And Chastain didn't expose her body – just her sports bra. Others saw it as a celebration of the human body, and of the joyful exuberance that one experiences through jogging and other forms of exercise.Ĭlearly, our mores have changed – or have they? In 1999, women's soccer player Brandi Chastain caused an enormous controversy when she spontaneously stripped off her jersey after kicking the goal that ensured her team's victory. Critics, including me – yes, at the tender age of 10, I wrote a letter to the editor that was published – suggested, naively perhaps, that topless women simply don't belong on the cover of a serious sports magazine. Four decades ago, Sports Illustrated caused an enormous stir when its cover featured a topless woman jogging on the beach.
The debate over nude advertising and health & fitness is hardly a new one.
Is it "art", as some of its ardent proponents, including Budig and ToeSox executives maintain, or is it merely the latest twist in a long history of sexual and commercial exploitation?
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In one of the photographs in the series of ads, she's in a difficult Ashtanga yoga pose, known as "firefly", and her expresson is serious, but the effect is oddly disconcerting.
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According to Yoga Journal, some 18 million Americans – about 1 in 10 adults – were practising some form of yoga in 2006, though the numbers seem to have fallen off in recent years, even as the revenues generated by the industry continue to grow.īut something seems to have cracked inside the souls of long-time yoga enthusiasts when Budig agreed to be photographed wearing only her ToeSox. Until now, many have tolerated, and even celebrated, yoga's commercialisation as a way of promoting its popularity, even if it means "dumbing down" the practice or heavily tailoring it to the traditional fitness market to further expand its appeal. Thanks to heavy marketing, and word-of-mouth advertising, it's now a bustling business worth $6bn a year and featuring a gallery of self-promoting yoga "celebrities" like Budig, and an endless array of high-priced yoga accessories, including sticky mats, CD-roms, home videos and pricey yoga retreats and vacations in exotic Third World getaways. Budig posed provocatively in ads for the clothing manufacturer ToeSox, which prompted one of the magazine's original co-founders, Judith Hanson Lasater, to protest publicly, first in a letter to the editor, and more recently, in interviews.įor yoga purists, it's bad enough that yoga is no longer the quiet, esoteric practice of yore. So far, the two sides have largely confined their debate to articles and blog postings in popular online yoga magazines, including the industry's trade publication, Yoga Journal, where nude and semi-nude ads featuring a prominent Los Angeles yoga teacher, Kathryn Budig, first started appearing last summer. The controversy pits seasoned yoga teachers and other spiritual purists, who abhor the growing trend, against a new generation of aggressive yoga "entrepreneurs", anxious to promote the ancient Hindu practice as America's premier "wellness" lifestyle – even if it means exploiting, as critics maintain, the female "beauty myth" and embracing a "sex-sells" marketing strategy. A merican yoga practitioners are abuzz with a new controversy rocking their once boutique but now rapidly commercialising industry: magazine advertising and public yoga classes featuring unabashed nudity.