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
Is there a relationship at all that cannot be defined by love? And, if we were to begin talking of relationships other than romantic love, how would we speak of sexuality? Upon this deliberation, we realised that our Love and Sexuality issue seemed to revolve around romantic love and sex. The departure this issue on Relationships and Sexuality makes is to try and incorporate forms of relationships that might not be about romantic love but have their own kind of romance, and facets of sexuality that might not be about sex per se but will place its interest in alternate relationships to it.
They were stranded together on an island, the only two English-speaking writers at a conference (this somehow happens in Berkeley). They have wild and instant intimacy of the kind where you tell each other everything. It’s the kind of friendship in which you want to be together all the time, the world is not enough, the day is not long enough to give you all the time you want with your friend.
My sexual desires may not be what certain people called ‘normal’ and I could not share this with my so called friends as I thought they would consider me weird. Surprisingly a woman in my hometown introduced me to the world of Kink. She was a regular housewife and with her for the first time I got to know what I actually needed and wanted and it went on for a good amount of time till I moved out of that place for many reasons.
Feminist critiques are often critiques of relationship structures: marriage, the joint and nuclear family, monogamy, and heteronormativity. Patriarchy, fundamentally a system of inheritance, finds a natural home in these structures.
This is why I’ve often wondered: how do feminists imagine and navigate romantic relationships? Do they have to constantly be thinking about and watching out for the many ways in which power, privilege, autonomy and entitlement manifest in their relationships and dating culture? It seems rather unromantic to do so.
True were his words that people will always talk, but why? What was so wrong with us? Was it because he was shorter and I was taller? Or was it because that when we hugged he was more in my embrace than me in his? Or was it that I had to bend a bit to kiss him? Strange how perceptions work about couples – no matter which identity one conforms to.
A multitude of views are recorded when couples are interviewed about their sex lives and relationships. It is often found that while women are more concerned about the way they look and how they react to their partners’ moves (including women’s need to fake orgasms), men worry more about things like performance. It is safe to assume that all of us have sexual insecurities.
Why are certain privileges only afforded to couples? Why can we not share them with others outside of a romantic or sexual paradigm? Why is intimacy seen as being the purview of lovers? In actual fact, we may often share a greater intimacy with our friends than we do with our lovers.
अब इस अनजान व्यक्ति ने कुछ बेचैनी से कहा, ‘मुझे माफ़ करना, मैं कोई मूर्ख्ताप्पूर्ण बात नहीं करना चाहता लेकिन आप को साथ देख कर इसलिए हैरान क्योंकि आप जैसे जोड़े प्राय: देखने को नहीं मिलते’। ज़ाहिर है इस वाकया के बाद एक घबराई हुई हंसी थी।
Mainstream media is beginning to pay attention to men’s relationship with abortion – a welcome counterpoint to the anti-woman, anti-abortion rhetoric Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) spew on the topic.