Once again I check
out Patheos Pagan channel and read yet another entry that simply has
me going “what the fuck?”
Alone In Her Presence: Caitlyn Jenner and Still Knowing Goddess written by someone
named Erick
DuPree does a
reasonably decent job of explaining the concept of Divine immanence
but then steps off immediately into the ozone. Erick defends his
teaching women the women's mysteries using the Goddess within us as
an excuse for doing so. Let's look a bit into this and how it is
almost impossible not to see this as sexists as all hell. A man, and
one into trantric practice at that (sexual magic/yoga) presumes to
teach women about mysteries that have been the exclusive providence
of women since the dawn of history and then hangs this whole thing on
a brand spanking newly transitioned celebrity transsexual with
literally only days of “experience” living as a woman and one
totally sheltered from the reality most women deal with on a daily
basis at that by virtue of being a celebrity!
Gee,
who could possibly see anything wrong with this?
Just
like another author from this site, the Allergic Pagan, I've
mentioned before, Erick apparently likes to take perfectly good words
with well established meanings and just redefine them to suit
himself. In this case it is matriarchy. In
trying to parse his using this term it is clear he is not using the
established meaning but hanging some internal sense of worshiping
women on it instead. The word means a society ruled by women,
something that never actually existed in the real world throughout
human history. What some people called matriarchies in the ancient
world were in fact egalitarian societies which admittedly, viewed
from the patriarchy of today can be seen as matriarchy simply by
virtue of difficulty in most people of actually grasping societies
where men and women are actually equal.
Erick
is blown away by the image of Caitlyn Jenner, America's latest three
day wonder. Of course he is! The image is overly sexualized and
photoshopped to turn a 65 year old newly transitioned transsexual
into a masculine wet dream image. In other words, the very sexist
patriarchal worst of reducing women's worth to whether or not some
man gets a hardon or not, to be blunt as hell.
And
let's not even go further into exactly how creepy it is for a man
into trantric sexual practices to be teaching women about the women's
mysteries, something he cannot have any personal knowledge about but
does put him in a position of authority over a group of unsuspecting
women. Gee, what could possibly go wrong here?
I
am not going to attack Caitlyn Jenner. The journey she is about to
start is a long and difficult one I actually know quite a bit about
having lived roughly half of my adult life first as a nominal male
and then a woman just as the ancient transsexual priestesses of the
Goddess before me. But Erick, my dear, there are damn good reasons
why male bodied people were not among the priestesses of the ancient
world and it has nothing to do with the fact that the Divine is part
of you as it is myself. Your heart might be in a good place but
please take a step back and see that women need to address the
patriarchy as empowered women and having a man “show them the way”
doesn't cut it in a world where men telling women who they are and
passing judgment on their worth is the problem.
There
is no paradox with immanence
btw. It is simply a concept that humankind understood the Divine by
until the Abrahamic religions screwed it up with Poppa god. Paganism
today, in a true paradox, has turned from the Poppa God to mostly the
ancient concept of the Divine Feminine principle, not completely, but
in that the
majority of Pagans now refer to the Goddess rather than God and
Goddess from Wicca, even those who define themselves as Wiccan. But
sexism is still the order of the day among Pagans who will forgive a
child molesting sexual predator male
“leader” but vilify
any Crone who dares to speak out against it.
Sexism,
pure and simple. And I am getting really sick and tired of seeing in
in Pagan venues that should know better.
