"Grown Woman”: Lorde, Virgin, and The Cult of Women’s Knowledge

But I didn’t, and still don’t, like making a cult of ‘women’s knowledge,’ preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know—women’s deep, irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive, inferior; women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light." – Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a perennial quote from American science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, first uttered at a 2010 speech in Oregon. This summer, I found myself frequently reminded of this particular musing in response to Lorde’s most recent album Virgin (2025) and its associated press tour. As a lifelong Lorde fan, I spent June counting down the days until her long-awaited fourth album release. But upon Virgin’s arrival, I quickly became skeptical. From questionable interview quotes surrounding hormonal birth control to a problematic justification of her viewing of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape for self-discovery purposes, I couldn’t help but wonder if Lorde was indoctrinated into the very “cult of women’s knowledge” Le Guin warned against.

On Virgin, I argue Lorde blends her signature raw, confessional, and deeply vulnerable style with a misguided, frequently gender-essentialist breed of spirituality, ultimately leading her to stumble into the crystal-doting, Facebook-posting territory of the latter.

Virgin primarily adopts a gender-essentialist view of spiritual femininity by framing processes associated with biological sex, such as ovulation and pregnancy, as mystical, near supernatural phenomena. Speaking on hormonal birth control—which heavily inspired much of Virgin’s imagery right down to the IUD on the cover—in a Rolling Stone interview, Lorde described going off the pill and ovulating for the first time in years as “one of the best drugs [she’s] ever done.” On the track “Clearblue,” Lorde additionally characterizes the experience of unprotected sex and a subsequent pregnancy scare as revelatory and profound. She specifically describes the incident as “deep in [her] matter” and “changing [her] patterns” ultimately leaving feeling “free” and “so alive.” In sum, on Virgin, Lorde clearly draws a parallel between the biology of the female body and connection to some greater divine source of inspiration and knowledge.

Lorde reiterated this point in a recent DAZED Magazine interview, explaining that she wrote every song on Virgin “at the end of 2023, after [she] came off birth control.” She continued by comparing this influx of inspiration to what she imagined a pregnant Lauryn Hill experienced while writing her masterpiece The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), stating “she was pregnant and had this unbelievable channel open between her and some creative force.” Citing pregnancy as the source of the “creative force” behind Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation minimizes Hill’s intellectual feat to the result of her female biology, perpetuating the problematic logic at the center of Le Guin’s argument.

Speaking on these traditionally private matters is characteristic of the vulnerable tone Lorde fans know and love. However, the way these quotes and lyrics directly connect female biology to spiritual growth and increased creative potential worries me. While the experiences such as pregnancy are certainly foundational and life-changing, claiming these normal human processes allow for special access to profound, mystical wisdom risks minimizing women’s creative and intellectual prowess into the result of blind, instinctive knowledge inherent to their biological sex.

Beyond linking biological sex with special access to spiritual knowledge, Lorde peppers throughout the album moments where womanhood is not directly tied to biological sex yet women’s emotional knowledge is still fetishized in a problematic way. On “If She Could See Me Now,” Lorde equates becoming a woman with intimate knowledge of pain through the lyric “baby whenever you’d break me… / it made me a woman being hurt like that.” The lyrics of “GRWM” (which Lorde uses as an acronym for grown woman) echo a similar sentiment, as Lorde lists the trauma she inherited from her mother as a foundational component of her “grown” womanhood, which is the titular focus of the song.

These lyrics imply that pain is inherent to womanhood. While I don’t believe Lorde intended this message, in conjuring such a clear link between womanhood and suffering, she falls into the trap of portraying feminine knowledge as lurking down at the “dark roots”; a line of reasoning that’s rejected at the heart of Le Guin’s critique.

When considered alongside the album’s emphasis on female biology, the connection Lorde draws between femininity and suffering becomes even more concerning. While the experiences she names might resonate heavily with her personal understanding of her own gender, it is problematic to essentially reduce womanhood into the composite product of suffering and ovulation, especially in the public-facing context of a highly anticipated pop album. 

Additionally, too often, the kinds of philosophies of womanhood outlined throughout Virgin parallel common anti-trans rhetoric. Specifically, trans-exculsionary radical feminists (TERFs) commonly delegitimize trans women’s gender identity by claiming they do not understand the pain that TERFs allege is inherent to womanhood, whether that be the physical pain of menstruation or the psychological toll of misogynistic abuse. Additionally, an emphasis on biological sex characteristics—such as the ones Lorde highlights on Virgin—as determinants of gender is one of the most frequently drawn-on pieces of anti-trans rhetoric we see today. While Lorde likely never intended to align herself with anti-trans bigotry—especially given her own misgivings with the gender binary—we cannot ignore the fact that the view of womanhood she presents on Virgin is the logical bedfellow of well-documented anti-trans hate campaigns.

Moreover, it is not merely transphobic rhetoric that ideologically aligns with Virgin’s depiction of womanhood—the album directly descends from a certain breed of new age feminist spirituality. Think of a self-proclaimed “mystics”— a label Lorde uses for herself in the opening lines of “If She Could See Me Now”—they are typically white women who wax poetic in TikToks about the “divine feminine” or claim an inherent connection to the moon through their menstrual cycle. While Lorde might not employ these particular problematic and frequently culturally appropriative spiritual practices associated with this kind of online “mystic” woman, her claims surrounding biological sex on Virgin reach similarly problematic conclusions. 

While it can feel empowering to see womanhood portrayed in a divine, powerful light, equating female biology with magic is a line of reasoning that’s been used to oppress women for centuries. Naively, I expected more from Lorde, especially given her 2021 single “Mood Ring” which directly satirizes bad-faith spiritual practices. It unfortunately appears as though Lorde has become the very thing she once criticized, adopting the spiritual manteau denounced by Le Guin as a vessel for half-baked conclusions on what it means to be a woman.

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Kate Heslin is a sophomore in the School of Health studying Global Health and Creative Writing. She talked about feminism a lot in her 7th grade English class.