Salon.com > Whitney Joiner

The yogification of America

Sun, 02 May 2010 15:01:00 +0000

By now it's safe to say that the Great Yoga Takeover of America is complete. According to a 2008 Yoga Journal study, 15.8 million Americans engage in some form of the ancient Indian physical and meditative practice, spending almost $6 billion a year on yoga classes, mats, DVDs and exotic retreats. There’s yoga for couples, yoga for babies, yoga for dogs. (As the New York Times reported recently, there’s already a scrappy, populist yoga-for-the-people movement afoot, a backlash against the steep price tag of upward of $20 for a 70- or 90-minute class.)

But how, exactly, did yoga become so firmly entrenched in American culture? While its explosion is certainly a product of the last few decades, it still comes as a surprise -- given its massive popularity -- to find that not so long ago, yoga was considered dangerous, possibly evil, and certainly a threat to the chastity and delicate nature of American women. Yoga as home-wrecker? That's a new one.

Not quite Americans

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:30:00 +0000

The small Texas town where I live, Marfa, is the home base of one of the largest U.S. Border Patrol sectors, covering 165,000 square miles and encompassing 25 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border. From my house, I can hear the Border Patrol headquarters' intercom, alerting agents to calls on line two or line three; their green and white patrol cars are everywhere, around town and throughout far west Texas. It's a daily reminder that we are living on the edge of a line in the desert, a line that Homeland Security is vigilant about protecting -- keeping certain people in and certain people out. A line that migrants will spend thousands of dollars, countless days and untold psychological turmoil trying to cross in an attempt to make it into America.

Dive-bar dharma

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:17:00 +0000

Sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion on the floor of a Bowery yoga studio, 29-year-old Ethan Nichtern -- a community organizer, writer and Buddhist teacher -- looked around at the roomful of 20- and 30-somethings.

"Remember the Road Runner versus Wile E. Coyote cartoons? In New York we often feel like a drugged-out version of Road Runner -- running all over the place, but not getting anything done, right?"

The room nodded. What New Yorker doesn't feel like Road Runner?

"We're constantly looking three or five years ahead, waiting for that moment when you finally achieve what you set out to achieve, and it's like everything in between is just commuting," he continued. "Then it arrives, and it's kind of depleted, so you move on to the next goal." More nodding, and hands went up to describe moments of glory (the grad school acceptance letter, the coveted job, the relationship you fantasized about for ages) that eventually faded: a lesson in the classic Buddhist teaching of impermanence.

"As usual," Nichtern announced at the end of the evening, "we'll continue this conversation at the bar downstairs."

Live girl-on-girl action!

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:50:00 +0000

Julie was a freshman at Northeastern University in Boston when she first saw two straight girls making out. The Norfolk, Mass., native had just arrived on campus for the start of the school year, and she was at a frat party. "Some guys were flirting with a girl, saying to her, 'You should make out with your friend,'" says Julie, now 20. (Like the other young women quoted in this article, she asked that her last name not be used.) "The girl said, 'Oh, no, I don't want to.' Then she looked at her friend and smiled, like maybe it wouldn't be so bad. They pecked on the lips, but the guys kept egging them on, so they ended up French-kissing. Me and my girlfriends looked at each other and said, 'I can't believe they're doing that!'"

After two months at Northeastern, the "girl-on-girl" make-out session had become inevitable at parties, but Julie still hadn't kissed a woman herself. Then she and a female friend showed up at a party without the $5 cover charge, and she suddenly realized that girl-on-girl action could be a form of currency. "I said to the guy, 'What if we make out? Will you let us in for free?' He said, 'Yep, do it.' I knew it'd be something that [the guys] were into which would get us what we wanted -- to save $10."

The gloom and doom canon

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 19:27:00 +0000

I was preparing for my big move to college, loading the car with freshman necessities -- the new computer, the photos of friends, the clothes I'd promptly abandon for more Massachusetts-blizzard-appropriate attire -- and lugging a box of old books to the trunk, when my mother stopped me. "Why are you taking those?" she asked, gesturing towards a pile of young adult novels like Francesca Lia Block's "Weetzie Bat" and Louise Fitzhugh's "Harriet the Spy." "You're not going to have space for them, or time to read them." Why am I taking these? I thought. And then I realized why: They were coming with me for comfort, for reassurance. "They're my friends," I said.

Mom and I both laughed, but it wasn't a joke, really; I felt like I needed these books around. Growing up, I relied on the books I read -- more than my family, more than friends -- to teach me about people, relationships, life in general. And I relied on their characters to remind me that, even though I perpetually felt like an outsider, I wasn't completely alone -- whatever I was feeling, someone had felt that way before.

