For the minority of yoga teachers (and smaller minority of yoga consumers) who have woken up to the fact that somatic dominance is a primary currency in commodified yoga, the Johnny Kest scene in the recent NYT/FX/Hulu doc was outrageous, but also recognizable and predictable.
There’s been a lot of great commentary on it already — most of it nailing down how the embodied entitlement of implied-consent “adjustments” merges with Kest’s patronizing shutdowns of the very straightforward feedback given by the women who were able to speak in the moment.
Theodora Wildcroft remarked that this is the kind of thing that exposes the mainstream industry as unworthy of public service — a blow to everyone moving in that direction. There will be much more to say on that point.
I’d like to highlight a few other things.
Reporter Katie Rosman opens the documentary by describing how in ten years of yoga practice she had never heard of the Jois abuse stories. There’s a good reason for her to have been in the dark, as revealed when Maty Ezraty describes an intentional decision taken by some of Jois’s students to not report his crimes. It’s so well hidden, in fact, that Kest is able to freely advertise and monetize his authority as a student of Jois, which likely factored into the marketability of his training system to a corporate chain.
This is important to repeat: it’s bad enough that Jois’s crimes were hidden, now we see clearly that the invisibility of Jois’s crimes has enabled brand profitability for teachers of Ashtanga and beyond. In the meantime, Jois survivors have left careers, suffered health problems, and racked up therapy bills.It was clear to me years ago that this wicked calculus would put Jois’s survivors in class action territory if it were not for the fact that those who have profited on Jois’s name aren’t represented by any suable organization.
The documentary does not answer the question of whether Kest has committed assault. But it does show how easily he could.
How?
Kest is operating in a somatic environment normalized by Jois, and which neither the industry around him nor its trade associations have challenged in any accountable way. The environment has changed in that adjustments have been standardized and domesticated within training systems, and the somatic dominance has crossed a gender line. But the basic premises remain. Here’s an incomplete List:
- The teacher assumes dominant and definitive knowledge over the student’s body.
- That knowledge is established by the objectifying male gaze* that diagnoses flaws that must be manipulated back into order. This means that the adjustment starts and can be felt before the touch. (*can come out of men’s or women’s eyes).
- The interventions are endowed with transformative mystery and so there can be no informed consent. (I.e.: The student’s body is to be enlightened to something it did not yet know. This can cannot be pre-explained.)
- Thinking or talking about what’s happening in the power dynamic encounter constitutes an interruption of esoteric communication. Asking questions means you’re not tuning in to the silent sweaty wisdom of God.
- The unregulated environment of implied consent, heavily gendered power dynamics and the value of silence provokes a spectrum of responses. Enthusiastic responses are instantly recruited to support the marketing narrative of the space, regardless of whether they are healthy or fawning (trauma-related).
This List begins to explain why what is so bizarre and outrageous to the awake yoga teacher/consumer seems perfectly natural to Kest. It’s not just entitlement and male privilege on display. It is decades of a very specific matrix of embodied power relations that have become invisible to those ensnared in them.
This List also tells us why it’s so hard for Kest’s clients in that room to speak up. They’ve been told in dozens of implicit ways before they even enter the room that he’s in charge and his authority threads back to a spiritual master. Plus: surely a national fitness chain wouldn’t be endorsing and hiring someone unsafe. Add to that the sunken costs of getting to that conference and the cognitive dissonance of wanting to have a good time and not harsh anyone’s mellow, and the path of least resistance beckons. In the most vulnerable cases it’s not about the easy way out at all, but about having frozen.
The doc shows in clinical detail the spectrum of responses to a rigged game, from seeming acceptance, to awkward silence, to patient offers to help Kest see that consent cards might be a good idea, to a firm challenge on the necessity of consent, to someone who’s able to say that the “diaper change” might trigger PTSD from past sexual assaults. Up until this point, this very spectrum has been used to justify and victim-blame, which is Kest’s fallback position when he tells the story about how the same touch on two different people provokes different responses. The subtext is: what’s he supposed to do with these crazy women? It’s not his problem, is it?
The mainstream upshot of the Rosman report is that, without a doubt, yes it is his problem. But it’s not a problem that he will have the resources to solve. And it’s not a problem that whistleblowing on abuse can really change either, given that the Jois, Manos, and other stories are well-exposed now, and very little has happened on a systemic level. Think about all of the platformers and gatekeepers who let this stuff happen because the money flows? Rosman asked tough questions of Kest’s corporate bosses, but how about the yoga conference organizers? How about his retreat hosts?
If you’re a yoga administrator and you’ve watched all this reporting pour out in 2018-present and you don’t immediately institute consent policies for your events, you’re asleep at the wheel, IMO.
Trade/educational influence is also not enough, given that Kest has been certified by YA for how many years and sounds surprised to even hear of the notion of consent, even as YA has poured big money into trying to get the most basic best practices out there and part of the conversation.
At the end of the doc, Rosman asks the simplest question of all: How come barbers, manicurists, and massage therapists all need licenses to touch other people’s bodies, and Johnny Kest doesn’t? Some of us have been asking that for years, and I haven’t heard a single answer to this question that doesn’t appeal to a sense of grandiosity or narcissism that claims the yoga teacher is somehow doing something too special to understand.
