American commodification of Tantra
• Heterogeneous
From a review of Kiss Of The Yogini by David Gordon White:
It is not only Hindu fundamentalists whom White disagrees with. He is equally critical of New Age appropriations of Tantric texts. He excoriates the Americans who “cobbled together the pathetic hybrid of New Age ‘Tantric sex’”, who “blend together Indian erotics, erotic art, techniques of massage, Ayurveda, and yoga into a single invented tradition”. New Age Tantra, he suggests, is to medieval Tantra what finger painting is to fine art, and he rails against “the funhouse mirror world of modern-day Tantra, in which Indian practitioners and gurus take their ideas from Western scholars and sell them to Western disciples thirsting for initiation into the mysteries of the East”. Here is another sort of pizza effect: India itself as the source of the Western misappropriation of India.
Wendy Doniger, The Times Literary Supplement: Tantric bodies