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
It’s technology that has allowed me, amidst the lockdown, to connect with so many people and I dare say, sext and share photos. It’s technology that has allowed me and many others access to things like porn, fetish websites, and to buy sex toys and so much more without leaving our beds!
Therapy is a space to heal and grow. It helped me to accept my identity as an anxious, cisgender, South Asian, bisexual woman. Moreover, I have come up with the perfect response next time someone asks me, “But why do you think you are bisexual?”
Exploring sexuality is innovative in itself. What does that mean? Well at the outset, the very fact that we are willing to explore our bodies, their sexual expression, their ability to experience pleasure in so many different ways, and that we go beyond social norms is groundbreaking in itself.
In our mid-month issue, we continue to explore the theme of innovation and see how art is being increasingly used in innovative ways to highlight issues of sexuality and gender.
People we refer to as “digisexuals” are turning to advanced technologies, such as robots, virtual reality (VR) environments and feedback devices known as teledildonics, to take the place of human partners.
Because the Internet is an integral part of our daily lives, it is important that young people are given the right information so that they can explore the world around them, access information without violating legislations, know their rights in the virtual and physical world and have enjoyable and consensual relationships with whoever they choose.
Cyberspace has given the queer woman a chance to problematize the existing gender and sexual identities which, like any identity, is not static. It allows her to create and occupy spaces which will give her freedom and power in a way that the misogynistic physical world cannot provide.
Some nights I worry that if birth control for men is indeed released, clinical trials of which were suspended in 2016 as its side effects, incidentally the same as what women have been dealing with for ages, were just not worth it, it would be named Fuckboi.
How might we think of sexuality as innovation, before we jump onto producing new technologies? Does the language of innovation, that of newness, invention and change, have anything to offer in rethinking structures of intimacy?
We advocate the idea of reclaiming spaces in society by creating large wall-mural projects to raise awareness and to create a voice for the community. We are now finding more innovative ways to engage the community to come out in public spaces, also using the Internet and social media, to feel confident, safe and a sense of belonging.
For a long time, female bodies were considered similar to male bodies, just shorter, and most research and medical trials focused primarily on the male body with the assumption that the same would work on the female body.
Most of us, during childhood, internalised the lesson that sex or pleasure is ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’. Artists around the world are increasingly using ‘tactile art’ to challenge the shame and embarrassment that people feel when they look at their bodies.
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.
In a recent class, I asked Kanika and Tincy, our ISL teachers, how we could sign sexuality, and they asked, “How do you explain sexuality?” I wondered how I could sign ideas like attraction, pleasure, gender, values, and so on, but tried nevertheless, using my limited vocabulary, apologetic about being reductive.