When Yoga Sparked a Sex Panic
Yoga and meditation were once seen by Americans “as weird and culty,” Nicole Daedone tells Reason. “Any new, profoundly healing protocol is seen as dark.”
Daedone is the founder of OneTaste, an “orgasmic meditation” group that’s come under fire from federal authorities. She and OneTaste’s former head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, are currently being prosecuted on a conspiracy to commit forced labor charge—a situation you can read all about here, in my new deep dive into OneTaste and the weird, weak case against it.
Daedone’s comments sent me down an archival rabbit hole, seeking out past examples of people freaking out about yoga and associated philosophies. What I found is so absurd, hilarious, and relevant to modern moral panics about sex that I’m devoting today’s newsletter to exploring this wild little slice of history.
“Eve is eating the apple again. It is offered as a knowledge of the occult that shall solve the riddles of existence,” reads a Los Angeles Times article from October 22, 1911. “Yoga, that eastern philosophy, the emblem of which is the coiled serpent, is being widely disseminated here.”
In 1912, The Washington Post warned that American women were leaving their husbands, giving away their money, or becoming “dangerously ill by…devotion” to “swamis and Hindu priests” who preached, among other things, yoga and “love for love’s sake.”
Today, yoga is anodyne and mainstream in American culture. But it wasn’t always so.
‘Federal Inquiry Into Why Women Join With Hindus’
As the 20th century revved up, America entered a full-blown moral panic over yoga and those who taught it. Instructors were accused of being cult leaders, or worse. The practice became known as something menacing, morally subversive, and sexual. Eventually, federal authorities would get involved.
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) provides a great overview of all this in its 2006 piece called “Fear of Yoga.” Yoga started gaining traction in America near the turn of the 19th century, the CJR explains. It was helped along by the Theosophical Society, a “spiritualist-reform group” that “embraced a combo platter of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and spiced it with a few of their own.” Then, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 “launched America’s first superstar swami: the charismatic Vivekananda” and “more swamis followed in Vivekananda’s path, more Americans saw the light, and that was more or less when yoga’s trouble really started. After decades of sketchy, slightly mocking coverage by newspapers and magazines, yoga came under increasingly vicious attacks.”
At the root of all of this was—can you guess?—a hefty dose of xenophobia. Swarthy foreigners were teaching yoga to nice, white American ladies—sound the alarm! Even worse, some American women were leaving their homes and perhaps even taking up romantically with these yogis.
It made news across the country when the wife of Purdue University President Winthrop Ellsworth Stone left her husband and family “to pursue the mystery teaching of the Yoga philosophy,” as The Billings Evening Journal put it on May 5, 1908.
(While Americans now use the word yoga primarily to refer to the yoga postures that people have adopted as an exercise regimen, the word was more commonly used back then to refer to broader yogic philosophy, and sometimes Hindu beliefs more generally.)
Obviously, this sort of thing became a matter of federal concern.
“Governmental inquiry has been set on foot in an effort to discover how many American women converted by the various swamis and Hindu priests have left this country for India,” The Washington Post reported on the front page of its magazine section on February 18, 1912.
In March 1912, San Francisco paper The Bulletin ran the headline “Federal Inquiry Into Why Women Join With Hindus.” The subhead: “Uncle Sam Worried Over Number Enticed Away by Soft-Voiced Swamis.”
Yoga Drives Women Insane?
Panic about immigrants at this time coincided with “a purity panic,” as the CJR noted. And together, these worries “set loose the idea that these dark-skinned foreigners and the morals-loosening effects of their ‘yogi philosophy’ were a menace t
Article from Reason.com
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