Feminism Wrecked My Yoga Class
Excerpt from Karen Kachra on philosophynow.org (for some reason, if you do a Google search from the article, you can read the whole thing. However, when you click on the link, it tells you that you must be a member. So do a Google search for the title if you’re interested).
“…That same week I had another, inversely, frustrating experience, this time at tantra yoga class. At the beginning of each class participants spent some time giving their impressions on the assigned text. (Usually there is no textual component to a yoga course, but our teacher aspired to give us some philosophical context to our class experiments.) On the week in question, we had been assigned a book by John Deimos. Personally, I strongly disliked his theory – I had, one might say, a feminist reaction to it. Deimos spins a story about Feminine and Masculine sexual essences and describes them in stereotypically patriarchal fashion. Women (basically, those who have Feminine essences) are ‘like Hawaii’: lush, creative, fertile, supportive, free-spirited and nurturing. They like to love and be loved and are devoted to their lovers. They are not really concerned about mental achievements; it was said that to the extent that they become good at ‘taking on the world’ modern women become more and more alienated from who they really are, and consequently from the kind of sexual relationships they really want. Men, as you might by now imagine, are on this picture ‘like New York City’: full of ambition, bustling, dominant, aggressive, go-getters who are driven and savvy and who are often ‘great minds.’ To the extent that modern men have learned to be caring, supportive and sensitive males, they harbor a discontent from not (at least sexually) expressing their true skyscraper nature. Deimos’s basic argument is that we should transcend the idea of gender equality-sameness and allow ourselves to be passive/active with each other, depending, of course, on what one’s true essence is. All of this struck me as, to put it mildly, far-fetched. (Besides, I was already corrupted from having read volume one of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.) Some of Deimos’s observations about why contemporary relationships have problems and why men and women have conflicted gender identities and aspirations made some sense. There was also a certain appealing quality in the very simplicity of his approach – did it not but reflect the great cosmic yin-yang? In any case, I remained quite skeptical about his judgments.
In class, however, only one of the other eight students said anything at all negative about the material! I knew these people to be university students and graduates; they were not dumb. Why was nobody thinking critically about all this fluff? Why were all these women (the class was for women only; we happened to have various ethnic backgrounds) identifying so much with this depiction of womanhood that smacked of a convenient submission to, and justification of, the current patriarchal order of things? One participant actually said she felt enlightened by the book and relieved that she could now accept her feminine essence. Another said she ‘devoured’ the book in two days, and instantly connected with Deimos’s approach. Even the lone student who had negative things to say about the book belittled her own criticisms, saying that she did, after all, find the book rewarding … and she thought that her problems with it had to do with her entirely too practical Wisconsin upbringing which made her baulk, in particular, at the suggestion that women are like Hawaii and men are like New York. I kept thinking about steak eating, cattle rustlin’, macho-man small town America – was it Feminine just because it was rural? Were there no Feminine cities, simply because skyscrapers resemble penises? And what about the sexual essence of San Francisco?”
