Don’t take it from me, take it from the Hollywood Reporter:
Just as tastes in fashion, food and music evolve, so do tastes in arm candy, girlfriends and trophy wives. In Hollywood, one’s got to keep up with the ceaseless tide of status symbols…
When it comes to trendy trophy women, these alpha men compete in every venue of their lives. You can’t keep good testosterone down. So what possible genre of human could usurp the shiksas, shopgirls and Asian beauties? Who or what could be more desirable to powerful men of Hollywood and beyond? Yoga teachers. That’s right: Satnam to the new sex symbols. Whether practitioners of Ashtanga, Kundalini, Hatha, Vinyasa, Iyengar or Bikram, they’ve got major industry players in a twist.
The hands-on physical intimacy that comes with a private session or yoga class is a petri dish for hormones, and celebrities and industry people going for yoga teachers is just hitting its zeitgeist zenith now. On June 13, Crown Prince of Sweden Carl Philip married former erotic model/reality TV star/yoga instructor Sofia Hellqvist. Owen Wilson had a baby with yoga teacher Caroline Lindqvist in 2014. The wife of Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge fund billionaire, is former model Sonia Klein, now a yoga teacher who partnered with the family of late Ashtanga master Krishna Pattabhi Jois in 2012 to found Jois studios and clothes. The wife of New York-based hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb is yoga teacher Margaret Davidson Munzer, whom he married in 2004. Scrubs star John C. McGinley wed his yogini Nichole Kessler in 2007; screenwriter Greg Pruss married his, Anna Getty, in 2003. Pop maestro Dr. Luke has two children with his yoga teacher. So if you think Alec Baldwin was ahead of the curve — marrying yoga instructor Hilaria Thomas in 2012 — he wasn’t. He was just catching the wave. Kundalini master Guru Jagat of Venice’s Ra Ma Yoga Institute says of the hot-for-yoga-teacher trend, “I’ve definitely observed the phenomenon — lots of it.”
So now you know.
Like all good mating rituals, this one speaks to its time. “Most sexual norms are reflective of cultural norms,” says L.A. sex and relationship therapist Dr. Chris Donaghue. “With yoga on the rise, it’s expected that a yoga identity and body would become a highly eroticized commodity.” Yogini Mandy Ingber, who since 2003 has been instructing the likes of Aniston, Jennifer Lawrence and Emilia Clarke, says: “When you’re looking for a connection to the self, you’re more open to connecting with someone else. The relationship between a yoga instructor and client is very intimate.”
In other words, boy meets girl — in tights.
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