Voices
You held my hand, we hugged each other / I was lost in your love, wanting to go further
People in the city move from their homes to their workplaces and back to their homes. The production of this everyday rhythm of the city makes people accustomed to the sexual overtones that come with it.
People in the city move from their homes to their workplaces and back to their homes. The production of this everyday rhythm of the city makes people accustomed to the sexual overtones that come with it.
As advocates of safe, inclusive and sexuality-affirming spaces, we can explore different ways to ensure that the people we are interacting with on dating platforms are legal adults and are not merely wearing a mask of adulthood.
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.
Connection, to my mind, is one of those profoundly entrenched concepts manifesting itself throughout our lives. It is difficult to let go of.
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.
Human beings are not brains in jars, but are fundamentally shaped by their perception of and interaction with the worlds around them, through their physical bodies and their sensory encounters.
Because we also understand and acknowledge the power of a single step forward, we decided to deep dive into working with sign languages for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and including them in the safe abortion rights dialogues.
The language of consent is not neutral. It is rigid where it should be nuanced, malleable where it should be firm. Yes is an all-encompassing spirit, ever-expanding; No is frustratingly constricted, barely visible.
Mobility is undertaken for varied reasons across contemporary global spaces. One emerging reason for travel and mobility is reproduction. ‘Reproductive…
Should it have been a full stop or a question mark that finished the above title? It deeply confused me….
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.
So, what can be done about insecurity?
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.