Gloria Steinem & the Dark Thread of Feminism

Gloria Marie Steinem, March 25, 1934 – September 2, 2026)

Between 1958 and 1962, Gloria Steinem served as the director of the Independent Research Service, a youth organisation covertly funded by the CIA to deploy non-communist American students to Soviet-run World Youth Festivals. Within this operation Steinem was identified as an ideal cultural ambassador; she was exceptionally media-savvy, highly intelligent, and ideologically aligned with a non-violent, Western liberal framework.

When Steinem later pivoted into the women’s liberation movement, her established ties to elite institutional networks and mainstream media circles allowed her to be, as the radical feminist group Redstockings alleged in 1975, “meteorically installed” as the movement’s chief spokesperson over far more revolutionary, anti-capitalist figures.

Steinem’s feminism is broadly categorised as liberal, mainstream second-wave feminism (sometimes called Bourgeois feminism). It is rooted in the fundamental belief that gender roles are artificial social constructs that restrict human potential. It is often accused of focusing on achieving gender equality within existing capitalist and class structures, without challenging the economic or systemic roots of oppression.

Her work and writing centre on several core tenets among which are:

Reproductive Freedom and Bodily Autonomy: Control over one’s own body is the absolute baseline of human liberty. Can you hear that echo today?

The Dismantling of Rigid Gender Socialisation: Steinem argued that society conditions children into binary roles that harm everyone.

Deconstructing Masculine/Feminine binaries: Reversing the idea that certain traits (like logic or leadership) are inherently masculine, while others (like empathy or nurturing) are inherently feminine.

The Root of Authority: True authority comes from within the individual, meaning psychological liberation must happen alongside structural reform.

On the surface these ideas are entirely sound and would certainly have spoken to a postwar generation of women keen to move beyond their limited roles as mothers and housewives. Under the control of their husbands and often subjected to personal and societal oppression, these feminist ideals would have appeared as an exciting exit route from servitude and having to hide or suppress parts of themselves that were deemed unacceptable.

The co-optation of Gloria Steinem did not require a formal contract ordering her to invent a new social order or disrupt the family, rather it functioned through the classic intelligence strategy of selective promotion and asset priming- where a person (or a group of people) is treated as a strategic resource to serve a political agenda.

By amplifying her moderate voice while marginalising radical factions who wished to dismantle the state or focus on class warfare, the establishment effectively used her as a human steering wheel. Her brand of individualist feminism successfully re-routed the profound energy of the women’s movement away from systemic disruption and into systemic integration, transforming genuine liberation into corporate inclusion and laying the groundwork for the hyper-commodified identity politics of the modern cybernetic loop.

From the perspective of ecofeminism and somatic philosophy, authentic grassroots movements aimed at liberating human potential and resurrecting a sacred respect for the living Earth were systematically co-opted by the capitalist machine. By separating women from their biological identity, second wave feminism, of which Steinem was a major figure head, was a crucial part of this process

Instead of liberating women from oppressive structures, mainstream feminism was steered to redefine freedom strictly as becoming an efficient cog in the corporate, industrial matrix. Success was measured solely by economic output and institutional compliance. This process reached its zenith with the modern gender agenda, which philosophically detaches human identity from the biological body and moves it entirely into the cerebral, abstract realm of the mind.

By convincing individuals that their true self is entirely separate from their biological body, the technocratic system achieves the ultimate Cartesian split. A population alienated from its own biological reality, its multi-generational families, and its ancestral roots becomes deeply vulnerable. It creates a profound identity vacuum that can only be filled by corporate intervention—turning personal expression into an endless cycle of purchasing bespoke identities, medicalised conformity, synthetic consumer goods, and online presence.

From the perspective of somatic philosophy and ecofeminism, the explosive modern resurgence of the Goddess movement and the broad cultural fascination with the “Divine Feminine” represent a direct, instinctual psychic backlash to desomatisation.

When a technocratic system successfully spends decades cutting human consciousness off from biological reality, the human spirit doesn’t simply accept the vacuum. The rise of the modern goddess archetype is the collective unconscious attempting to force a re-somatisation and a return to the living matrix of the Earth.

This is the ultimate cybernetic paradox. The irony of the modern Divine Feminine or Goddess revival is that most of it is broadcast, commodified, and consumed through the very digital screens and algorithms that caused the alienation from our bodies and nature in the first place. Even when groups of women gather with an embodied, ritualistic intention, or in sharing circles, there seems to be no escaping the obligatory photo for social media.

When women hunger for meaningful connection where their essential feminine nature is accepted and embodied, they often find quick but ultimately insubstantial hits from watching others beautifully performing this connection in social media videos. The brain receives a dopamine fuelled simulation of the thing it is starving for, but it is not the same as experiencing connection oneself and being free of the need to record or share the experience.

