Eros Liberation / Sex Exploitation

A new article about the Neo-tantra school ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) misses the deeper dimensions

The Goddess Styx

I wanted to share a relatively unvarnished response to Anya Kamenetz’s quite devastatingly harsh article on ISTA (International School of Temple Arts), which just appeared in New York Magazine, “We All Have Predators Inside Us: Can a Neo-Tantric sex group dedicated to exploring dark desires root out abuse?” I feel a twinge of guilt because I told friends of mine within ISTA — some featured in the article — that I thought she was a great choice to write the piece. Of any writer that New York could choose, I thought Anya (a long-time environmental activist and Burner) was the most likely to be sympathetic to the personal-liberation-oriented ethos of ISTA. This was not reflected in the final article, which comes across as very negative.

I have known Anya for many years and consider her a friend, although we had a falling out during the Covid period (she blocked me on Facebook, hurting my feelings) and never truly reestablished our connection. Ironically, back then she thought I was part of the anti-vaccine camp, when I was actually seeking to undertake a deep dive through the many layers of shadowy ambiguity surrounding that health emergency to try to attain some level of clarity — for myself and our community. For the record, I am not anti-vaccine. My assumption remains that the Covid vaccines helped more than they harmed, but also harmed more than anticipated. Anya has built a successful career integrated into the mainstream media establishment — NPR, several books, etc — with all of its invisible biases. I consider her a wonderful person with a kind heart and a deep sense of social and ecological responsibility.

Let me step back, take a deep breath, and try to explain why I feel this is so important or even essential.

From a meta-systemic perspective, we can all see, I hope, that the gender dynamics, the issues in love, intimacy, and Eros, in some sense the “war” between men and women, remain a massive block preventing humanity’s evolution out of the repressive, exploitative, and patriarchal structures that now threaten us with extinction. As I write this, Donald Trump just made a deal to fly Andrew Tate and his brother out of Romania where they will be relocated to Florida where, if I understand correctly, Russell Brand has also taken up residence. The tech-fascist Neo-Christian Right has made a point of embracing and even celebrating toxic masculine predatory sexuality — they are using this as a sales technique for confused young men, who struggle with the ways that women have been attaining intellectual and financial parity with them and no longer want to be subjugated — although it is also true, I believe, that women, in some cases and at some times, will claim a victim identity as an underhanded technique of gaining (and misusing) power (to be clear: I am not saying that is the case for the women Anya profiles in her article).

You see: It is difficult to write about topics where multiple angles are all, simultaneously, partially true, and where it is easy to get attacked for saying things that different groups may perceive as bad. The Western mind has been trained in reductive, dualistic, binary thinking which no longer serves us when issues are complex and bleed into each other in many intricate ways. Sexuality is, I find, one of these very complex areas. We must do much better work at crossing this Stygian swamp or cleaning up this Augean stable, for the reasons I made clear in the last paragraph. Holding on to old angers, resentments, and judgments are not going to serve us well, going forward. Men and women need each other now — and that will be more the case as things get more dire in the years ahead.

For this reason, I felt a lot of disappointment in Anya’s article even though I am not surprised where she ended up. In fact, thinking about it, it was inevitable. Mainstream journalism has its own rhetorical structure and internal logic; it helps define and redefine social codes and collective ideologies, but tends to this in a very reactive, anti-intellectual way. There are spin cycles that arc across a number of years where you see a fringe topic like ayahuasca or polyamory at first treated with condescension and disdain, made a subject of ridicule. Then there is the new hype cycle and the same topic is given tremendously positive coverage. Then a few years later there is a backlash, scandals are uncovered, the topic is pilloried, and the process starts again. Journalists and podcasters make money and garner reputation from being on the ascending or the descending curve of a hype cycle — or they can do both, switching from celebrating to desecrating. There is little money to be made writing on such subjects shorn of hype or scandal.

I love ISTA and have done three workshops: Level One twice and Level Two once. I also attended one of their festivals held on a cliff overlooking the Dead Sea in Israel, which was extraordinary. I gained a great deal from these experiences, which have also been very difficult and challenging for me. I am also friends with Baba Dez, ISTA’s founder, who receives harsh treatment in the article. I am very slowly working on a book with a woman ISTA facilitator. The title of our slow-cooking book is Sex, Soul, and the Apocalypse: We start with our personal journeys around love and intimacy, and then expand into the larger archetypal and mythological dimensions of Eros as it operates across our contemporary world.