how to tell if it’s performative femininity
the Divine Feminine is a frequency, not a survival strategy.
She’s soft. She’s radiant. She wears flowing dresses, smells like flowers and speaks in a gentle voice. But is she truly embodied or just performing?
We live in a culture where femininity has been reduced to just an aesthetic that is being used to chase external validation from men, popularity and more. It’s easy to get lost in the bows and frills of it all and forget what the divine feminine truly represents. It’s easy to confuse true divine feminine embodiment with performative femininity. One is rooted in authenticity. The other, in appearance.
What is Performative Femininity and Why is it Popular?
Performative femininity is just an outer shell without the embodiment. It’s a behaviour meant to look feminine without being truly connected to the feminine essence. Yes, wearing dresses and makeup that make you glow like a goddess is a beautiful pleasure to be cherished, but doing all that doesn’t make someone a divine feminine.
Most women aren’t performative because they are superficial. Performative femininity is mostly a survival mechanism. It’s people pleasing. It’s a quest for validation to be socially accepted. It’s rooted in fear of rejection. When you live in a world that rewards appearance over authenticity, it’s only natural to adopt similar survival patterns.
Humans thrive in communities that love and accept them. Even during ancient times, belonging to a tribe meant more resources and support to survive. Humans are wired to seek others and their acceptance. This is the same programming that keeps fueling performative femininity. When a woman keeps up with patriarchal expectations of how a woman should be, she usually does this from a place of survival.
♡ Energy
When it’s performative femininity, the energy feels forced. Sometimes it looks like appearing soft in the external world, but moving differently in private. It’s putting up a facade of sweetness when there are unprocessed, heavier emotions such as anger. It’s looking like the ‘soft girl’ archetype with silky robes, a whispery voice and rosy coloured outfits, but with an energy of needing to control external perception.
It can look like niceness that’s covering up the reluctance to handle discomfort, emotional messiness, or real conversations. It can look like using a curated softness to gain external validation without truly connecting to inner softness. It can look like using ‘soft girl’ or ‘submissive wife’ trends as a strategy to attract love or to fit in, with no authenticity.
When it’s divine femininity, the energy is felt, not forced. It doesn’t need to be proven, performed, or perfectly packaged. It’s a softness that comes from surrender, and not from strategy.
Divine femininity is being deeply present with the ebbs and flows of life. There is strength to witness and hold any moment without trying to manipulate it into something that looks better. True feminine energy reflects the energy of the Divine Mother. It reflects the multidimensionality of a woman. Divine femininity is sweet, soft, nurturing, fierce and dark.
Divine femininity is energy in alignment. It can look like a woman being easygoing, nurturing and sweet, or it can look like a woman feeling her primal rage, standing up for herself and honouring her boundaries. What matters is how much she honours her inner seasons and the multifaceted nature of being a woman.
♡ Boundaries
When someone is trying to appear feminine, they may become a more passive version of themselves. This is because women often confuse being passive with being feminine. Some believe that being able to go with the flow, even at the expense of safety, respect, or inner peace, is a trait of true femininity.
Yes, being easy-going is a beautiful trait. But if that energy isn’t coming from within, it can be performative. A truly easy-going woman usually doesn’t find herself in situations where she has to abandon her peace. That energy is something that one can come to enjoy after setting boundaries and practising the art of saying ‘no’ for a while.
When it’s performative, it becomes people pleasing, where you say ‘yes’ to things that don’t feel right, water yourself down to seem more agreeable, and abandon yourself by allowing others to walk all over you. This is not Divine Feminine embodiment. This is a woman who is in need of more inner fire and confidence to stand her ground so she can experience true peace on the other side.
The Divine Feminine is intentional about what she invites into her life. She doesn’t say ‘yes’ to everything. She knows that her energy is too sacred, and she is good at maintaining boundaries.
While the performative feminine is fueled by the need for external validation, the Divine Feminine is rooted in her inner alignment. If something doesn’t feel good in her body, she trusts that signal. Even at the cost of disappointing others, she chooses her sense of safety, respect and inner peace.
It is easier for the Divine Feminine to say ‘no’ because she knows that the validation that comes at the cost of her authenticity is not real. The acceptance she receives by being agreeable and abandoning herself is hollow. She knows that it’s not true affection, but a temporary reward for a performance.
She recognizes that what is forced, faked, or contorted to please others will always come with a cost, and she is no longer willing to pay it with her precious energy.
