Who else here has noticed just how much the whole goddess worship subset of the pagan/wiccan/new age crowd has grown over the past 10 or 15 years? Come on now…raise your hands.

One…two…three…look, I can’t be the only one whose noticed this. I mean the bumper stickers alone tell the tale.

Isis, Isis, Ra Ra Ra
In Goddess We Trust
Ankh If You Love Isis
Goddess in Training
Goddess is Alive and Magic Is About!
The Goddess Does Not Seek Worship – She rejoices in being vividly imagined
The Goddess Loves You. Everyone Else Thinks You’re a Jerk
You Call Her Mother Nature. I Call Her Goddess

Those are just the ones I’ve seen in my tiny corner of the world. And I never saw them a decade ago. I’d swear it. I know that the pagan religions themselves have been seeing a big boost lately so it doesn’t really surprise me that the goddess subculture would grow too. And there are so many old goddesses to pick from if just plain old “Goddess” won’t do: Isis, Ishtar, Hecate, Hera, Athena, Kali. Many more I’m sure.

But what interests me is how this seems to be growing alongside some odd new theories of motherhood and femininity. I know I’ve told y’all before a couple times that I am myself a little hippy dippy in some of my mothering and lifestyle choices. But still, I look at some of the following trends I’ve taken note of in mothering discussion boards and shake my head:

• Women who want to be stay at home moms and expect their husband to work at least one job full-time and bring home ALL the money, also do half the chores…and yet allow that hubby to have only about 10% of the say (if that) in how the kids will be raised.
• Women who tell their husbands they are “touched out” from spending all day with the kids and put off not just sex but even basic intimacy for months or sometimes years…and then get mad when they discover their husband has porn on his computer or Blackberry. What’s even better are the ones who start getting ready to leave and/or divorce said husband for having porn, even though most of these husbands haven’t stepped out or otherwise actually touched or spoken to another woman sexually
• Women who feel so empowered about their ability to bear a life and bring it into the world and who are so fearful of every opinion that isn’t their own that they homeschool their children despite the fact that many of them have zero aptitude for the job. What’s even scarier are the ones who unschool their kids.

Why do I bring up examples of women whose non-standard choices are even more radical than those of moi? Because its like…I don’t know…it looks to me like there is something in the estrogen lately. Or something in the water. I don’t know. It’s like feminism mutated somehow into this weird mix of 1950s housewife mentality, late 60’s hippy earthlove stuff, and 70’s radical bra-burning stuff. It makes my head hurt the way this kind of mixture bubbles and boils and well smells bad. A lot of these elements aren’t meant to mix. And yet I see women complaining that their husbands don’t make enough money for them to stay home with the kids and aren’t home with them enough yet these same women will cut fruits and vegetables from the grocery budget and try to figure out how to make their own ketchup and salad dressing from scratch to prevent having to pick up a job themselves (even part time) and leave the house or (God forbid) put the kids in daycare for even a couple partial days each week. And then some of them want to keep having even more kids even though the income level never goes up and they already can’t make ends meet.

So the heck what, Miz Pink (you might ask)? What does this have to do with religion or even goddess worship? What it has to do with is what I see as an overinflation of the importance of being a woman. Don’t get me wrong I’m a woman and I want my opinions and achievements noted. We ladies are some powerful stuff. Sir Pink is not allowed to give me marching orders (I don’t give any to him either…well, mostly I don’t…not every day at least). But how does it serve us to get so pumped up about the fact that we have a uterus that we start to act like we’re the most important people? Isn’t that what we’ve spent so long getting mad at men about: Thinking that they were masters of teh universe just because they have a pair of cajones?

And now to try to bolster our feelings of self worth, I think many women are turning to goddess worship not because they really believe in any particular goddess but because it feels good. We women give birth therefore (so many of them think) the highest power should be a woman …even though there hasn’t been any record left behind by any goddesses to give us any reason to believe they ever existed as anything other than mythology…along with most of the gods by the way.

We are turning our female parts into altars and we are worshipping at them. Idolatry. That’s how God sees it I bet.

So many of us women want to reject the way the feminists did things in past decades and we also want to kick men to the side. Frankly too many of us have convinced ourselves that we are goddesses. This is confusion and chaos.

It’s a powerful thing to be a woman. But the things that make me special for being a women don’t make me better (or worse). I don’t need to create a goddess to validate myself. I don’t need to bring back a dead religion/mythology as a way to prove to the Christian church (or Jewish or Muslim) that I don’t need them.