Feminism and the White Tigress

It is a great shame that modern day pornography has perverted our understanding of sex and sexuality. As a feminist, I have spent much time working against the sex industry and its encroachment onto our lives and how we understand and perform our sexuality. I’ve always been deeply disturbed by the disembodied, disempowered and degrading use of female bodies in pornography, as well as the buying and selling of a female body to hundreds or perhaps even thousands of men in prostitution.

Coming to terms with the sexual teachings of the White Tigress and the awakening of my sexuality that this entailed has meant dealing with how these sexual practices have conflicted with my feminist understandings of sexuality. Or at least, how they have appeared to conflict on the surface.

Most of these conflicts, however, have felt to me as more intellectual then intuitive. As mentioned in my first post, so many of the sexual teachings of the White Tigress have felt intuitive and natural to me. However, because some of the sexual practices of the White Tigress resemble the acts seen in pornography, and as pornography is a great perversion and debasement of sexuality, learning of the White Tigress has made me need to reconceptualise these same acts in a new and different light.

The first practice that at first glance sits uneasily with my feminist analysis of pornography is the practice of Congealing the Dragon’s Jade which requires the man to ejaculate on the woman’s face. Because the ‘cum shot’ has been so central to pornography and is degrading to women, in many ways representing the ultimate use of her body and her face as a sex object, the intuitive feminist reaction to such a practice is to feel repulsion. But in the White Tigress practice, which was developed long before pornography, ejaculating onto the woman’s face was used as a means of physical restoration of the skin. Practicing the teachings of the White Tigress has required me to understanding the same act in a different manner, and to dissociate it from the negative connotations of porn.

In a similar manner, the practices of the White Tigress encourage women to gag on the man’s penis. This act, too, has been grossly perverted by porn. ‘Gagging’ has been used as an act to cause suffering to women in pornography, and to totally dominate the woman so much so that she is no longer able to control her body or the sex act that is being done to her. The same act in the practices of the White Tigress, however, is used to increase the production of saliva. Saliva, in Taoist practices, is a health-giving fluid and a component of the elixir of immortality. Gagging increases saliva production, from which the woman will reap benefits, and increases the eroticism of the act for man, working him into a higher state of arousal through which he will ejaculate more semen, which is the ultimate goal of the White Tigress and the key to her physical and spiritual restoration.

Another example of a White Tigress which, at first glance, sits uncomfortably with feminist values is the teaching of submissiveness. In the practices of the White Tigress, however, her submissiveness is aimed at extracting from the man as much qi as possible, as the more receptive the woman is, the more the man is inclined to give.

These are some of the teachings of the White Tigress which at first may seem to sit in contradiction to feminist ideas of sex and sexuality. However, these acts need to be taken outside of our current understandings of sex and sexuality that have been heavily shaped by pornography. These practices need to be understood in a completely different context, where the physical acts may be the same, but the connotations of the acts are completely different. Besides which, the ultimate goal of the White Tigress is to extract the life energy of many, many unwitting men, to replenish her own qi and to ensure her youth, beauty and longevity. And those are not the acts of a submissive woman.