The Yoga Bro and the R A P E Academy Bro Are the Same Male

Some of the most submissive males I've ever met are yoga males. But they are only submissive to other males.

In March 2026, CNN published a months long investigation into a hidden network of men coordinating online to drug their wives to sleep, rape them, and film it. A French lawmaker called these networks online rape academies.

I made a short video on Instagram saying yoga bros and those men are the same. In this episode I explain exactly what I mean by that.

We cover:

• Why the performance of softness is not safety 
• What yoga males actually do with other males
• The private conversation that costs nothing and changes nothing
• Why the performance of safety functions as a perceptual weapon against women's own discernment
• Why submissive males are structurally incapable of doing accountability work

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

Transcript

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In late March of 2026, CNN published a month-long investigation into a hidden network of men who coordinated online to drug their wives and partners to sleep, rape them, and film it. They had a telegram group, they shared dosing advice, they discussed technique, they uploaded the videos to a pornographic site that hosted over something like over 20,000 of what they call quote-unquote sleep content. And a French lawmaker named Sandrine Josot called these networks online rape academies. These are spaces where men teach each other to become predators and how to coordinate to avoid detection. So I made a short video on Instagram last week saying that yoga bros and those men of the rape academies are the same males. And I want to explain a little further what I mean by that. So some of the most submissive males I have ever met are yoga males. But they're only submissive truly to other males. And I want to be precise about my language here because it's easy to hear submissive and think uh, you know, passive, weak, uh like conflict avoidant uh across the board. But that's not what I'm describing. I'm describing selectivity. I'm describing a male who has a fully operational hierarchy that he navigates with precision. He knows what he's doing, he knows exactly who's above him, he defes to those males without question, he protects those males without even being asked to, and then turns around and performs something completely different to the women in the community. Towards the women, they perform softness. These yoga bros perform softness, they perform self-awareness, they are self-effacing, gentle, conscious, quote unquote. They listen, they nod, they hold space, they ask good questions, they say the right things about boundaries and consent and you know, like doing the work. And every single one of those performances is in an effort to uh being chosen. It's in service of being chosen, of being trusted, of being considered the safe one in the room. That's the actual strategy behind the yoga bros, and it works completely. Now, what they do with other males is completely different. They're hierarchical, they're protective, and they're loyal. You know, watch what happens in a yoga community when a senior male teacher is accused of harm. Watch the men who were just holding space for the women in that community. Watch how they quickly become unavailable, how measured they get, how suddenly they're committed to complexity and nuance and not having all the information and you know, like trusting the process. They'll talk about it in private with you, they'll say the right things to their partners, to their close friends, you know, in conversations, but but in those conversations, that that costs them nothing because change doesn't happen that way. And then they'll pat themselves on the back and call it courage. They will feel, they'll genuinely feel that they have done something by having private conversations. They think they've taken a position. But they have not taken a position. They've what they've done is they've managed their own conscience at literally zero cost to themselves and zero benefit, most importantly, to the women being harmed. They will not say it where it counts when it counts publicly, not on record, not where their standing in the community is at stake, not where the senior male teacher whose proximity gives them credibility might notice. Every single time. Now the men in the CNN investigation, they're probably not visibly dangerous males. They were husbands, boyfriends, they are safe males, males that were loved and trusted. They did not present, they probably did not present as predators, they presented as, you know, partners. But they coordinated, they found each other, they built an infrastructure together, they shared information, and then they refined their technique, then they protected the network. You see, the coordination is what makes it a network rather than a series of isolated events. The coordination is what matters, and what it's what makes it function. And the yoga bros coordinate too. Except the coordination just looks a little bit different. It looks like who are the teachers that get recommended for trainings and who doesn't. It looks like which accusations get amplified and which ones get quietly managed. It looks like the private conversations that cost nothing. It looks like collective amnesia about testimony that's been on public record for years and decades. One group coordinated to commit the abuse, the yoga bros coordinate to protect the abuse. This is happening everywhere. This is happening in Albuquerque. This is happening all over the world right now. If you go to a yoga studio where there are male teacher, male yoga bros, they have coordinated to protect an abuser, to protect a predator. Do your research. So this is the part I want to spend the most time on because I think it's the most important part and the least understood is this performance of softness that is not safety, but we confuse it for safety. This is what gets these men chosen and keeps them protected, and it gets women to stop looking, to stop looking for any kind of red flags. When a man in your community, a yoga bro in the yoga community has established himself as conscious, gentle, self-aware, like when he has years of holding space on his record, when every woman you know thinks he's one of the good ones, your own perception becomes the unreliable variable. Not him, you. You noticed something, a closing of ranks, a silence that felt coordinated, or a private conversation that went nowhere. And you looked at this man with his decade of performing safety, and you thought, maybe I'm reading this wrong, maybe I'm being unfair, maybe this is my trauma talking. That is not an accident. That is the purpose of the performance. The performance of safety is a weapon, is a perceptual weapon. It doesn't just protect the man from external accountability, it gets inside the woman's own discernment and makes her distrust herself. Now, the women who were drugged couldn't name clearly what happened to her because she was unconscious. The women in the yoga community often can't name clearly what happened to her because the men perform safety. It is so convincing the way that they do it, that her own perception gets questioned before his behavior does. Same, same. Now, submissive yoga bros will never be able to do true accountability work because that requires two things. It requires that you are have the capacity to think critically. The ability to look at your community, your lineage, your teacher, your male friend, evaluate it honestly instead of protectively. That's the first thing that it requires. And the second thing it requires is that you're able to break rank, saying something where it costs you something in public, on the record, where the senior male can see it. Now, these two things are what is required for accountability work. And a man whose entire social and professional standing is built on proximity to other powerful males, on being liked by other powerful males, on being protected by other powerful males, that man cannot break rank. The cost is too high. The structure, the architecture of the system doesn't permit it. He will talk about accountability, he will perform accountability, he will have very meaningful private conversations about accountability, but he will not do it. I've been clear about that for a long time. I am interested, my work is in naming the structure accurately so that women stop being surprised by it, so that when the conscious, gentle, self-aware yoga male goes quiet, when that happens, at exactly the moment his voice would cost him something, you recognize it for what it is and you stop questioning yourself. The yoga bro and the rape academy bro are the same male, different vocabulary, different methods, same function, same result. If you've sent a broga yoga bro's attempt at accountability to me, I want to see it because those responses are the curriculum. School is in session.