intimacy
Sexy Crip Desires
Many disabled people in India live with their parents and any expression of sexuality is suppressed as a rule within the confines of their homes. Sexual desires of persons with disabilities are seldom a priority issue for families or civil society. More is said through silence than words. Be grateful that you are alive. Isn’t that enough?
By Abhishek Anicca
February 4, 2023
Sexuality And Looking Beyond Safety
We all talk of ‘safe’ as some place where we are not in danger. Well, the truth is there is danger everywhere. So, maybe before we even delve into the subject of safety and sexuality, it is imperative that we take a moment to pause and see what safety and sexuality could even mean.
By Asmi
April 1, 2020
Sexing the Digital
That offline patriarchal norms are travelling online – lock, stock and barrel. Digital technologies may appear to be gender-neutral, but floating below their waters is the whole kit and caboodle of patriarchy.
By Bishakha Datta
December 18, 2023
Safe Sex In The Time of Abundance
I want it, I got it. Right? Except, what I often get is some approximation of erotic pleasure, which has more to do with my own conditioning about what good sex looks like, and little to do with my body’s erotic mechanisms. This very peculiar condition is often lumped under ‘sexual frustration’, when it should really be addressed under safety.
By Faustina Johnson
April 1, 2020
Review: It’s the Little Things that Make All the Difference
But whether you root for this couple or not, Little Things makes you think about the small things – like reading out a line from a book of poetry, sharing a friend’s WhatsApp message with your partner, forgetting to wash your dirty socks before they make the room stink – that make or break a relationship.
By Shweta Krishnan
February 1, 2019
Review: I see you
My friend’s son, too, likes wearing tutus and frilly skirts. Every time they go shopping for clothes, he heads to the girl’s section and picks out the frilliest outfit. At check out, invariably the cashier asks if the pretty outfit is for his sister and he confidently says it is for him. Often he wears these outfits to school. His confidence comes from his mother’s acceptance of him and her understanding of his gender expansiveness. It helps that she is a sociologist, but there is a constant pushback from society including from his peers at school who bully the little boy. But it is the constant support from his mother and family that allows him to remain confident and thrive whilst being different.
By ElsaMarie D'Silva
June 15, 2021
Refusing the weight in waiting
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.
By Aathira Gopi
March 15, 2022
Reclaiming Intimacy: Sex Positivity and A Cultural Grammar That Values ‘Personhood’
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.
By Anonymous
Quick Bytes with Tejaswi Subramanian
Sexuality makes me think of an erotic adventure. Something that helps us be alive to the world around us, and to life around us.
By Tejaswi Subramanian
June 18, 2024
Quick Bytes with Soumya Mishra
Sexuality is fluid, embodying my emotions, and their expression, thereby creating an aspect of my identity central to me.
By Soumya Mishra
September 18, 2024
Quick Bytes with Abhishek Desai
The pandemic and lockdown isolation made recovery harder for people with sex or porn addiction because of a lack of support systems that enabled their recovery.
By Abhishek Desai
April 18, 2024
Queer Heterosexual, Heterosexual Queer: Two Tales of Queer Love 100 Years Apart
The lovers enact many recognizable hetero-normative romantic tropes – the wronged petulant woman pacified via kisses and caresses, the woman too tired for sex who then tries to placate the sulking male lover.
By Mamatha Karollil
Public Sex and the Police in Urban Spaces
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.
By Shruti Arora
April 1, 2022
Probing the Screen: Pleasure in the Virtual World
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. While virtual sex offers a window to revisit the sensual, it is also not immune to limitations and insecurities.
By Neel
June 15, 2021
