Voices
While sex workers face repeated harassment by the police, many young couples face threats in a one-off incident if the police finds them with their partner/lover. They may face police surveillance of expressions of intimacy and affection in public.
I can recall my experiences in the washrooms of different gyms that I have been a member of. A men’s washroom is an interesting place in terms of how sexuality manifests itself in its various aspects. It was not unusual to see men of various kinds with strange energies in these washrooms.
This article explores how women are constructed as a ‘space’ manufactured by men to seek comfort, but void of having any active agency or participation in that space itself. I seek to bring this out in this article by drawing a parallel between the nineteenth century ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India) and the depiction of the twenty-first century ‘heroine’ in Bollywood movies.
As a girl, I was made to believe that pleasure was something that existed outside my body, something that I had to seek out, something that was necessarily a product of a partnered experience. I don’t think I was even allowed to want pleasure, especially in its sexual forms.
The In Plainspeak team decided to time travel and re-discover previously published articles that explore the multiple ways in which people find joy and pleasure in their sexualities.
I am still coming to terms with my own femininity, as with new learnings I find myself regaining many facets of my personality which were lost while trying to ‘act like a man’ and ‘act tough’.
During an orientation session of Queer Hifazat, a programme for queer youth run by my organisation Red Dot Foundation, Deepak*…
Practicing polyamory comes with the struggle of breaking down value systems and non-acceptance that may lead to ostracism not only from the heterosexual world but also from the queer and trans community. Claiming oneself as queer depends not only on how one identifies, but also, in society’s eyes, on who one’s partner is; being single does not qualify and neither does being polyamorous as the latter is considered ‘non-serious’.
Contemporary and predominant imaginations of intimacy focus primarily on a sex-centric (romance-centric?) model which assumes that sexual desire exists and holds the same value for every person and every relationship regardless of their subjective positions. Sexual intent and desire are often the cruces of how relational aspects such as intimacy are socially constructed.
He said ‘tender’ today/in such a way/I thought/I’d definitely like him saying/dirty things to me
I now feel comfortable entertaining the thought that my ease with my selfhood does not necessarily have to be threatened by the possibility of love in coupledom. Indeed, comfort with one’s self can actually evolve into healthier forms of love towards the other(s).
एक समय ऐसा था जब मैं भी लड़कियों के लिए बनाई जाने वाली हर चीज़ से सिर्फ इसलिए दूर भागती थी क्योंकि मुझे लगता था कि नारीवादी दिखने के लिए एक खास तरीके से दिखना और व्यवहार करना आवश्यक है।
एक तो यह समझ नहीं आता की आखिर इसे मेनोपॉज़ क्यों कहते हैं? पॉज़ का मतलब तो यह होता है कि किसी चीज़ का कुछ समय के लिए रुकना और आप के चाहने पर दोबारा शुरू हो जाना। मेरे विचार से तो इसे मेनोस्टॉप कहा जाना चाहिए!
This article was originally published here. My social media timeline repulses me. It’s filled with cis-het conformity among other things,…
This article was originally published here. It is a summer night in 2010 and my parents are asleep in the…