...she wanted her next lover to be a broom.

Why I’m perfectly comfortable with letting John Friend sleep with whoever he wants to sleep with as long as they want to sleep with him.

Sorry everyone, this is another John Friend post. If you aren’t a yogi(ni) you may not have heard about John Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga, and his personal and business mishandlings (is that a word?) that have recently come to light. The major charges include freezing his company’s pension funds, putting employees into situations where they had to accept drugs on his behalf, and bagging tons and tons of chicks… many of these women were his employees, and students. Married employees and students. But anyway. My feelings on this are pretty simple: the pensions- big deal, the drugs- not cool, but no harm no foul, and the sex- I’m completely uninterested in sex that doesn’t involve me or my friends. Or vampires from Bon Temps, Louisiana. 

One of my girlfriends posted an article on her facebook yesterday and asked her fellow yogis to weigh in on the situation. I said my thing. She said the same thing. Then one of her other friends made the comment that abusing a position of power to get tail is never okay and that by shrugging the situation off we were, essentially, complicit and “enablers”. I started to type a response, but then decided that I didn’t care, and also I was being a bitch and her post was full of spelling errors and I was like “ugh. why bother?” which sucks, but whatever. That would have been the end of that, but as a lot of you know, I don’t sleep. When I woke up in the middle of the night I started thinking about what this friend of a friend had said, and it’s just so myopic… I had to say something, but I’m going to do it here instead of facebook because then you can all respond with gifs. I’d like that.

Chuck Klosterman said it best: All relationships are a power struggle. This is true. It’s always true. I have never been in an equal relationship. There are tons of factors that can make relationships uneven, sometimes one partner has the advantage in one situation but not the other, the upper hand can definitely change (sometimes hourly), and there’s a whole continuum of unevenness, but trust me, if you’re with someone, at any given moment someone is in a position of power, and if this friend of a friend is right, then if I have sex with my husband- clearly the person in power as he PAYS FOR ME TO HAVE FOOD AND SHELTER- then he’s abusing his power simply by having it, and that’s fucking dumb. 

When I was 18 I started dating a guy who was in a lot of ways awesome, but in a lot of ways awful. I look back now and realize that I probably still genuinely like the guy, but at the time in our lives we had no business being together, or with anyone, really, who was not a paid caregiver. This guy was 3 years older than me, which in a lot of ways would give him the upper hand. However he couldn’t keep a job, which meant that my jobs paid the bills… so maybe I had the upper hand? He was bigger than me and had more friends… so I guess he was sort of in the power seat… but I was savvier and slightly more attractive, so was it me? Does the fact that I was resigned to being a teenaged bread winner make me the advantaged partner, or the disadvantaged partner?

When I worked in clinic we joked about walking the fine line between flirting and babysitting. Batting my eyelashes at the doctors I worked for made my day a lot easier. These men were my bosses. But if I would do a tiny bit of giggling and hair tossing I could get them to do their jobs without yelling at me or fucking things up. Deal.

I have had two friends enter into relationships with teachers. Neither of them felt like they would be punished for ending the relationships, but both felt that their education may have benefitted from them. Is a teacher in a position of power? Sure. But weren’t my friends, too?

My mom is a physician, and for a long time her boyfriend was one of the nurses who worked on the unit she worked on. She was the doctor (power), but he was the man (power). Shit, huh?

Aren’t we as girls taught to be vaguely afraid of men, as they can hurt us and rape us and make us miserable because they’re more powerful than we are? Is any heterosexual relationship acceptably ethical? 

Here’s the thing: I don’t know. I have the feeling that in any relationship there’s a lot more than can be explained demographically. There’s history and preferences and arrangements and coincidences and everything else. I’m pro-consensual relationship, and the only people who know if the relationship is consensual are the people in it. Suggesting otherwise is foolish, mean, reductive, and, frequently, insulting. I don’t think that John Friend started a style of yoga thinking that it would help him get lots of girls into bed, but I think the he found out that starting a style of yoga put him in the position of, yep, getting lots of girls into bed. Oh fucking well. Sounds pretty badass to me. We have such a tendency to color experiences as good, bad, moral, immoral, whatever, when really those situations JUST ARE, and what we’re reacting to is ourselves. I’ll make John Friend jokes all day long (have you seen the Manduka videos such as “John Friend on Teaching Love” oh man…), actually I’ll talk shit about Anusara all day long because I’m hippie dippie as hell and every Anusara and Anusara inspired class I’ve ever taken has been poorly taught and vaguely annoying… like preschool with more heart openers. If somebody wants to start dishing on the guy for the pension stuff, by all means, but for the love of God stay out of the dude’s bedroom.