HOLDING THE CARDS

Security, specialness, and enlightenment—we've been more than willing to use our attractiveness and sexuality to procure these. And the more women I spoke with, the more I realized that while our teachers may have been the ones to initiate the relationships, we women harbor a deeply ingrained, age-old understanding that our attractiveness, in whatever form it takes, gives us the power to control and manifest outcomes—something we bring to the spiritual path a priori, and often unconsciously. Simply put, we know that there is an inherent power in being the ones who can say “Yes.”

Dr. Fisher illuminated the biological and anthropological reasons why women are able to exert such extraordinary influence and control through sexuality. “There's no question that women have an enormous amount of sexual power,” she said, “because they are the custodians of the egg, and take nine months to bear a baby. And they are the primary caretakers of the very young in every culture in the world. So women are exceedingly valuable, because they are the ones who will rear a man's DNA. As a result, around the world people tend to regard women as the giver of sex. The woman bestows the gift, and the man gets the gift if he plays his hand right. But she holds the cards.”

In her book, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Christina Hoff Sommers critiques some of the overarching feminist viewpoints that have emerged during the last twenty or thirty years—particularly the view that women are, by and large, victims of male abuse and exploitation. From that perspective, she concurred with Dr. Fisher: “Human psychology is just too complicated to be reduced to a simple power differential: woman equals victim equals oppressed. While it's true that the mentors have power,” she said, “women have their own power to attract the mentor. So as much as there's the mentor-student dynamic, there's the male-female dynamic, where there's known to be attraction. And for a woman, being young and beautiful is charismatic, as being older and powerful and wise is for a man. So both parties bring their attractions to the relationship, and it's uncertain who has more power.”

In fact, many of the women I spoke with clearly articulated an awareness of their own sexual power and the ability they knew they had to attract men. “I think we all grow up with strategies that we've learned for feeling safe and secure in the world, and special,” said Annie. “If you're born attractive, then you learn to use your femininity as a way of getting what you want. I was reasonably attractive and bright, and I knew from fairly early on that if there was someone who I really wanted to fall in love with me, I could bring it about. I'm very adaptable, and I knew how to match energies with people and adapt to a situation, so it wasn't hard to make my dharma instructor fall in love with me.”

“In my case,” said Diane, “I have to tell you, there were several teachers, and all of them were different. I think the Buddhist was somewhat innocent, and to some degree, he knew his power. But he was also curious, because somewhere I pushed buttons in him. He wasn't a sexual being, and I helped him out with that. At the same time, he helped me spiritually. So, who do you blame? Of course, what it comes down to can be an abuse of power, absolutely, and it is up to the teacher to draw that line. And while I really do believe it is the teacher's responsibility to act appropriately, I think that as adults we all have a responsibility for our actions. I mean, he's human, too, right? And here's this young, little twenty-four-year-old babe-ette . . . What are you supposed to do? Really!”

If we're honest with ourselves, seductiveness is second nature to women, and we begin cultivating our ability to attract surprisingly early in life. Some of my earliest, most vivid memories of attraction and seduction, at age fourteen, resulted in my first kiss—with the twenty-six-year-old handyman who took care of our home, shared my love of music, was physically desirable, and was older and experienced. And while it is true that he approached me, in a timeless moment I can remember like it was yesterday, what I now realize is that for months prior to that, I had been deeply intent upon him. I expressed that intent in a myriad of ways—from making sure I bumped into him in whatever corner of the house he was working to sitting at the piano and playing melodies into the stillness of the afternoon, knowing he would hear them. At that young age, and even earlier, I instinctively knew how to pull him toward me, the way a young kitten instinctively knows how to hunt its prey—that deep impulse having been preprogrammed into the very structure of its cells and psyche. The fact that it didn't lead much further than that kiss, I now see in retrospect, was ultimately due to his discretion rather than mine.

“There's power in female sexuality, and women have been aware of this and used it to their advantage, although we hard-line feminists always want to say to our disadvantage,” said Sommers. “But that is disrespectful of women, and it understates reality. Because in love affairs, first and foremost there is a man and a woman. And then there's the status and the background of the people, which also come into play. But fundamentally, you have two people. Of course, we're talking about a woman who is an adult. I'm not talking about a girl who is underage—that's a totally different situation—but a woman who is eighteen or twenty-one. I think she has to be viewed as a responsible moral agent making choices, because to view her as passive, easily manipulated, and exploited is to assume that she is somehow helpless and weak and ineffective as a human being. I do find that patronizing. We should not tell young women that that's always the scenario when they may know deep down inside that it's something quite different. So I'm really arguing against a one-size-fits-all approach to evaluating love affairs between spiritual mentors and students. I think that there's a lot more going on that has to be sorted out, and it could very easily turn out that the woman held most of the cards.”

Women's strong attraction to influential men can sometimes lead them to circumvent what would ordinarily be considered taboos to intimate relationship, including great disparities in age. Recounting the sexual relationship with her eighty-four-year-old teacher, Linda told me, “I was eighteen at the time, and although he was pretty vital as far as physical relationships go, it was not nearly as wonderful as those I'd had before or have had since. But it served the purpose of making me feel special and affirmed. In fact, over time the relationship actually became a kind of obsession. I felt that I got a spiritual power from being with him. And actually, he asked me to legally become a vice president of the organization.”

Indeed, a woman elevated to the highest status in a spiritual community through a sexual relationship with the teacher can reap the benefits of being most favored, most powerful, and most spiritual. As Heyn acknowledged, “That's the prize in that community, and I think that it's the most compelling possible situation a woman could be placed in.” June Campbell, author of Traveller in Space, has spoken openly about her experience as the sexual consort of one of the most renowned Tibetan teachers to come to the West, a yogi-lama who was purportedly celibate and whose holiness was widely recognized and revered. When asked in an interview in 1999 what motivated her to perpetuate the relationship for a number of years, she replied, “Personal prestige. The women believe they too are special and holy. They are entering sacred space. It produces good karma for future lives and is a test of faith.” As Dr. Fisher concluded, “[Sex] has always been an extremely powerful tool that women have, not just in the spiritual world, but in the business world, the academic world. I mean, think of the wife of the President of the United States—she didn't get there by election!”