When you're dealing with scams, women seem to be the victims more often. This is true for bunco scams of most sorts. I've often said that the psychic rip-offs are a feminist issue. Our society seems to tell women that they're more "intuitive" and that's a way to say something very beautiful in a very ugly way. Being open-minded ... does not mean being a sucker. Being skeptical is not being cynical. To me, they aren't even related.
—Penn Jillette
Many feng shui practitioners live off a client base that echoes the current demographic of the self-help/New Age genre — white women with some college background who, if they work, generally are employed in fields typically dominated by women such as secretarial or administrative work, elementary or secondary school teaching, and counseling.
That's why the literary attempts of many feng shui practitioners echo the psycho-religious language used in self-help and New Age books, and books that cross over both genres — such as McFengshui books.
This explains why feng shui authors are so repetitive: readers of the material actually expect authors to overgeneralize, oversimplify, and repeat themselves, creating what Wendy Simonds calls a "ritual of self-reassurance," a "crutch for guidance" that works "like a mild dose of Valium."
McFengshui is the opiate of the New Age masses
Readers of this stuff often acknowledge that their reading selections have a similarity to drug use.
Like romance novels, psycho-religious material such as McFengshui books is known to be addictive for certain personality types. Mostly the addiction can be blamed on inherent self-soothing mantras (in which, like the home on the range, you never hear a "discouraging word"), but also because reality never intrudes.
It's these inborn traits of psycho-religious (and McFengshui) material that concern some people and outrage others.
Particularly offensive is the trait Simonds calls the "unhealthy collapsing of judgment, a postmodern relativism that does away with morality in its focus on self as omnipotent."
Other observers, from Todd Gitlin to Richard Rosen (who invented the word psychobabble) don't mince words, calling the material inarticulate, jargon-packed, and obscene mindlessness.
Jonesing for a fame corner
No one questions that psycho-religious reading, such as McFengshui, can create addictions. That it influences people to become passive, narcissistic consumers is also accepted by a range of individuals, from book editors to the addicts themselves.
No one disputes the presence of deceit in the marketing and promotion.
Feeding on the larger culture's view of drug addicts and addiction, the general impression of the genre is that it ruins mental faculties and wastes lives in mindless activity.
For people whose culture and artifacts have been appropriated by members of the psycho-religious subculture, there's nothing holistic or spiritual or alchemical about it — it's pure theft, disrespect, and crass materialism. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum was the first to notice the link between get-rich-quick literature and occult language; it permeates McFengshui like the scent of a skunk.