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
As a society, in our platforms of exchange of goods, products and services, how are we approaching parenting, children or sexuality? Stores are clearly catering to the constructed parent and child. There’s lots of toys, clothes, diapers, bedsheets and cute dangling, fluffy things to cluck at in stores catering to parent and child as a combination thali (platter). The day I see personal and sexual hygiene products in a store catering to mom and a teenaged me, I will kick up my heels and bray.
When the opportunity to work on a documentary film shoot about mapping Ramleela (a dramatic folk re-enactment of the life of Ram(a), an avatar of Hindu god Vishnu, and his wife Sita, an avatar of goddess Lakshmi) performance traditions across the state of Orissa presented itself, I had three thoughts in my head.
Mobility is undertaken for varied reasons across contemporary global spaces. One emerging reason for travel and mobility is reproduction. ‘Reproductive…
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.
While we have come a long way from the singular Freudian focus on sexual energies and reducing most mental health disturbances to sexuality, there is no doubting its significance for an individual’s wellbeing.
Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse that we begin to think of ‘love’ as an idea only when our beloved or the object of desire has departed – either when love has failed, or in the absence of the lover – that is absolutely crucial to any theorisation of love.
Family, immediate and extended, is usually who you turn to. They are the ones who provide stress relief and reduce anxiety by boosting self-confidence and self-esteem and providing a protective shield. There is a sense of belongingness in good times and in bad.
Traditional masculinity is not without its problems but to eliminate its component of stoicism is to pull the rug from under a cast of tough and determined characters who make society function.
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.
Eudaimonia, ever the kind soul, made every effort to befriend her cousins who initially treated her as a pest. Maybe it was out of spite for the love Eudaimonia received from the elders in the house and that too which she often left in her wake, but before long her cousins turned their attention to her in ways so cruel, the light in Eudaimonia’s eyes began to wane and it would be a very long time before it shone through them again.
So, even though “home” is supposed to be a place of comfort – a personal space which should allow us to express our gender, sexuality and bodies freely – this notion of home stands defeated in reality, where there are certain unsaid rules which govern the distribution and use of space.