The I Column
What do we create for ourselves in that moment of acute awareness? Do we create empowerment, love, care, self-expression; or do we manipulate it to create abuse, distrust and disharmony? For, what is spirituality if not the uplifting of the human spirit? If sexuality is the medium for someone, what’s the problem?
My interaction with men started once I finished school and most men in my life have been decent to me, to say the least. However, there are different sides of maleness or manhood that I have come to experience.
Is there anything about my sexuality that is private anymore? What happened to the unspoken rule of not discussing one’s sexual life in the open? What happened to the sleazy jokes and the complete silence around sexuality that I remember from the previous generation?
On a larger scale, my non-normative sexuality is confined to tiny spaces, influenced by fear of impending violence, rejection and revulsion, even when one is privileged enough to live in a metropolitan city.
It is this camaraderie with sexualness that made my mother uncomfortable about my comfort with lipsticks. Stains become metonyms for the woman herself, and her sexuality. It is possible that this stain might stay on someone’s mind as they encounter a stained cup. It is possible that even if they never have seen the person, they would now be compelled to imagine them.
Porn is able to express the ‘yummy yucky’ nature of many of our fantasies. I use the term ‘yummy yucky’ because I feel it captures a mix of that which is both “hot and disturbing”
After the underwear slips off, does the underwear brand really matter? The underwear may mean different things for different people. It may evoke desire or may hinder access.
I personally feel that any cause, specially one like kink that is in its nascent stages, needs its own space to grow, to affect enough people, before it merges with the larger cause of queerness, or sexuality, or even humanity.
Will I write openly about what is or is not done, what is or is not meaningful when it comes to sexuality? Yes. Will I talk about BDSM and kink as a way of life, despite it being taboo for discussion? Yes, I will talk about BDSM and kink, and many other things as well, but I will not evangelise for them.
For them there is always a smile, and for them time has stood through. Memories are edged in the season of those years in which I met them.
The point is simple. Intimacy is not about sexuality, penetrative sex, gender, BDSM or any one parameter. Yet, intimacy is about all of them AND MORE.
As we move toward destigmatising the topic of sex for all genders, we should include the language of intimacy as we collectively create a new cultural grammar around sex.
What I can say is that I tried to be the best lover for a woman, and I am much obliged to the girls I dated then for trying with me.
Both of us, have recently, decided to get married and will be in a marriage that I like to call a subversive marriage. Subversive marriages are based on an uncompromising equality and negotiations that serve for the betterment of both the partners.
Sashwati Banerjee is the Managing Director of Sesame Workshop in India. Ms. Banerjee leads the organisation in its mission to…