Karma Cola and the birth of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg
On its face, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg is a pretty unremarkable object. A shiny, cold stone. A smooth, marbled, asymmetrical oval, tapered at one end. It’s pretty, sure, but it’s a far more complex object than it appears. The Oscar Award winner’s online wellness empire, Goop, used to promote The Yoni Egg as “the strictly guarded secret of Chinese concubines and royalty in antiquity” that, when inserted into the vagina at long stretches, could “balance hormones, increase bladder control, and regulate menstrual cycles” in addition to stabilizing chi and feminine energy.
Those claims were shot down by a California court in 2018 and Goop agreed to pay $145,000 in penalties for making unsubstantiated claims about its products. Medical professionals debunked Goop’s pseudoscience, saying that the eggs, far from bringing feminine energy into balance, could lead to health risks like bacterial vaginosis or even Toxic Shock Syndrome. What’s more, a study led by OB/GYN Dr. Jennifer Gunter found zero evidence to support the claim that Gwynie’s Yoni Egg had its roots in ancient China.
And what of that name? The word Yoni actually comes from Sanskrit and was first used in Hindu spiritual texts to describe the vagina and feminine energy more broadly. It was later adopted by Buddhism and eventually made its way to the West where it was quickly stripped of its history. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg comes with no recognition of this history — just the vague claim that it was “the strictly guarded secret of Chinese concubines.” That’s one culturally scrambled egg!
It’s not a vaginal cure-all or an ancient Chinese (or Indian) artifact, but Gwynie’s Yoni Egg is so much bigger than its bogus claims. It’s a potent symbol of what happens when avarice and ignorance meet, another example of spiritually bankrupt Westerners ignorantly repackaging Eastern religion in the name of “wellness”. It’s cultural appropriation, come to a confusing apex.
That’s one culturally scrambled egg!
The circumstances are unique but the story isn’t new. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg emerged from the same cultural stew that birthed white-washed gimmicks like goat Yoga, a prime example of appropriation gone wild. Even the most seemingly authentic Yoga practices today are more akin to Western gymnastics than their ancient Indian namesake. The rebirth of Yoga is a solid place to start if you’re wondering how we got to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg. But it only tells part of the story.
If you really want to know from whence the stone ovum came, look no further than Gita Mehta’s 1979 literary debut. The short, psychedelic era parables that make up Mehta’s Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, paint a picture of a cultural ouroboros created by the haphazard melding of Western capitalism and Indian religion in the 1960s and 70s. While each has its own unique twist, almost all of her stories follow a similar trajectory: clueless Westerner in search of instant enlightenment travels to India where opportunistic holy men and straight swindlers offer karmic comeuppance in the form of spiritual snake oil.
Like the marketing copy for Gwynie’s Yoni Egg, Karma Cola reads like satire but it isn’t fiction.
Published in 1979, the loosely reported work of literary non-fiction, new journalism, or whatever you want to call it, still manages to hold up a mirror to the Western world’s endless commodification of Eastern spirituality. The episodes might seem dated, even cliche, until you realize we’re living in the sequel. The characters and the setting have changed but the bullshit remains the same.
Through a series of short, casual episodes, Mehta sets the stage for the cultural unravelling that made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg possible.
In Karma Cola’s opening chapters, Mehta documents the influx of hippies into her homeland in the late 60s and early 70s. Coming off the summer of love and seeking some meaning in chaos, they trailed teen idols like The Beatles, themselves following in the footsteps of Western intellectuals like William Butler Yeats and Aldous Huxley, as they mined Hinduism’s complicated history for solutions to capitalism’s unwanted side effects.
“It was fitting that the Beatles raised the cry Eastward Ho. The gentlemen of the Empire had left their calling cards three hundred years ago, and their great-grandsons could now at last afford to be indiscreet and dabble in the murky waters of Indian thought,” Mehta writes. When the shaggy descendants of India’s colonizers returned, they found a culture as thirsty for blue jeans and rock and roll as they were for wisdom and awakening.
“The seduction lay in the chaos. They thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong,” Mehta writes.
Thanks to icons like The Beatles and Allen Ginsburg (who makes a cameo in the book as a failed guru) the hippies came to India seeking instant enlightenment en masse. What they found, Mehta repeatedly argues, were opportunistic healers happy to cash in on the spiritual bankruptcy of the West. It sounds like heavy stuff, and it is, but the circumstances are so ridiculous, the ceremonies so ludicrous, that Karma Cola reads more like comedy than tragedy.
Alas! Instant salvation could be had at a price, and there were plenty of gurus keen to sell it, too.
Take the Hollywood scriptwriter who traveled to the banks of the Ganges, seeking a quick cure for his relentless sex drive. He encounters a bathing sadhu, who reluctantly breaks from his river dip to dispense wisdom and a load of semen on his sex-obsessed disciple.
Back in Hollywood, the scriptwriter recounts a naked stranger cumming on him in public as a “miracle”.
Or the story of the English aristocrat who got a mouth full of piss following his visit to a guru rumored to miraculously transform urine into rose water. Mehta writes of his awakening:
“It tasted,” observed the aristocrat later, “remarkably like ordinary urine.”
Not all of Mehta’s parables revolve around human excrement, but nearly all of them find Westerners so convinced of the thing that they are seeking that they will take it however they can get it. Like Gwynie’s Yoni Egg, rose water urine, at least to my knowledge, has no grounding in religion, and yet, we spiritually parched Americans are no less inclined to mindlessly lap it up.
Mehta’s India is full of white people voluntarily living in poverty; breaking their own bones as penance; abusing their children in the ultimate act of performative flagellation; even following their sadhus to their deaths. Here, corrupt ascetics treat Westerns like playthings, soul-seeking pawns with deep pockets. Some will pay with their lives, others in cash, but it’s all transactional. She quotes one guru from TIME magazine:
“My followers have no time. So I give them instant salvation. I turn them into neo-sanyasis.”
Alas! Instant salvation could be had at a price, and there were plenty of gurus keen to sell it, too. Trouble is, you get what you pay for, and each empty transaction comes at the cost of tradition.
Mehta’s India is also the home of the fame-hungry guru living lavishly while dispensing mantras like gum balls, to be chewed up and spit out when they no longer deliver the sweet juice of enlightenment. As the West sought awakening at any cost, Indians sought the apparent freedom of Western capitalism, happy to trade culture for cash. Mehta describes the exchange so sweetly and succinctly:
“You have the Karma, we’ll take the Coca-Cola, a metaphysical soft drink for a physical one.”
In that clearly unbalanced exchange the stage is set for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg, for Goat Yoga, and golden milk lattés. Karma Cola closes with the hippies retreating, taking their skewed ideas of karma, reincarnation, and enlightenment back to the West. Over the next half century, a new breed of gurus, informed by a decades-long game of cultural telephone, would repackage Eastern philosophy and sell it as “wellness,” often evading critiques of cultural appropriation.
Add a touch of Hollywood celebrity, a bunch of whack marketing copy, and a bundle of white sage and BOOM! You’ve got GOOP!
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Yoni Egg is still on sale today. It’s been stripped of its attachment to ancient Chinese history and its bogus medical claims, but the name remains. Without it, what would be left but a shiny cold stone? A smooth, marbled, asymmetrical oval, tapered at one end.