It girl gone wild

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 20:16:00 +0000

The media loves the barely legal girl with a troubled past and a memoir -- or a novel so thinly veiled you can see through it -- in hand. (See Elizabeth Wurtzel, Amy Sohn, Molly Jong-Fast). So it makes sense that Abigail Vona, the 20-year-old author of the just-released "Bad Girl: Confessions of a Teenage Delinquent," an account of her year at a Tennessee lockdown facility for delinquent teens, has received an ample amount of press already.

Sex, lies and the “down low”

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 19:27:00 +0000

On July 24, Chicago-based author, businessman, speaker and HIV/AIDS activist J.L. King joined other prominent African-American writers in New York for the weekend-long Harlem Book Fair. He'd been invited to sign copies of his controversial new book, "On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of 'Straight' Black Men who Sleep with Men," and to participate in a panel about fidelity in black relationships. The fair was a success -- King's book sold well, and the panel went smoothly -- until Saturday evening, when he attracted some unwanted attention.

"We're walking and taking in everything," King's manager, Marshall Douglas, told me over breakfast at King's Park Avenue hotel the next morning, "and this guy walks up and says to J.L., 'You're a homo!' And he stopped the people around him -- 'That guy right there is a homo! He's the one who wrote the book! Yo, why are you doing this to us? My wife is asking me if I'm doing that D.L. bullshit!'"

One strike and you’re out of school

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 22:34:00 +0000

In November 1996, Dustin Seal, then a high school senior, was expelled after authorities at his Knoxville, Tenn., high school found a 3-inch knife in his car. Even though the knife wasn't Dustin's, and even though the friend who'd left the knife in Dustin's car claimed responsibility for it, the administration didn't budge: Under the school's "zero tolerance" policy, every student found with a weapon on campus had to be expelled.

Dustin became depressed and withdrawn after his expulsion, says his father, Dennis, a 58-year-old retired commercial contractor. "He would ask me constantly: When are they going to let me back in school with my friends? How can they take everything away from me when I've done nothing wrong?"

The Seals sued the school district and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, winning at every step. But by the time the court sent the case back to the local level for Dustin to claim damages, he was too exhausted to continue fighting. He settled for $30,000 in December of 2001.

Six months later, Dustin spent a June day with his father shooting pool. He went home that night and repeatedly left messages on Dennis' answering machine while Dennis, sick in bed, slept in the next room: "It doesn't look like we're going to the bike show tomorrow, Dad, but I love you." "Dad -- goodbye."

Here comes the (freaked out) bride

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 18:38:00 +0000

During her engagement in the fall of 1995, Sheryl Paul found countless wedding planners offering advice about dresses and flowers and food -- but she didn't find any books that helped her with the big problems she was facing: the fear of marriage and becoming a wife, and the anxiety about leaving behind her family and single life. After all, planning a wedding and getting married should be an experience nothing short of ecstatic, right?

Not always. The engagement, the wedding and the first few months of married life are periods of constant ups and downs, says Paul, a Los Angeles-based therapist and author. But none of the wedding books she read discussed this emotional roller coaster.

So Paul, who was earning an M.A. in counseling psychology at the time, wrote her own wedding book -- "The Conscious Bride: Women Unveil Their True Feelings About Getting Hitched." "As part of my research I conducted interviews with many women and I quickly learned that I was not the only one who felt afraid and anxious while planning my wedding," says Paul. "Some women burst into tears when they were proposed to, some wanted to flush their engagement ring down the toilet, some cried on their wedding night and had no idea what was going on. They didn't have the vocabulary to name and talk about their experience."

My pseu-called life

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 15:51:00 +0000

It's hard to remain anonymous when you're on a book tour and doing countless interviews, but Zoe Trope is trying. "Zoe Trope" is the pen name of a 17-year-old from Portland, Ore., whose memoir, "Please Don't Kill the Freshman," was released earlier this month by HarperTempest, an imprint of HarperCollins.

A 17-year-old with a memoir?

A 17-year-old with a $100,000 advance to write the memoir?

A memoir blurbed by Dave Eggers ("Zoe Trope's book is unflinching") and Jonathan Safran Foer ("I'm in awe of Zoe Trope").

Well, yes.

It's been a busy few years for Zoe, and she's trying to keep a modicum of privacy in Portland: She won't allow pictures of her face to be used in the press, and she won't give out her last name or the names of her parents, older brother, or high school. "So much of it has to do with my age," she says about her decision to remain anonymous. "I didn't want people to know where I lived or where I went to school and bother me or my friends." But she doesn't kid herself. "It's really terribly easy to figure it out," she says. "Redheads named Zoe in my city? Not that many."