The feminine is packaged and fed back to us in a cybernetic loop and algorithm that is dictating exactly what is and what is not acceptable. The saturation in digital (non) reality is further disembodying not only the feminine but all of humanity.

Meanwhile in “real” life gender politics, the Tavistock Centre has increasingly received a massive and unexplained surge of teenage girls presenting with sudden-onset distress. The Cass Review noted that the massive, sudden influx of teenage girls to the clinic coincided perfectly with the smartphone and social media boom of the mid-2010s. From a Tavistock “Open Systems Theory” approach, the digital environment was flooded with automated algorithms and micro-influencers promoting abstract gender theories.

Rather than ask why thousands of young people were suddenly rejecting their physical bodies, Tavistock instead opted for pharmaceutical intervention. The body was seen as an editable machine that could match an abstract mental identity.

When human consciousness is systematically severed from biological reality and instead exists within a matrix of digital simulation, humanity is stripped of its organic, internal compass. When a woman cannot trust her body, her own gut instincts or her human interactions, she looks instead to an external techno corporate state to define what is real. Abstract ideals dictate what she needs to align herself with to create a chosen sense of identity. Ever changing algorithmic trends creates confusion and cognitive dissonance that disrupt her essential nature causing further fissures in the psyche. This in turn renders her more susceptible to external influence, and so on in an endless loop of erosion, dopamine, and created dependency.

While the United Nations defines femicide in the literal sense as the intentional killing of women and girls driven by gender -related motivation, the technocratic agenda is committing a form of systemic, metaphysical and cultural femicide.

Today women are no longer burned at the stake; these days there are far more subtle ways of controlling them, ways that rarely entail literal death but serve as a guillotine of severance between embodied, instinctual wisdom and spirit. The divine feminine has become a synthetic parody of a far greater, more essential feminine power where the Earth-Body-Spirit connection cannot be atomised into an isolated single cell.

Ten years ago, in my dissertation that touched on the topic of feminine erasure I wrote:

How will the “divine feminine” of the future look […] will it be an on-line course with credits… a virtual reality… a programmed cyborg… or an internet meme?

Ten years later we are much farther down the path of an artificial divine feminine.

Many of the pioneers of feminism like Gloria Steinem were celebrated as empowering women and advancing their position in a patriarchal system, but the reality has a far darker underbelly where good intentions and reasonable desires were subverted and used as tools of control. These agendas do not spring out of isolation as independent entities but are part of a far greater, longer running strategy. Sudden or unexplained social trends such as thousands of girls suddenly becoming so disturbed in their own bodies that they opt for gender reassignment, do not arise out of nowhere but are a reaction to external forces steering these covert agendas.

According to the Tavistock institute total yearly referrals for gender related issues exploded from under 100 in 2009/10 to over 5,000 by 2021/22. By the late 2010s, roughly 70% of all referrals were teenage girls.

According to the Cass Review, between 2017 and 2020 alone, GIDS received 9,555 total adolescent referrals, with the vast majority being assigned female at birth.

By 2018, several large clinics, including the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) stopped uniformly reporting referrals by registered birth sex due to intake policy changes.

The true number of young women seeking guidance is much higher than those who received appointments. For instance, the UK waiting list grew to over 26,000 young people by 2023 due to capacity deficits.

We do not know for certain how many women were murdered during the witch trials of the late medieval and early modern period in Europe however reports like the University of Edinburgh’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft confirm that the total death toll across the entire European continent was around 40,000 to 50,000.

I am in no way implying that Gloria Steinem and her fellow second wave feminists could have known that they were operating inside a much larger systemic infiltration. Neither could they have fully realised that freedom from biological oppression could also lead to complete biological disconnection and disempowerment of the women they sought to liberate.

In the culture they operated in, women were marginalised or viewed as second class citizens on account of their biological drives and functions. Detaching from these biological binds would have seemed like a step in the right direction.

What was not considered within that ideology was the erasure of the feminine through reducing her identity to an abstract ideal where she was cut off from her raw feminine power. For whatever reason at that time and within that group of female intellectuals and change makers, the inherent power of the female body was overlooked. It was not however overlooked or unknown by forces pulling strings behind the curtain of social engineering. And while many of us are consciously seeking to reinstate our feminine essence now, we are up against potent infiltration that attempts to trick us into believing our identity exists within ever changing, editable, abstract ideals. In this reality, commodification and control are the name of the game and the feminist ideal of liberation remains elusive.

Within this simulation it is safe for women to connect with the divine feminine and the goddess, outside of the simulation it is still dangerous.