. It acknowledges women’s anger. It validates rage. It even name-drops Mary Magdalene and Lilith, the Bible’s bad girls, invoking the good book, to seem radical. So maybe this is a reclamation?
But the rage is gently redirected away from structural change and back toward “leveling up.” Demand better crumbs. Communicate your needs with higher vibrational energy. Redirecting our anger toward individual self-optimization rather than collective liberation. Same shit, now armed with an Amex card and killer heels. We’re still navigating a world structured around male desire and male standards, but fuck it, we look good doing it. In bullshit-free terms, this is premium subordination.
Beauvoir warned about goddess worship for this reason. Not because she was anti-spiritual, but because treating women as divine still doesn’t treat them as human. Turning women into divine beings does not turn them into citizens. They operate on a different plane: mysterious, unknowable, connected to forces beyond rational understanding. Which sounds super cool after centuries of being told you’re hysterical and emotional and can’t be trusted with serious decisions.
But goddess status doesn’t get you material resources or political power. Control over your own medical care. The ability to talk about your actual body. I’m not talking about your moon cycle but your urinary tract, your sexual health, your fucking bladder. Even your pleasure.
At Good Kitty, we are shadow-banned on social media. We are categorized as medical and rightfully so. But somehow, with clinically-proven ingredients, one of the top urogynecologists and female surgeons as co-formulator, made in the USA in a cGMP FDA-regulated lab, this is bad. We’re not showing anything graphic or making pornography. Just naming a common, painful, medically documented condition that half of women will experience.
We designed Good Kitty to be smart and slightly feral on purpose. We treat women like adults. Adults who think and have sex, and know their bodies. We are not woo woo. We are talking about prevention, microbiomes, antibiotic risk and stewardship, and long-term urinary health because this isn’t folklore. But we support anyone who believes solstice circles are good for them, too. Get after it. I’m not condemning spirituality. It just can’t be our only accessible solution.
But mystical femininity makes better content than pelvic anatomy. So the platforms encourage ritual and censor reality. The message is clear. Female bodies should only be symbolic.
Let’s go back to the water metaphor. “You are not weak, you are becoming water.” Water is formless. Water takes the shape of its container. Water, as the Tao Te Ching tells us, wins by yielding. It’s soft, adaptive, and flows around obstacles rather than confronting them directly.
All of which sounds like lovely wisdom until you realize it’s the same fucking advice women have been getting forever. Be accommodating. Be flexible. Don’t be rigid or demanding or angular. Be a good girl. Bend.
I am almost fifty. Running and funding a startup that does not pay me yet. Raising kids. Working consulting jobs. Writing on the side because my brain needs a creative outlet to stay alive. I am not water. I feel more like infrastructure with load-bearing walls that’s unapologetically direct.
The divine feminine tells me to be both soft and sacred. Wild but wise. Accessible but mysterious. Whatever is useful. Whatever can be monetized. And make it pretty. A union of characteristics that magically result in being agreeable in any given situation.
Now let’s dig into this Betty Crocker shit. My grandmother was the matron saint of domesticity. She baked everything from scratch. She cooked, cleaned, ironed everything, even her husband’s underwear. She was bitter. She was also smart, regardless of her poor education. Lady brains weren’t cut out for that type of thinking back then. According to them.
When her husband died young, she turned out to be more competent than anyone expected. Home-ec did teach her some skills. A seamstress could pay the bills. She worked as a furrier, invested money, learned markets, built wealth quietly. She died a millionaire. She still baked pies. She did not iron another pair of underwear. A lie was exposed by her resilience. She was always capable. The world simply preferred her domesticated.
The divine feminine lives in all of us. Emotional presence, empathy, receptivity, care. These are human traits. But somewhere we gendered these traits female and used them as a subordination tactic for women specifically. We’ve required women to embody these traits while allowing men to access them as optional emotional expansion.
I don’t want women’s health or bodies mystified. I love my crystals and spirituality, but I love knowing my actual body more. I want agency over my health. Products clinically tested for specific health concerns. Open conversations without shame. We need to say urinary tract infection, pelvic floor, and vaginal pH without the moon goddess undermining real science.
We need material resources and political power distributed more equitably. We need childcare infrastructure and better paid family leave. We need to stop romanticizing domestic labor and start properly valuing it. We need, in other words, to be treated as fully human, which means being both subject and object, both transcendent and material, both angry and soft when we actually feel that way rather than when it’s strategically useful.
Meanwhile, in the realm of the material, UTIs still hurt. Birth control access is being restricted. Maternal mortality rates are rising. And I still get ads rejected for being too explicit when all I said was urinary tract infection.
I’m not interested in being worshipped. Definitely not trying to be water. I want to make a difference in the lives of women. My daughter. I want to be able to name my body, analyze data, talk about sex, and choose a life without asking for spiritual permission.
If there is divinity in that, fine. But it’s not mystical. And no one is twirling in a meadow. Unless I find that fun. And yes, sometimes I do.