The Army be thuggin’ it

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 22:01:00 +0000

Three times a week, 48 weeks a year, a four-man team drives a huge yellow Hummer to a different location. It might be a college or high school campus, a major fraternity gathering, an NAACP event, MTV's Spring Break, or BET's Spring Bling: If lots of African-American teens will be there, the Hummer wants to be there, too.

Spray-painted with patriotic images (a rippling American flag, a smiling white woman in a U.S. military officer's uniform), the yellow Hummer is the signature vehicle for the U.S. Army's "Taking It to the Streets" campaign, a hip-hop-flavored tour launched a year ago by Vital Marketing Group, the Army's African-American events marketing team. During these events, the Taking It to the Streets team lets possible recruits hang out in the Hummer, where they can try out the multimedia sound system or watch Army recruitment videos. The Army's team often throws contests, too: Which possible recruit can shoot the most baskets, do the most push-ups, go up the rock-climbing wall the fastest? The winners are awarded Army-branded trucker hats, throwback jerseys, wristbands and headbands. Want a customized dog tag? They've got a machine that makes them. Want to see what it's like to fly a plane? There's a flight simulator.

“Melodramatic representations of teenagers always bother me”

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 21:38:00 +0000

I'm having a hard time remembering my 7th-grade year. "You wrote a lot in your journal," my mother said, when I asked her about it. "And cried a lot. And listened to the radio all the time." Oh, right. Maybe I'd blocked it out. Middle school, how I hated you: those ridiculous Skidz pants and Z. Cavaricci jeans; the mixture of pride and shame about getting A's; the humiliation of my complete inability to roller skate, which was the only thing to do on Friday nights in my small Kentucky town.

While I didn't spend my afternoons huffing computer cleaner and dropping acid in my neighborhood park when I was 13, I still related to Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), the angry, out-of-control teenager in writer-director Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen." Tracy's an overachiever in her Los Angeles middle school; she writes dark poetry and gladly helps her mother around the house ... until she starts 8th grade and decides she's sick of being in the nerdy group and of being her mother's "baby." She wants to be like Evie (Nikki Reed, who co-wrote the movie), because everybody in 7th grade wants to be like Evie: hot, fearless, multiply pierced, sought after by guys and envied by girls.

The beard, the breasts and the bulge

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 19:16:00 +0000

In the cramped basement dressing room of a tiny club in New York's East Village, Stacey Whitmire, 28, prepares to take the stage. She has everything she needs to transform herself into her alter ego, Johnny Kat: his trademark '70s denim and leather patchwork bell-bottomed suit; hair clippings from a recent cut that she'll use for his mutton chops; and, of course, the package -- a small, pliable "softie" that resembles a flaccid penis. Truthfully, Whitmore's softie -- covered with a thin layer of fuzz and lint - is pretty sad-looking. But she'll use it anyway, because when you're a drag king, you have to pack with something.

"I used to use a sock cock," she says. "But I got the softie last year and it's fun having that realness in my pants."

Whitmire's Johnny Kat is the opening act for Kingdom Come, a touring cavalcade that will take five of North America's best-known drag kings throughout the South and Midwest. For three weeks, the kings -- Carlos Las Vegas, Ken Las Vegas, Christopher, Luster and Pat Riarch -- will tool around in a Winnebago, performing in places like Jackson, Miss., and Chattanooga, Tenn. And they'll be trailed by a film crew. Director Sonia Slutsky and producer Nigel Noble (the team behind the New York Times Television's "Portraits of Grief") are filming the tour for a documentary, tentatively titled "On the Road with the Kings," to air this fall or winter on the Discovery Health channel.

Not your mother’s comic book

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 21:26:00 +0000

For an artist known for creating unsettling comics filled with graphic sexual imagery, Phoebe Gloeckner's studio, a converted garage attached to her suburban Long Island home, is surprisingly subdued. Her daughters' artwork decorates the walls. Bookshelves overflow with scientific reference books, "Sanford and Son" videotapes, coloring books. Fluffy pillows cover an oversized chair and a built-in loveseat by the door. It's cluttered, homey, comfortable.

Only two illustrations of Minnie, Gloeckner's signature character, alter ego and the heroine of her brilliant new comics/text hybrid novel, "Diary of a Teenage Girl," hang above her desk. While working on "Diary," Gloeckner, 42, a medical illustrator and the reigning queen of alternative comics, couldn't display most of her illustrations, she says. She didn't want her daughters, ages 11 and 4, to see them.

Of course: How could she explain the "Diary" drawing of 15-year-old Minnie and Monroe, her 35-year-old lover -- and her mother's boyfriend -- arguing naked with Monroe's scrotum in plain view? Or the one of Minnie watching a pimp swagger down San Francisco's Market Street and wondering, "How does one become a prostitute?"