I can never take Americans who fetshize yoga and ashrams and Ayurveda and Hindu spiritualism shit in general seriously because if you Google basically any prominent yogi in India you will almost always find them saying some absolutely absurd/fucked up shit. There's another yogi in India who opem discusses exterminating Muslims. Like I can't square this reality with the "peace and love" image that Americans (honestly non-American white westerners are even worse I think, like europeans/israelis/aussies) have of India and yoga and Hinduism in their head. Like talk about rose colored glasses lmao
Having India on the internet has been fascinating for getting to see (often) English-speaking cultures that have just not internalized "modern" norms against cheerfully celebrating like, rape, or exterminatory social cleansing.
what a strange strange thing to say.
Like, you could grant arguendo all the feminist stuff about America having a “rape culture” – the pre-Take Back The Night frat party and ‘80s teen house party scenes really were “become debilitated on alcohol and experience sexual contact pre-marked as valid before any issue of consent” as a young adult norm.
I don’t have a sense of how much it manifests in real life – respected elders’ sexual abuse of the young is often covered up! – but Japanese pop culture often has some sympathetic idealization of the dirty old man.
The UK had Benny Hill!
But still, since the late nineties, if I ever see someone on the Internet just reminiscing about stranger or acquaintance rape in a casual tone, like as if they were talking about this one time they played a pickup game of basketball and it wasn’t even like Their One Basketball Story, it is always, always, without exception, some Indian guy talking about village girls or aunties or tight choots or something.