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
In our mid-month issue, we continue to explore the theme of innovation and see how art is being increasingly used in innovative ways to highlight issues of sexuality and gender.
We advocate the idea of reclaiming spaces in society by creating large wall-mural projects to raise awareness and to create a voice for the community. We are now finding more innovative ways to engage the community to come out in public spaces, also using the Internet and social media, to feel confident, safe and a sense of belonging.
Most of us, during childhood, internalised the lesson that sex or pleasure is ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’. Artists around the world are increasingly using ‘tactile art’ to challenge the shame and embarrassment that people feel when they look at their bodies.
The virtual world allows me to challenge the hold of patriarchy on my ‘effeminate’ body; in a sense, it allows me to evade the policing of desire that my body shares with another, its flows and slippages, the messy and the unkempt.
In a recent class, I asked Kanika and Tincy, our ISL teachers, how we could sign sexuality, and they asked, “How do you explain sexuality?” I wondered how I could sign ideas like attraction, pleasure, gender, values, and so on, but tried nevertheless, using my limited vocabulary, apologetic about being reductive.
Some nights I worry that if birth control for men is indeed released, clinical trials of which were suspended in 2016 as its side effects, incidentally the same as what women have been dealing with for ages, were just not worth it, it would be named Fuckboi.
For a long time, female bodies were considered similar to male bodies, just shorter, and most research and medical trials focused primarily on the male body with the assumption that the same would work on the female body.
People we refer to as “digisexuals” are turning to advanced technologies, such as robots, virtual reality (VR) environments and feedback devices known as teledildonics, to take the place of human partners.
Cyberspace has given the queer woman a chance to problematize the existing gender and sexual identities which, like any identity, is not static. It allows her to create and occupy spaces which will give her freedom and power in a way that the misogynistic physical world cannot provide.
Facebook. Google. Apple. Microsoft. Amazon. As the white male-dominated Big Five in Silicon Valley monopolise most platforms that guide online interactions almost everywhere outside China, any aspiration towards a feminist revolution has become capitalised.
How might we think of sexuality as innovation, before we jump onto producing new technologies? Does the language of innovation, that of newness, invention and change, have anything to offer in rethinking structures of intimacy?
As advocates of safe, inclusive and sexuality-affirming spaces, we can explore different ways to ensure that the people we are interacting with on dating platforms are legal adults and are not merely wearing a mask of adulthood.
It is rather edifying to find information that one can relate to through a solitary rectangular box. Over time, this solitary box somehow stuck around while everything around it changed as the world moved even further into a digital era.
It’s technology that has allowed me, amidst the lockdown, to connect with so many people and I dare say, sext and share photos. It’s technology that has allowed me and many others access to things like porn, fetish websites, and to buy sex toys and so much more without leaving our beds!