In recent years, the rise of “femininity coaching” and influencers promoting the “divine feminine” has positioned itself as a guide for women seeking empowerment. Often framed as a method to attract a “high-value man” these practices claim to celebrate womanhood.

Yet femininity coaching can function as a subtle reinforcement of patriarchal and anti-Black ideals, performing gender in ways that erase historical and structural realities.

For centuries, we’ve been positioned as the inverse of white womanhood. Under slavery, we were denied full personhood and stripped of gender distinction altogether.

Hortense Spillers famously describes this process as one of “ungendering”wherein Black women, treated as property and reproductive resources, were reduced to what she calls “female flesh ungendered.”

Anti-Blackness operates as a system that removes Black women from the category of “woman”, collapsing gender differences and situating Blackness in a state of non-being.

The legacy of this violence continues to shape the ways we are seen (and not seen) within modern ideals of femininity and beauty.

The prevailing standards of hegemonicfemininity (softness, passivity, restraint) were constructed around white, middle-class, heteronormative ideals. These standards exclude us by definition.

It’s within this racialised framework that femininity coaching emerges as a particularly fraught practice.

Many social media influencers market femininity as a set of behaviours or attitudes designed to curtail “aggressiveness,” and embody “feminine energy”. For Black women, these programs often claim to “correct” thehistorical masculinisation imposed uponus, yet they risk re-inscribing the very hierarchies that excluded us in the firstplace.

When femininity is presented as a universal ideal, it implicitly centres whiteness as the standard.

Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it plainly: “Beauty is for white women.” For beauty to function as it should she writes, “…it can never be for black woman”. Beauty requires our exclusion to sustain its power. Cottom continues, “..It is actually blackness, as it has been created through the history of colonization, imperialism and domination, that excludes me from the forces of beauty…Big beauty definitionally excludes the kind of blackness I carry in my history and my bones…”

The lingering effects of our historical ungendering mean that modern femininity discourse offers us only conditional acceptance. The supposedempowerment asks us to conform toideals that historically excluded and devalued us, ideals that denied our humanity. Femininity coaching cannot be disentangled from the legacies of anti-Blackness.