Page:What Men Want - Initial Thoughts on the Male Goddess Movement.pdf/7

Rh some studies suggest as many as two-thirds of Contemporary Pagans are women. As Harvey argues:

"In its Pagan manifestation this Goddess-talk has primarily been concerned with the embodied living of life by women. “The Goddess” is not equivalent to “Woman” as archetypal being but more like “the innermost being of women” or “that which exists between women encountering each other”. The diversities and particularities of women’s lives are significant, not merely some overarching archetypes to which people might be expected to conform."

That is, thealogy fundamentally seeks to go beyond ‘hypodermic’ models of patriarchal God worship in which participants are expected to conform to some ideal typified by an infallible male deity. In contra-distinction, female deities empower female practitioners to create new expressions of feminine being which are not rooted in subordination to masculine gods or patriarchy.

Her-Story and Gyn-Ecology

Such revisions concerning explicitly feminist and egalitarian models of worship by Goddess spiritualists also have had concomitant effects on the way they view the histories of patriarchy and misogyny. That is, goddess worship has often become associated with a revisionist historiography, accompanied by eco-feminist sentiment which equates nature with the feminine body. Such sentiments have been allied to a feminized version 311