Social Justice: Why yoni jewelry bothers me

I am troubled by the yoni jewelry on Etsy.

This is not to say that I'm troubled by the concept.  The original notion of the yoni is part of tantric sex practice, as I've been writing about for one of my copywriting customers: basically, "yoni" is Sanskrit for "divine passage," and it refers to the vagina/vulva as a sacred temple.  The penis gets a similar reverence as lingam.  All well and good.  Sex is sacred and beautiful.


It's hard to post even the very lovely examples of yoni jewelry in a post like this, so here are some cowrie shell earrings from D Rae Designs.

I think the problem comes in when women (and men) who have little interest in the Tantra adopt the idea of venerating the yoni.  The thing is, once you're worshiping something in a vacuum, you automatically mentally remove it from the realm of everyday practice.  To decide that we are now going to revere the vagina as sacred rather than thinking of it as dirty turns the vagina into a concept that is beyond the woman.

If my vagina is sacred, it doesn't belong to me.  Sacredness implies worshippers, implies a social construction and concept that is larger than myself.  I don't want to think of a part of my body as filthy, as shameful.  But I also don't want to think of it as bigger and more sacred than the rest of me.

I'm all for resisting the idea of shame, but replacing it with the idea of sacredness, without understanding the yoni concept as part of a whole person, doesn't grant a woman control of, ownership of, and pride in her sexuality.  It only estranges the woman from her sexuality in the opposite direction.

So all that polymer clay yoni jewelry on Etsy (some of which, admittedly, is lovely)?  When I look at most of it, all I can see is a woman desperately resisting the idea that sex is dirty ... by putting it away from herself and her life entirely, promoting it as a passage to the sacred experience rather than a part of herself, her sexuality, her pleasure.  How is this different from the Victorian narrative?  How is this helping anyone?

A linklist, which should really be one word

... this spammy blog (is there a term for this?) uses an article I found while trying to discover M's Ratemyprofessor rating, and it is just about the funniest damn thing I've ever seen.  M and I did dramatic readings to each other.

Is this a thing now?  Seriously someone -- is this a thing?

On a more relevant-to-anything note, here are two of the many cool things I've turned up while doing the copywriting for this lovely site, Keys of Paradise:

This mellifluously written essay on musk is fascinating, informative, and a truly beautiful piece of online writing which is a superb example of structuring lengthy content for the Internet reader.

There is an loa in the Voodoo tradition who protects abused women and lesbians, hopefully not always in combination: Erzulie Dantor.

And everything I ever wanted to know about alchemy can be learned from these sites: Alchemy-Works, which does sell some of its products but is more valuable for its wealth of information, and <"http://www.alchemylab.com/guideto.htm">a page on which I have wasted hours which  gives the alchemical properties of hundreds and hundreds of ordinary foodstuffs.

On a vaguely related note, many props to the makers of the Mystery Case Files games, available from Big Fish Games and on disk at many fine department stores.  They're a combination of hidden-object with item-adventure games; they capture the essence of the greatest old-style text adventures in their snarky humor, intertextual references, and complex plotlines, but are also absolutely state of the art in graphic rendering and in the incorporation of live-action film with digital art scenes.  They have a smoother and more graceful user experience than their imitators as well.  And, as I was playing the latest entry, "13th Skull," between pages of my novel-sized list of item descriptions, I realized they also apparently have a really excellent cultural consultant.

"13th Skull" has a few problems in terms of atmosphere, notably the fact that while the previous games, "Return to Ravenhearst" and "Dire Grove," had an engaging and incredibly atmospheric creepiness, this one had sort of a hokey Scooby-Doo ghost feel.  I'm quite willing to believe that this was deliberate (M was not so kind about it), but it's a little startling -- perhaps it's the lack of a well-developed and sympathetic victim to save.  Or the fact that there are about four actual Southerners voicing the Louisiana residents.  Anyway, the point is, despite the oddly built atmosphere, every depiction of voodoo and hoodoo spells is, as far as I can tell in my admittedly amateur experience, perfectly accurate.  Right on!

Crap, this post has no subject.  Unrelated photo time!


Available here.