Gender in Wicca: Moving Beyond Traditional Ideas
Fertility, as it relates to the cycles of nature, is an easy concept to understand. Things are born, things reproduce somehow to continue their species, and then things die. This is a universal truth of everything living, no matter what the actual mechanics of the cycle are. To celebrate this is to celebrate the cycles of life, the most primal force out there as far as I'm concerned. So while this cycle does concern itself with reproduction to a point, the entire focus of the cycle isn't truly the reproduction. This is like saying that the entire purpose of my life, as a human female, is to produce offspring. While that is the role that biology has given me, it certainly is not what I'd consider to be the entire purpose of my life. And there's also the fact that plants, and some animals, do not reproduce sexually. Each plant is both male and female, though it needs the male pollen of another plant to fertilize it. (Which is one of Mother Nature's jobs for the bee.) Some animals reproduce by cloning themselves, dividing to make an exact copy, such as amoebas. These creatures need no sexual organs or biological gender at all.
Let's talk about biology for a moment, and the differences between male, female, masculine, and feminine. Male and female, biologically speaking, are another set of concepts that are easy to understand. We learn about the physical differences between the sexes practically from birth. Masculine and feminine, however, aren't so easy to categorize. These are gender traits, and gender traits are assigned by society and culture, not by biology.
Take, for example, the idea that women stay home and take care of children while men go to work and earn money. These are gender roles assigned by society, and they are roles we're familiar with. We may automatically think that things like cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food are feminine roles. Biologically, are females more suited to these things than men? No, I don't believe so. Can a man stay home and take care of children while a woman holds down a career? Certainly.
What does this have to do with Wicca and the Gods? We project a human form onto our Gods because that's the best way we can relate to them. We give them human personality traits and roles, and we separate these things out based on how we've been taught
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