No girls allowed...

Visakha Devi Dasi: Every day Prabhupada received letters from disciples around the world, and he began giving the stamps from the envelopes to Kirtan Mahadevia, a life member’s 10-year-old son. I was happy to see how thrilled Kirtan was with his burgeoning stamp collection.

Through his replies to those letters, Prabhupada sometimes had to tackle the tension between his male and female students. Some men, perhaps in their struggle to remain celibate, had taken a handful of statements in the scriptures meant to bolster renunciation, as well as Prabhupada’s comments on them, to demean women and to block them from basic asrama facilities and programs. To a disciple in New York Prabhupada wrote,

Who has introduced these things, that women cannot have chanting japa in the temple, they cannot perform the arati [worship of the Deities] and so many things? If they become agitated, then let the brahmacaris [celibate male students] go to the forest. I have never introduced these things. The brahmacaris cannot remain in the presence of women in the temple, then they may go to the forest, not remaining in New York City, because in New York there are so many women, so how they can avoid seeing?

Reading this, I realized that although Prabhupada had made some comments that seemed to fuel this male-female issue, he was balanced about it. His comments had really been meant to decrease his students’ distractions so they could more easily focus on the spiritual life, and the biggest distraction for anyone trying to give up material consciousness is sex. His frenetic young male disciples, however, with their hormones racing, tended to think Prabhupada’s young female students themselves were the distraction. Prabhupada was clear: the actual problem was his male students’ uncontrolled minds and senses. They were his beloved disciples, but in their immaturity were protecting themselves by turning attraction into aversion. In Prabhupada’s words, “in order to withstand the attack of maya [illusion] and remain strong under all conditions of temptation, young or inexperienced devotees in the neophyte stage of devotional service will sometimes adopt an attitude against those things or persons which may possibly be harmful or threatening to their tender devotional creepers. They may even overindulge in such feelings just to protect themselves... Kindly see the thing in this light and forgive their small mistakes. The big thing is that they have given everything, even their lives, to Krishna—and that is never a mistake.”

I certainly didn’t have Prabhupada’s broad, compassionate vision. At this point, my enthusiasm for Prabhupada’s movement was severely dampened by the way some of his male followers related to his female followers. These men’s condescending, smug attitude toward the women was ridiculous and obnoxious, I felt. It was the laughable bias of a nine-year-old brat who rants, “No girls allowed. I hate girls!” If it weren't for Prabhupada and his more mature followers, I would have been back at Rochester Institute of Technology.