Magical beings bonding with women exclusively (inspired by Brandon Sanderson’s Spren)

I need help figuring out how to make my magical beings and their bonding to women exclusively make sense. I don’t really want them to bond to women’s souls because I’m afraid it will cause inconsistencies with my story.

Without going too deeply into the plot, one of the biggest themes is women’s suppression and overthrowing the strong patriarchy. Women’s bonds are blocked in the guise of “protecting” women. If women are to believe this lie, when a pre-existing bond is broken or blocked, the woman shouldn’t have that violent of a backlash or else they’d know right away that it shouldn’t be blocked. If a soul connection is blocked or broken, believable consequences would be too big to ignore. I still want the missing bond to be distinct, but not life threatening.

For the bonds being exclusive to women, I’m thinking it could be linked back to the Godess’s blessing to women or something. I don’t have a strong reasoning for it yet 😅

If these beings actually do end up being a gift from the Goddess, I haven’t decided if they are related to the goddess (like pieces of herself) or if they are unique creations made specifically to be women’s companions fo whatever reason I have yet to come up with. If they are spirits, it’d make sense that they come from a spiritual realm like Spren and would relate to ATLA’s spiritual realm.

The age a female bonds to a spirit is yet to be determined, but I’m thinking between 8-10 years old. There might be a special ceremony that used to take place on the girl’s birthday at a “holy, spiritual” place where the magical beings live/come from. Maybe a tree that is a portal to the spiritual realm that the spirits come out to choose to bond with the girl.

If they are spiritual beings, then it would make sense for the bind to be on a spiritual level. I’m just hesitant to stick with that because of the consequences of blocking the bonds.

The magical beings themselves are still in the works. My magic system is elemental (inspired by Avatar the Last Airbender and Korra, but expanded abilities related to those elements) and has runes. The Spren inspirations I want to implement are the bond between human and “being,” potentially can shape shift into what the human needs/wants (but I don’t know if that’s too copy cat like of Spren), can appear and disappear to others who aren’t bonded (like Sylphrena), can be trapped in gems (to enhance men’s magic because they were jealous of women’s bonds and found a way to use it themselves), some might be like Windle (Lift’s vine Spren) that appear like some sort of plant for plant magic wielders/benders (don’t know what to call them yet).

A couple other inspirations are Harry Potter world’s patronus and fairies (like Tinkerbell). If they’re spirits, I imagine they’d be like a patronus, not quite corporeal but with the ability to be as solid or as transparent (invisible) as desired. Their true form could also appear like animals or like fairies (also like Sylphrena occasionally appeared as a miniature human).

Thank you in advance for your input ☺️