I have been receiving some interesting responses to my threads on Hilaria Baldwin and the Gwyneth-white-bourgeois yoga-industrial complex.

One common question: Is it really a problem if it's about body positivity?

The answer is this: The prevailing yoga-industrial complex in the US (and Europe esp the UK and France) is not a body-positivity movement. It is a body-shaming movement that reinforces white patriarchal beauty standards (esp thinness, repackaged as sinewy) and makes them *moral*

By connecting thinness with spirituality, the current yoga-industrial complex reinforces old tropes about body size being about virtue. Additionally, these body sizes and shapes are almost solely relevant to white women.

Many WOC who attend yoga classes report discomfort with staring or judgment of darker, curvier bodies. There is a great deal of social exclusion, as well as the implication that (because yoga is "spiritual" exercise) curvier bodies are due to laziness and "unenlightened"

More importantly, surely you've all noticed that the WORST thing a white woman can ever imagine calling someone or being called is "fat." This is because white womanhood is trained early on to be in service of white manhood, and that means staying thin and sexually appealing

The social training many white parents direct towards their daughters says:

"Be thin, or no (white) man will want you, and then you will lose access to white power and wealth."

As a result, it's best to understand the Hilaria Baldwin kind of "body positivity" as an ongoing desire to prove she belongs in the realm of a powerful white man and white patriarchy in general. Same for Gwyneth and the yoga influencers.

These are not women performing or believing in "body positivity." They are making an extended visual case for white beauty standards and white supremacy in general. But it looks like exercise!

Note: None of these women ever feature or talk about the "yoga bodies" of Black or POC women, INCLUDING Indian women who practice yoga. Their particular appropriation of yoga is largely de-spiritualized and is specifically about making thin white womanhood look like a moral good.

There's a lot of further reading on white women and the enshrinement of thinness as a white (and thus universal) beauty standard.

As a start, I love this article by Ashleigh Shackelford pointing out that body positivity is incompatible with whiteness.

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/the-body-positivity-movement-still-looks-like-white-feminism/

Anyway long story short, Hilaria's bragging about her body and posing in her lingerie to prove she has "earned" a rich white husband and access to white power structures. She is never a true advocate for body positivity, and neither is the yoga-industrial complex. EVER.

ty

Also: I've said this before, as have others, and it's worth repeating: Loving yourself, and your body, as a woman/femme is a radical act of subversion against 6,000 years of patriarchy.

I wish you all had had my mom as your mom. You'd think you were hot shit no matter what anyone said too :)

By the way, even most white men have no idea why they suddenly consider these bodies attractive. They really think they're making aesthetic decisions and sexual selections when, as Meryl Streep memorably noted, they are picking from a pile of bodies chosen for them by capitalism.

One year it's muscles, another year it's big butts, another year it's heroin-chic thinness and white men think these are their preferences when in fact they are cyclical ways to distort and sell women's body parts for the male gaze.

We should go back to a time when a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. These mfs are out of control now, picking body parts and sizes like it's out of a catalogue.

i.e., white men think they have attractions but in fact what they are attracted to is the status that certain kinds of women's bodies suggest. They're told that to be seen as powerful or admired, they need an impossibly thin girl. It's the status more than the person.

In a few years the ideal white-woman body type will be a big, muscular butt (you already see it on Instagram fitness accounts) and all these whites ladies looking for rich husbands will give up butt-reducing barre classes and take up deadlifts and squats. Watch it happen.

Starting the year as I mean to go on, with absolutely enormous Feminist Buzzkill energy

Because this website is...how it is, a point to make clear: Yoga is not bad. Yoga is good. Yoga is an ancient Indian practice. What is bad is the way that white women have colonialized yoga and used it to commodify and sell the white, abled, thin female body as "yoga."

Do yoga if it's what you like. I do it all the time. But I do not listen to, or frequent, self-appointed white gurus who make yoga about "cardio" or posing for public admiration. It's a spiritual practice, between you and your body and your spirit, not to please the male gaze.

And yoga is certainly not, as much as Hilaria Baldwin and her ilk would have you believe, about "yoga bodies" or becoming an influencer in order to diminish other women and their self-image to raise oneself up in the social or financial order. Resist commodifying yourself.

To borrow a popular saying, a yoga body is any body that does yoga.

Just as importantly, we need a yoga that's adaptable to different bodies -- of all sizes -- and to all gender identities and colors. White women dominate the aesthetic for capitalist and patriarchal reasons.

Hope that helps.