Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:
“This Is America” explores the undercurrents pulling Western civilization into the abyss.
I made the mistake a few months back of YouTubing yoga poses for my amateur morning yoga routine in the yard.
I’m actually pretty good at it, relatively speaking, despite little formal training aside from some free classes in a hi-so Bangkok studio I went to back in the day. (It was always a dystopian and jarring juxtaposition to leave the well-perfumed sanctuary of a Silom yoga studio into the urban hellscape that is the Central Business District.)
But there’s always room to acquire new and improved techniques.
In return for wanting to learn something valuable to improve my life, YouTube saw fit to put me onto what can only be described as the Bikini Yoga Whore algorithm, a close cousin to the Guitar Whore algorithm we have explored previously.
Related: This Is America: The Guitar Whore Thirst Trap YouTube Hustle
These are unserious people who intentionally select the most salacious positions so as to maximally showcase their assets, accompanied by the most enticing thumbnail lure maximum incel viewership into the sales funnel.
Call me old-fashioned, but I would prefer to learn how to do yoga from an individual steeped in the tradition — or at least someone who makes a good-faith effort to pay homage to it.
This yoga mentor would, ideally, have spent years studying not just the movements but the breathwork that goes along with them as well as their spiritual significance per the ancient Hindu canonical teachings from which the discipline emerged.
From whom I would not prefer to learn yoga is a twenty-year-old internet whore in a bikini next to a swimming pool, a half-step and a few months removed from launching an OnlyFans career, making fuck-me googly eyes at the camera.
The Social Justice™ left likes to complain loudly and often about something called “cultural appropriation,” in which (white) people foreign to a particular culture adopt aspects of it without fully appreciating or understanding it, as a sort of fashion statement or gimmick.
Related: PC Police Release Updated Annual List of Banned Halloween Activities and Costumes
Almost always, as in the case of proscribed, allegedly offensive Halloween costumes, accusations of “cultural appropriation” are weaponized tripe to endow academics with an inflated sense of indignation and therefore purpose in correcting social crimes they invented — plus a few big DEI bucks for themselves in the process.
But, if the term ever had merit, it’s in the case of the Bikini Yoga Whore.
Yoga, at its best, is a phenomenal tool for self-actualization using the media of breathwork and movement. I don’t profess to be a guru preaching enlightenment from an ashram or whatever, but I can see the merit plainly enough. It’s helped me and it’s helped friends of mine recover from addiction.
Clearly, this is a rhetorical question — the saturated market forces internet whores to innovate new schticks to monetize their bodies — but: is nothing sacred? Is there no sacred cow that can’t be monetized via sexualization?
Or is the sky the limit?
Are topless Bible readings for clicks next?
By natural disposition, I’m not actually a cultural conservative, or at least I wasn’t until recently. The internet whores, and the transgender groomers, and all similar manner of decadency and decay forced my hand.
Anti-drug people — and I learned this in my Reagan-inspired “Just Say No” indoctrination in public school in the 90s — talk about “gateway drugs” as in: if you start smoking pot, it’s short hop and skip to intravenous meth use (a dubious prospect largely at odds with actual research into the matter, which I don’t feel like necessarily getting balls-deep into here).
But the Internet Yoga Whore, and the Internet Guitar Whore, are absolutely gateways into Pornhub. You open an app like YouTube for some innocuous purpose, get bombarded with tits next to guitars or yoga mats, and your lizard brain hardwired for reproduction is activated. If you’re not mindful, the next thing you know your browser is headed straight for the pornography as if on auto-pilot.
Idiocracy, a masterpiece of taking the modern cultural trajectory to its logical end, touched on the mass-sexualization of everything for marketing purposes — in fact, the re-orientation of civilization itself around selling stuff (often using sex) and the social degeneration that it incurs.
Related: Bill Hicks and I Have Some Life Advice For Marketers
The bottom of the bikini yoga whore barrel
There’s one girl who’s the absolute bottom of the barrel of the yoga internet whore genre. She calls herself “flowinaparadise.”
What’s most egregious, perhaps, for anyone who knows anything about yoga is that this bitch’s form is all, totally, wrong in every single video she’s ever produced that I’ve seen. And YouTube has fed me a lot.
In no way whatsoever can flowinaparadise be plausibly said to be doing “yoga.” Without exception in her videos, she is bending over this way and that in front of the camera with her under-tits poking out under her shirt set against softcore porn music.
This is America.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
Follow his stuff Substack if you are inclined to support independent journalism free of corporate slant. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.
For hip Armageddon Prose t-shirts, hats, etc., peruse the merch store.
Insta-tip jar and Bitcoin public address: bc1qvq4hgnx3eu09e0m2kk5uanxnm8ljfmpefwhawv