Just as pornography is not an accurate representation of sex in a loving relationship, ‘yoga porn’ bears little resemblance to real yoga.
Similar to ‘food porn’ (glamourised images of food or cooking), yoga porn is pictures of women in bikinis doing ‘advanced’ yoga poses on a beach or mountain top. Sure these images look beautiful and may inspire some people so what’s the problem? The problem with yoga porn is that it doesn’t represent yoga. Here’s why:
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1. Even people in a Bikram yoga class wear more clothes than these scantily clad women.
2. You never see them doing Downward Dog or Warrior 1, it’s all about what looks good.
3. You rarely see images of men, women older than 30, non-Caucasian women or overweight people in these images so it does not represent the composition of your average yoga class.
4. Often the alignment looks dangerously wrong, but most people will just be staring at her body, wishing they looked like that in a bikini.
5. Yoga on the beach isn’t fun, the sand gets everywhere…
6. Yoga is so much more than the physical pose (Post continues after gallery.)
#YogaPorn
But aren’t these images inspiring?
The pro-yoga porn people will argue that these images inspire people to try yoga for the first time. I believe that for every person that’s inspired, there are an equal number of people alienated from yoga because they’re too “fat”, too old or not flexible. As a yoga teacher and yoga studio owner, I feel the urge to speak out against yoga porn as its just so damaging to women’s self esteem and perpetuates the body image problems that yoga is slated to cure.