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
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.
But self-care is not a clean and happy procedure, it is not definitively achievable when systematically explored. To understand the scope of self-care we need to see the ‘dark side’ of the landscape, and destroy the versions of self-care that denounce our plurality. In this fight, the only outcome can be a recognition of experiences beyond the wellness narrative structured around the neoliberal agenda. This article is an attempt at foregrounding some aspects of self-care that decentralise the prevalent commodification of it.
Digital entanglements transcend bodies, time, geographical borders and boundaries, influencing – and perhaps fundamentally changing – the ways in which we understand, explore and express our sexuality.
I often imagine if I had been able to access friendly and empowering comprehensive sexuality education from my childhood, how different my life would have turned out to be.
‘Is the future so dark?’ you might ask. I am here to tell you that it is not. As you begin your exploration into the world of queer theory and feminist theory, you will learn that the straightjacket version of sexuality cooked by our families was undercooked.
Fire served as a seminal piece of media in my life for that reason, not only because of its queer themes and normalisation of LGBTQ+ relationships but because of how it normalises the pursuit of pleasure as a fundamental part of us, and not something we should be ashamed of.
For everybody was more interested in the welcome sounds of cooks at work and the aromas wafting from the huge community kitchen, adjoining the hall, than in the puja.
The short-lived thinness had left me before I knew it. I became fat, and thereby undesirable, once again. A chasm appeared in my relationship with my body. Its ways of responding had become strange. My form became unfamiliar to me, and to those around me.
For me, pregnancy was a strange state of being so present and so aware of my body, while at the same time being separate from it. This experience really did a number on me during those nine months and during the postpartum period.