The Crisis of Procreation: Regulating Sex in Global Guru Movements

Abstract

This paper analyzes the value placed on no-sex and non-procreative sex within Hindu-inspired contemporary global guru-led movements. Some of the largest global guru movements of the 20^th century expended considerable energy regulating sex and procreation, such as Muktananda (Siddha Yoga), Sathya Sai Baba, Mata Amritanandamayi, Osho/Bhagwan Rajneesh, and ISKCON. Most of these gurus (and guru-led movements) have encouraged their aspirants (sannyasis and brahmacaris) to be celibate, but many have legacies of sexual allegations, transgressions, and abuses. Osho/Bhagwan Rajneesh is an outlier in that he encouraged unbridled sexuality, but still he understood procreation to be an impediment to spiritual engagement. The data for this research is based in archival research into sexual policies and regulations, and legal accounts of sexual transgressions and abuses. This paper argues that these anxieties around sex, and particularly around procreation, generate harmful abuses of power at the level of both the interpersonal and the bureaucratic. In some cases, pressures against procreative sex resulted in gurus and disciples engaging in homosexual sexual relationships. In others, clandestine abortions were secured for female gurus and devotees. Other ‘celibates’ bypassed the possibility of procreation by engaging sexually with children, and others enacted bureaucratized sterilization. In short, the field of celibates is ripe with anxieties about sex and procreative sex, but it is also prolific in its production of regulative strategies, and means of circumnavigating sexual prohibitions.