Paganism and Feminism: long time coming

One of the many things that continue to saw away at the back of my mind as I attempt to work modern Paganism as I understand it into a religion for me is this niggling conflict I've always felt between Wiccan and ceremonial symbolism and feminism. I used to be able to ignore it, but as feminism has become more important to me, the issue has been increasingly shoved forward.

It's this gender association thing, you see. Look up any table of magickal correspondences, page through any Wiccan ritual, and nearly everything there will be assigned to either male or female. Fire and Air are masculine; Earth and Water are feminine. Swords and Staves are masculine; Cups and Coins are feminine. The Sun, nine times out of ten, is masculine and the Moon feminine. And why?

The feminist part of my brain recoils at all this gender-labeling, saying, so why are femininte things always passive/reflective/yielding/receptive and masculine things are always dominant/assertive/aggresive/powerful? Is that really such a good idea that things always get divided up that way? (Not to mention -- isn't it redundant? If what you want to say is that a thing is aggressive, say it's aggressive. It reminds me of an archaeological survey of a graveyard once. This is a female's grave, it was labeled; we know this because it has female things in it, like pots and spinning tools. We know these are female things because they are always found in female graves. Well, lovely. Did you look at the bones? No, they didn't.)

Now to be fair, Wicca and modern Paganism do avoid associating women exclusively with feminine things and men exclusively with masculine things, both with the gods and with practitioners. But, well, it's still an association, and it's still there. Maybe if that same set of associations weren't so destructively pervasive in the wider society it wouldn't bother me so much, but they are, and for all practical purposes they always have been, and I'm wary of letting yet another religion perpetuate them unquestioning.

(Well if you don't like Wicca, don't practice Wicca, you might say. All right. How? Short of going the strict reconstructionist route -- and that won't get rid of the gender roles problem, just move it around a bit -- you won't find a modern incarnation of Paganism that isn't influenced by Wicca at least a little bit. Gender roles are pretty basic, and thus pretty widespread.)

Truth told, I feel very freed by my realization, upon reading Hutton, that there's nothing fundamentally feminist about Wicca at all. (And like Deborah Lipp posted ages ago, worshipping a Goddess doesn't necessarily make you feminist. It doesn't even necessarily make you not misogynistic.) I feel like I can stop trying to justify things I don't like about it so much because no, there was no chain of logic I would have agreed with behind it, so I can stop trying to look for what isn't there and just work on what works for me. One of the benefits of a young religion, I suppose; it's possible to do enough research to know when to stop.

None of this is news to people interested in feminism, I know. There's a second half to this post that I'm working on; it's a little more productive, I think, in looking at alternatives but as such it's taking me more time to work out...