Are "Masculine" and "Feminine" Energies Just Patriarchy Repackaged?
“If you want to attract a masculine man while you’re dating,” explains a dating coach on TikTok to the women in her audience, “do not lead with your accomplishments. If you’re leading with your accomplishments, anything that’s based on performance or doing or hard work, you’re actually leading with masculine energy.”
And why is this a problem, we, the audience, might ask?
“If you’re leading with your masculine and he’s attracted to you or you’re attracted to him, hands down he’s in his feminine and you’re in your masculine.” Luckily, if you want to know how to avoid this problem and remain firmly in your feminine energy? The text on-screen is helpfully promoting a course in “Healing Your Divine Feminine Energy” - and it’s 50% off this week!
If the idea that a particular topic of conversation carries a gendered energy exchange is surprising, confusing, or unsettling - to say nothing of the heteronormative assumption that if I’m “in my masculine” then you must be “in your feminine” - then you’re probably new to the world of social media dating advice. But what are masculine and feminine energies and where did this belief, which is shared by hundreds of self-taught online coaches and consultants, come from?
As it turns out, it’s a mash-up of a few different traditions pulled from a few different - though not entirely distinct or unrelated - places and times.
One of these influences, and maybe the most important one, is Jungian psychology and specifically Carl Jung’s dualistic archetypes of anima and animus. According to Jung, the anima is the unconscious feminine side of a man (for whom the masculine side is conscious and already present) and the animus the unconscious masculine side of a woman. In a functioning psyche, these unconscious sides are fully integrated - men acquire emotional sensitivity and women logic. But in an unhealthy one? Jung warns that either repressing or becoming possessed by one’s anima or animus can have potentially destructive effects.
To be fair, many modern Jungian thinkers don’t see things in such strict male-female terms or base their ideas solely on biology. According to 2012’s Handbook of Jungian Psychology, anima and animus aren’t tied to your sex at all and any person can and probably does possess both an unconscious masculine and feminine. Of course, not everyone working in the Jungian tradition today is so progressive. Jordan Peterson draws heavily on Jung's ideas to promote "traditional values," compulsory monogramy, and trans-exclusionary rhetoric. And whether or not Peterson can accurately be described as Jungian? There's no public figure that's more closely tied to their tradition.
Another notable influence comes from simplified ideas about Eastern mysticism. People who believe in masculine and feminine energy frequently invoke cartoonish versions of Taoism and Chinese philosophy, especially the concept of yin and yang, in order to prove their existence. And if they can demonstrate a shared, global understanding of paired, gendered forces in traditions that emerged independent of one another, the thinking goes, then those forces must be real in a physical sense! (Jung deserves some credit or blame here, too, since he claims that these similarities prove the existence of a collective unconscious that everyone can tap into - another idea that’s frequently been borrowed.)
Similarly, it’s common to see masculine and feminine energy tied to gods and goddesses from different cultures. Rather than using psychology, this view links the ‘energies’ to divine figures, noting figures of a Mother Earth, a fertility goddess, or a masculine war god across various religions. Even in the Abrahamic tradition, some Catholics see the Holy Spirit as a feminine balance to the masculine God, and ancient Jewish and other Semitic texts describe the goddess Asherah as the consort or wife of Yahweh.
One more influence can be found in the self-improvement industry’s corporate rebrand of New Age ideas, most of which trace back to the “seven hermetic principles” in occultist William Walker Atkinson’s 1908 The Kybalion. Even if you’ve never heard the phrases “natural law” or “hermetic principle”, you’ve probably encountered some of them. The Law of Attraction from the best-selling self-help book The Secret, which claims that putting out positive energy brings good things your way? That was coined by Atkinson a century ago. The Law of Polarity, pushed by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins, which argues that the best romantic relationships are formed between people who are wholly unalike but can balance one another? Also an Atkinson idea. (Nevermind that there’s little scholarly support for the first law and that experts entirely reject the second!) And those poles also include the poles of emotion and logic, leader and servant, masculinity and femininity.
These links to the self-improvement and self-help industry point toward one of the seedier sides of masculine and feminine energy advocates, too. Because learning about masculine and feminine energy? Learning how to harness and actualize it in order to realize a goal? That’s a massive for-profit enterprise. If you find someone invoking the language of gendered energies on social media? There’s a very good chance that they have a link-in-bio and offer services as a dating or life coach. And offer courses and sell an e-book.
Of course, what they’re selling is patriarchy. A return to a restrictive, binary and heteronormative “tradition” that insists on the importance of balancing two energies - a psychological balance, a divine balance, or a relationship balance - while also consistently privileging and prioritizing the masculine. Masculine energy is almost always seen to control to feminine energy’s chaos, or as the active force that does and accomplishes something as opposed to the passive feminine which merely observes or receives. Masculine energy makes you and your impact and your world bigger; feminine energy everything smaller. As far as balances go? This doesn’t sound very balanced at all.
“Hold your masculine energy until you’ve led with your feminine traits,” finishes the dating coach, and I suppose this is actually good advice if the women she’s coaching want to find a traditionally (and harmfully) masculine man. But for the rest of us? Language like masculine and feminine energy is a kind of social signal. And what it signals is a commitment to the patriarchy.