The Divine Feminine intentionally chooses who has access to her energy and leaves spaces where she doesn’t feel safe or respected.
♡ Emotions
There is a difference between a woman who has unlocked light within her after transcending the darker parts of her and a woman who struggles to resonate with anything that doesn’t feel like love and light.
Performative femininity uses ‘love and light’ as a mask to appear more acceptable and liked. The discomfort from accepting and processing emotions such as anger, disgust and jealousy comes from a fear of being perceived as a darker version of the feminine.
When a woman rejects the darker aspect in herself and others, instead of seeing them as something to be embraced and transcended, she rejects the entire feminine collective. She rejects the pain that women have been through and the inner and outer wars women have won to access more heaven on Earth.
To embody the Divine Feminine is to be comfortable with the chaos that is inevitable in life. When someone is uncomfortable with deeper conversations, judgmental of heavier emotions, that’s a sign of disconnection from the Divine Feminine.
The Divine Feminine allows herself to feel deeply. She doesn’t fear her emotions. She understands that emotions come up for a deeper reason. She is loyal to her inner world. Just like how Goddess Persephone had to descend into the underworld to transform from the naive maiden to the Queen of the Underworld, the divine feminine honours and transcends her darkness.
Divine Femininity is embracing all kinds of emotions and pain that women go through. It’s being able to cherish and draw wisdom from every phase of life, including the darkest nights of the soul.
♡ Sense of Self
Social media is flooded with content telling women how to be more feminine. Women are told to walk like this, talk like that, never initiate, never show anger. These rules often reinforce patriarchal standards more than they empower. This isn’t true femininity. It’s being made digestible. Palatable. Acceptable.
Divine femininity is about expressing your most authentic self. It’s not about following a certain set of rules to emanate magnetism. You can only be the most attractive when you allow yourself to be exactly who you are. If your most authentic self loves to dress like Adam Sandler, then that’s when you will have the most magnetic energy. If your most authentic self is outspoken and full of fire, then that’s when you will be the most attractive.
The magnetism you want to emanate doesn’t come from keeping up with someone else’s preferences. It happens when you are your rawest self. And when you abandon who you truly are, that’s when you become the most disconnected from your feminine energy.
The Divine Feminine is sure of who she is, and when she is not, she allows herself the grace to blossom at her own pace. She doesn’t force herself into trends, roles, or performances that don’t feel true in her body. Even when she is uncertain about who she is, she tries her best to choose her alignment over approval. This makes her free from craving constant external validation.
A woman who is free from the conditioning that taught her to chase validation from others is a powerful woman. A woman who is okay with not being liked by everyone is free. This freedom allows her to express herself in ways that feel true to her heart. She follows her highest excitement every day and allows herself to be led by her highest self.
When a woman is secure, her standards also go higher. This keeps her protected from wanting to please anyone and everyone she comes across. This keeps her shielded from giving her energy away to those who don’t know how to treat her properly.
The first thing to do to embody divine femininity is to realize that you already are the blueprint of the woman you want to become. The desire you have to express yourself in your most feminine ways is so beautiful. You are safe to honour it.
The woman you want to be perceived as is your highest self. You are already this higher version in the higher realms.
But you do have to do the inner work to bring those higher frequencies into your human experience. You don’t need to go against the innate wisdom in your body or please others to be seen as a divine woman.
All you have to do is turn towards what makes you feel safer, softer and peaceful within. If you start to express yourself authentically, honouring how you feel, the world will meet you halfway, and the tribe or men you attract will be just as authentic and connected to their souls.
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You’ve named the difference between performing femininity and embodying it here. The conditioning to chase validation is insidious because it’s dressed up as love, care, and connection, but it’s a prison that keeps us small and controllable. Here’s what blows my mind: the moment a woman stops needing everyone to like her, she becomes magnetic in an entirely different way. Not the desperate magnetism of people-pleasing but the gravitational pull of someone who knows her worth. People are drawn to that authenticity because it’s so rare. But here’s the deeper layer: when we break free from the validation chase, we’re not just liberating ourselves. We’re modeling a different way of being female in the world. We’re showing other women that it’s possible to exist without shrinking, without apologizing for taking up space, without constantly checking if we’re “too much.” The woman who is okay with not being liked by everyone has discovered the secret: she doesn’t need permission to exist entirely. That’s not just power. That’s a revolution disguised as self-respect. 👌
"Most women aren’t performative because they are superficial." THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU