You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I wonder what the hard core feminists of the 1960s and 1970s think of their baby now? Coeli Carr in her San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal article, ‘Selling the Feminine’, takes us on a tour of the current media ‘in’ thing to portray women as relatives of the goddess in Her many guises. From Roseanne, the ‘domestic goddess’ (p. 51) to Madonna who ‘blurs the line between good and evil’ (p. 52), from the ‘benign mermaid’ of White Rock soda (p. 51) to the movie Thelma and Louise (p. 53), Carr describes successful media attempts to attract women's attention and money.
What the Women's Movement spawned is nothing short of a revolution. My mother is turning over in her grave (or jumping with long-repressed joy) as the vibrations from Madonna's concerts shake her hallowed ground. The strong, independent woman's vernacular has entered the mainstream, and as Carr quotes the book Megatrends for Women, ‘advertisers who want to advertise effectively pick up on the trends’ (p. 51).
We could observe the revolution as the motion of an archetypal shift corresponding to the millennia change from Pisces to Aquarius. Madison Avenue registers cash receipts and does not give a whit for the deeper heave of psyche. Something disturbs us as Carr depicts the commercial successes of the goddess trend. Has capitalism, the right arm of patriarchy, taken us once again?
Madison Avenue may count its gold, but I know that Lady will have the last word. Carr hints at such by telling the Sumerian myth of Inanna's descent to the underworld, a story which she says is ‘now familiar to psychologically-minded women’ (p. 52). Inanna comes back to life after defeating death and rot. She returns to the upper world bearing some of her dark sister Erishkigal's charm. Demons cling to Inanna's side as she ascends, and she wears the very eye of death. This integration of the primordial feminine is not lost on psychologically-minded women. We won't buy Estée Lauder's version of a pumped-up Venus or Nike's j