When Did Goddess Become A Dirty Word?

About three months ago.

I've been building the 7th Tribe community with goddesses as our spokespeople for the last six months and in the beginning I found AI image generators were highly respectful of their divinity, I spent months training the machines to find the perfect prompts to make beautiful images that were age appropriate, ethnically correct and showed the goddesses in their full power.

Then something changed. I first noticed it when I tried to make an image of a bra against a black background. It was rejected for going against community guidelines, No boobs–just the bra. So I experimented, lacy knickers were also banned, but men's undies and Bridget Jones specials were fine.

Then my well-honed goddess prompt stopped working, powerful women became demure maidens with their tits out. Don't get me wrong, I want my goddesses to show their bits, our sexuality is powerful, but if I asked for a bare-breasted warrior the computer would definitely say no.

It seems the word goddess and sex are now linked in the algorithm. This was confirmed this morning when Cindy Gallop's post for her 65th birthday party with the dress code of sex goddess was removed from facebook - 5 months after it was posted.

And it's not just Facebook. I have 15,000 followers on LinkedIn, I believed my new business would be of interest to them, but they only showed my posts to less than 1% of the people who want to hear from me. As anyone who knows me knows, my mantra is 'Don't moan. Fix it.' so I immediately called upon a LinkedIn expert who gave me all the tips to get engagement, then I showed her my feed and she said, "This makes absolutely no sense, I haven't seen any of these posts and I should have."

This started an exploration, every day I tried different posts with different angles.

1. Type Only post. Reposting a post that had the headline, 'Women, you are not crazy. LinkedIn really does limit your reach' followed by some of her desk research that put it down to the algorithm favouring more masculine language. So I got my LLM (who knows me far too well) to write a post promoting my business using tech bro speak, it threw up some wonderful phrases like 're-mothering the algorithm' and 'multidimensional growth through womb-powered systems intelligence', It got 28,179 impressions.

2. Image post. I then looked at all the posts that kept on coming up on my feeds of selfies and decided to keep taking the piss out of what LinkedIn thinks I want to see. It got 1,937 impressions.

   
   

3. Image post with link. OK, so I was told never to put a link in a post because LinkedIn doesn't like it. But links in the comments had no engagement at all. I also wondered if LinkedIn hadn't recognised my change in business direction, so I deliberately wrote a midlife women's activist post bemoaning how tough it is for midlife women using a picture of a business woman and keywords like midlife women, careers and menopause. It got 2,604 impressions.

4. Image post with a non-business photograph. This one really surprised me, because it's not just about words. I kept to corporate language but instead of painting us as victims I called on the power of midlife women and I coloured outside the lines for the image which more aligns with the 7th Tribe brand. 671 impressions

5. (6, 7 & 8) Video posts. This is supposed to be the algorithm jackpot, My most viral post ever was video with almost 500,000 views, but videos with daily inspiration from the goddesses (a creative form of motivational quotes and mindfulness) barely scraped 300 views.

It's only been a week of experimenting, but the reason has become obvious—the one unifying factor on the under-performing posts is the word goddess.

"God may be in the details but the goddess in the questions." Gloria Steinem

There could be a number of reasons for this:

1. A bunch of young tech bros have got into the code with good intentions of reducing harmful images of women by barring words they associate with sexuality (voluptuous and curvy recently went against image community guidelines too). The answer is getting more women into the code, but we all realise that hope is paused with Trump's attempted murder of DEI globally.

2. Meta and LinkedIn could be blind to what's happening in the world. It's not hard to believe they haven't noticed midlife women are still losing or leaving their careers in droves and are starting businesses that actually make a difference in society. They haven't recognised these new businesses are built around gooey words like, empathy, intuition and love. And born to tackle issues that are likely to be around taboo subjects in business like Cindy's Make Love Not Porn and The 7th Tribe which appeals to the spiritual nature of women, not patriarchal fairy tales or corporate structure.

   
   

3. They are fucking terrified of us. Steve Bannon warned Trump that the Anti-Patriarchy movement would be bigger than the Tea Party and we all know which side the tech billionaires were on in Gamergate. They are terrified of us all getting together, probably because they are scared we will treat them the way they have treated us. The problem is, they currently hold the strings that bring us together. But they can't touch our heart strings or our networks.

   
   

All three scenarios can easily be remedied by united action. We all start writing exactly how we want to, using our language and promoting the businesses we either build or want to see. Then we amplify these posts, not by just liking them (which makes almost no difference to impressions), but commenting and sharing with a quote. The algorithm learns from us, so let's teach it. It's just a numbers game and we have the numbers.

You can even join our circle that's designed for united action on social media.

Because we can beat them a their own game - but with humour and love.

Align our divine archetypes with male fantasy? Sexy Jesus anyone?