Page:What Men Want - Initial Thoughts on the Male Goddess Movement.pdf/2

Author affiliation

Dave Green is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Email: David2.Green@uwe.ac.uk

Introduction

Throughout my research into Paganisms I have become aware of, and increasingly interested in, a group of Pagan men^[1] who, following the dominant feminine spiritual idiom^[2] of many Neo-Pagan paths, rooted their magico-religious practices in veneration of goddesses, rather than in mythopoetic constructions of masculinity.^[3] Although they are by no means a unified community of practitioners I began to term them The Male Goddess Movement (MGM). The MGM appears to be a new and unresearched phenomenon within Contemporary Paganisms. Indeed, whereas innovative interdisciplinary research has been conducted in relation to constructions of masculinity within other world religions, particularly in Christianity and Judaism,^[4] the few existing studies of masculinity within Paganisms provide one with a unilateral mythopoetic vision of Pagan men as instrumental hunters and providers who honour male deities and prize traditional masculine qualities such as strength,

courage, competitiveness and stoicism.^[5]

1. ‘Feminine’/’female’ and ‘masculine’/’male’ are often used interchangeably throughout this article to refer to dominant Western social constructions of gender – and the inequalities involved – as opposed to the use of ‘women’ and ‘men’, which, in sociological convention, refer to humans as biological constructs. For a fuller explanation of this convention see, for example, Stephen M. Whitehead, Men and Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press 2002; Amy S. Wharton, The Sociology of Gender, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2011.
2. This refers to the centrality of female divinity and feminist forms of praxis within mainstream Paganisms. See, for example, Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1982.
3. See, for example, Gabriella Smith, ‘The Wild/Green Man: Exploring the Mythopoetic Legacy within Modern Paganism’s Constructions of Gender’, 2008, available at http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/4/2/3/7/pages24 2370/p242370-1.php. Accessed 16 March 2011.
4. See for example, Björn Krondorfer (ed.), Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism: A Critical Reader, Norwich: SCM Press 2011; also Yvonne Maria Werner, Christian Masculinity, Leuven: Leuven University Press 2011.
5. As I argue later in this article, the MGM demonstrates a tempering of these values through anti-essentialist practices which seek to interiorize traits and behaviours more conventionally seen as ‘feminine’. An embryonic reflection on this temperance of mythopoetic masculinity can be found in Seth Mirsky, ‘Men and the Promise of Goddess Spirituality’, in Stephen B. Boyd, W. Merle Longwood and Mark W. Muesse (eds.), Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1996, 197-208.