I think that when we make choices about taking our clothes off for a camera in the name of yoga or following any path that tries to integrate discordant practices (like porn and spirituality or even punk music and religion), we should ask ourselves if there is some higher criteria we can impose on our intentions. The first thing that comes to mind is not the stiff precepts of “do this” or “don’t do that,” or even the basic tenets of peacemaking practices. What I think for myself is this: Is this action or thing going to help wake me and others up, or will it contribute to old habit making? To me this is a very important criteria for all my activities before I categorize them as sexual, deviant, exploitative or joyous. In some instances porn may wake us up and in other instances it’s designed to shut us down. Nude yoga may or may not be porn and may or may not be skillfull action in the ancient view. That’s not really the point. The key question for a yogin is whether or not we are waking up through our actions. Some forms of art and spiritual practice need to include the grime and the shadows, even of bodies, sexual or otherwise, as well as the beauty of saggy breasts and different shaped vaginas. Everything and anything can wake us up but our intentions certainly matter. In the privacy of one’s bedroom or computer screen, we can still ask this very basic question about awakening or shutting down and hopefully we can move beyond debate about what is or is not yoga and into the more heartfelt and altruistic sphere of interrogating our intentions to see if they match our ideal of waking up ourselves and others.

But something also needs to be said about the logic of pornography. Porn assimilates whatever is in the tracks of mainstream culture, prefrerably anything remotely sacred. Women feeling free enough to move their bodies in shapes as postures in classes is colonized by the pornographic gaze! This is hardly news. Women are always negotiating between this gaze and their own experience of themselves/desires/will. Even as a man this is not hard to see. This is what it means to be colonized, as it is the dominant hegemonic gaze.

Michael Stone