Mathilde Turner
For the first time in my rapidly lengthening life, a month and a half ago, I moved north of the river to Pimlico: London’s yummy mummy hotspot. To fit in with our pristinely coiffed, beige wearing neighbours, my flatmate and I decided to book a local yoga class. The alternative, purchasing a lacy stroller and giving birth seemed like too much of an initial investment. Our instructor was very much what one might expect from a yogi: a white woman, self-baptised Krystal, with dreads and an intertital tattoo. After a relatively enjoyable session involving repeated failed attempts at touching our toes and, rather perplexingly, several minutes of personifying our left and right nostrils, we lay in the dark, softly sighing ourselves into a meditative state. It was then we were struck with an offer we couldn’t refuse: a full moon naked yoga session. It promised to solve our ancestral trauma, reconnect us to our wombs, and even resolve our conflict with our mothers. It seemed we had discovered the female equivalent to Viagra, a cure to all the problems a woman (or, in Krystal’s terms, a womban) may encounter.
On the day, we trekked all the way to Zone 3 for a pre-nudity foraging session in the Walthamstow Wetlands. Unfortunately, following an erratic WhatsApp location, we never made it into the Wetlands. We seemed stuck in an endlessly repeating loop. Every 10 minutes we would somehow pass the same landmarks: a Co-op, a cafe advocating against whale torture in Moby Dick, and an overpriced organic shop. Nonetheless, within this suburban nightmare, we did our own foraging: in a bush, we found the egg of the rare Kinder bird, clearly an 8-month-old easter remnant, which provided some much-needed sustenance. Having had our fill of nature’s gifts, it was time to head to the yoga studio. Wombs at the ready, we made our way to Hooker’s Road, E17.
Trepidating, we entered.
We found ourselves in a well-lit room with a large window overlooking the car park. After some introductions, journaling and meditation, it was time for the ecstatic dance to start. It was a rather tense affair as we discreetly eyed each other up to see who would be the first to strip, all while swaying to, surprisingly, Enrique Iglesias. I hadn’t really planned to bare all but somehow, remarkably quickly, we were romping around in the nude, with the occasional tentative primordial scream thrown in. Guiltily, I gloated in having the most bountiful bosom. Finally, the yoga began. It was a rather sweaty affair, which brought about the most unexpected aspect of the session. As we deeply inhaled and exhaled, several distinctive smells wafted about, united by one common source: the minge.
I thought I’d be more prepared; I’d taken a preparatory trip to the Vagina Museum. Unfortunately, it hadn’t quite covered the necessary areas. It mainly involved a history of period products, with constant affirmations of how sexy periods were. This struck me as rather odd, considering I don’t believe in vampires. As I walked past a giant bedazzled tampon, flashy slogans screamed from every side, that everything women did was sexy – be it bleed, grow hair, age or pick our noses. Sex appeal, it seems, is a requirement for destigmatisation. There is only one way to be a feminist, and that is to accept and believe that you are sexy all the time.
Pop feminism makes us objectify ourselves before others even have a chance to. Margaret Atwood wrote: ‘Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy (…) You are your own voyeur.’ But as I exited the exhibition into the museum gift shop, which was about as big as the exhibition itself, I could see that times had changed. The fictitious man inside my head had been replaced by an ungendered capitalist, a Mx Monopoly, winking at me while drinking from a hip flask with a cartoon uterus on it (a cuterus! Female anatomy is palatable, rejoice!), sporting a t-shirt with cartoon boobs on it (one size fits all, as long as you fit UK 6-12). With a handful of pictures of various vaginas, thrown in seemingly for no other reason than to encourage fetishism (and of course, remind you that your labia is inherently sexy and beautiful), my visit was over. I felt rather weighed down by the newfound realisation that there was no respite from the erotic sphere. Although I’d acquired little enlightenment around vaginas themselves, I did feel I now better understood why men send dick pics. If relentless sex appeal is at the heart of empowerment, patriarchal privilege must be to blame for the belief that grainy images of pinkish rods pave the path to the bush.
You might now better understand why I was caught off guard by the stench of clunge in the yoga studio. In its unexpectedness, its lack of commercialisation, it symbolised that very respite that is so difficult to pin down. None of the women crow-posing in this room were naked for anyone but themselves – we weren’t performing for each other, or for the spectator that lives in every passer–by. In this space, it was possible to let go of self-consciousness because it was only our own consciousness that mattered.
Women shouldn’t need to believe that everything about them is amazing in order to believe they should be treated as people; perhaps a naked yoga class is as good a starting point as any to raise resistance against global yassification.
