Fifty Shades of Yoga

There's a fascinating Facebook page called 50 Shades of Yoga which makes an interesting connection between sexual bondage and yoga. Now let me start by making this very clear: I know very little about yoga, I'm not speaking as an expert on yoga.

Still, there's a certain superficial visual similarity between yoga and some of the more extreme bondage poses. The 50 Shades of Yoga page seeks to establish some greater similarity, but I'm not informed enough on the subject to make any judgements along those lines. Read the page and decide for yourself.

I found the 50 Shades of Yoga through a post on a the Elephant Journal blog that completely condemned it. The Elephant Journal post is by someone who teaches and practices yoga, and she's cheesed about it because she feels it's wrong to conflate bondage and yoga, or most forms of sexiness and yoga. She says, "This is the shit that makes men wiggle their eyebrows and make inappropriate comments and passes at me simply because I teach yoga. I’m a yoga teacher, not a whore."

I completely missed the meme about yoga instructors being whores, or whore-like. I had more a picture of them as spiritual, new-Agey, sometimes ditzy folks, generally focused on being healthy mentally and physically, in a sexy sort of way. Frankly, the contortions yoga practitioners go through look too difficult and uncomfortable to make me think of sex. (I honestly have the same problem with extreme bondage poses, they look so uncomfortable I have trouble thinking them sexy, even though the women are naked and tied up, though I realize that the women who are thusly bound are probably either flexible enough to handle them readily, or kind of enjoying the pain, or both).

Sure, the women who practice yoga are sexy and slinky and bendy and probably very good in bed, but it never struck me as what yoga is ABOUT, I mean, most forms of physical exercise and sports that women engage in make them slinky and sexy and are also venues for male fantasies, but that's not what they're ABOUT.

Still the visual similarity is intriguing, and fun to think about in an entirely salacious way. Check out the my post on this topic on my Politically Sexy blog for a thoroughly NSFW illustrated version.

Why Do the Bluenoses Rage?

"What, me, porn?"

Ran across a story about a schoolteacher who bought a student a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. A private school teacher named Roger Aidoo bought a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey for a 14 year old male student, who had requested the book as part of an extracurricular reading assignment.

The student's mother, Maya Ladson, did not think this was an appropriate thing for the teacher to do, and complained to the school about it. Fair enough, the school administrators hauled Aidoo in, gave him the third degree, and were apparently satisfied with his story that he was not all that familiar with the fact that Fifty Shades of Grey contained lots of explicit BDSMy sex.

Ladson, however, ain't buying it. She wants Aidoo fired. But the administrators, in a rare display of scholarly backbone, aren't firing him over the irate cries of one crazed bluenosed mom.

Here's my take on the story. Buying the kid a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey was a boneheaded move by the teacher. But it's not a firing offense. Hell, any kid with access to a computer can find porn that will make Fifty Shades of Grey look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. So the appropriate thing to do is to haul Aidoo in and tell him, "That was a really stupid thing to do, and if you do anything remotely like it in the future, we are going to fire you so hard and fast it will make you head spin. Now get out of here, you knucklehead."

The interesting thing is why Lawson's panties got totally bunched up over this. Bluenoses seem to get worked up over sex-related matters orders of magnitude more than regular people do. That's why they have so much influence, I suppose. I suspect that bluenoses are people who have attempted to repress their own sex drives in various ways, and every sexual thing that comes along is just a huge irritant to them, whereas it just does not bother the less sexually repressed. They're pains in the asses and generally useless, and it would be a shame if Mr. Aidoo lost his job because he irritated a bluenose. He would hardly be the first if he did, however.