A digital magazine on sexuality, based in the Global South: We are working towards cultivating safe, inclusive, and self-affirming spaces in which all individuals can express themselves without fear, judgement or shame
Pleasure, in the context of the private, defines the parlance of sexual satisfaction. As a womxn, the private is also the public: how I present and play with my gender, is a way of seeking validation of who I am.
I have been the overprotective patriarch and now it is time for me to find solidarity with my sister who will go through myriad experiences. I need to be there to support her while at the same time make her question her decisions rather than being a judgmental feminist.
The young Suchitra Sen – then plain Krishna Dasgupta – apparently once sat on a school bench and announced that she would be remembered long after her death. An ordinary middle class girl who was one of nine siblings, and an average student bereft of any artistic talent, all Sen had was her looks. But apparently, that was enough. “She was conscious of her great beauty… and behaved as if she… deserved every bit of the natural selection,” wrote Susmita Dasgupta in a thoughtful Facebook note.
Should we train it to think well, all these minds would see reason in similar things and they would come up with the same absolute reality – a universal Truth. That Truth would be a reflection of the Natural order for all humankind. That Truth alone would be beautiful.
Every match that came my way, every person I spoke to, every time someone pointed to the word “asexual” in my bio – it was all an exercise in acceptance, compassion, and empathy. People were asking questions because they wanted to know how best to interact with me, how to respect my boundaries, how to to get over their own misgivings about ‘my kind’.
Masculinity once upon a time was just a word we studied in school, whose sole purpose was to differentiate binary gender in the society. Now masculinity is a criteria of a certain job that a person has to perceive to be called or termed as one.
Over time, I realised that ‘home’ meant not just the physical and emotional space occupied by my parents, but also a set of practices or strictures, mostly dictated by parents, related to gender roles, religion, sex, marriage, friendships and ‘appropriate’ behaviour.