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
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.
“It’s rather unfortunate that our educational institutions and systems are so reluctant to understand, or they simply ignore, the importance of providing our youth with CSE that can help erase the shame and crippling self-doubt around sexuality, bodies, reproductive rights and wellness.
It is unfortunate that one of the most fundamental processes of human life is shunned to the extent that we’ve been taught, and so we learn to dismiss the natural feelings our bodies produce.
Within its realm, each artwork embodies an emblematic act that accompanies the intricate ritual of food: hunger, gathering, fire, serving, devouring and, ultimately, nourishing.
Paan is not only the bearer of stories but a medium through which these stories were told. And each ingredient that goes into the making of a paan has its own narrative.
There are hundreds of mukbangers and flood vloggers in India, with individuals earning lakhs of rupees through just eating delicious, and sometimes weird, food. However, those mukbang creators who do not follow stereotypical ideas of gender, caste and class meet with differential treatment.
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.
The simple truth is that my body and I are having an affair. We each obsess about the other, ask questions and desire each other so much, that it often borders on the shameless. My body is more in love with me, I suspect, than the other way around.
Our bodies become the form and medium through which we present ourselves to the outside world, engage with it, interact with it, perceive it and are perceived by it.
There’s a difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. The above instance was obviously of the latter kind. Humour has a complex but integral relationship with queer genders and sexualities, and it has been evolving over time.
You don’t even realise what you’ve said until someone in the group, quick as lightning, hits you with the rejoinder, “That’s what she said!” As you’re trying to make sense of what just happened, the group dissolves into giggles.
I tell them to laugh freely but question as much too. This gives them a sense of sheer relief to be able to ask, talk, question, because, even if it is ‘really bad’, after all, it’s being said in ‘lightness, is it not?
From the outside, the world of kink can look like a place where a smile would be a rare occurrence. But come closer if you dare. Let go of your inhibitions, your fears, your judgements, and biases, and take a real, long look..