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
My body presented to me the first paradox in my feminism that I would encounter. How could I claim to be a feminist if I was not proud of the body I was born in? My advocacy as a sixth grader seemed to fail when it came to my own self.
From today’s vantage point I see that I missed an opportunity to use PT and sports in school as a way to get to know and move my body. This in turn held me back from viewing myself as a sexual being.
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..
Our bodies are the vessels through which we feel, emote, work or navigate our societies and the world at large. Our bodies are the real, live archive of everything we have experienced and they have borne the consequences of our social conditioning and decisions.
I was watching something recently that said it was a bad thing to be vulnerable, but I don’t think it is a bad thing. I do see that there is a certain amount of power in vulnerability, it also needs courage, in my experience.
In this write up, we’d like to share a sense of what emerges from a compilation of these responses. This is based on the thoughts and feelings that come through for those of us here at In Plainspeak who have had the joy of reading the original responses as they came in to us. (Some of the quotations that follow have been slightly edited for flow and to help connect themes.) We know that most things in the realm of art, information and ideas lend themselves to a wide range of inferences and insights depending on the individuals making the inferences.
How should I walk, what should my gait be like, what kind of clothes can I wear that will sort of cover me up…? This indecisiveness and the burden of, “What will others think?” are some of the worries, that I carried for a long time while making decisions like: “Is this going to expose too much skin?”, “Is this going to look a certain way that I may not like to present myself as?”
No two human bodies are alike, and our different bodies arouse curiosity. But our fascination for the aesthetics of the perfect human body has historically created a space within art, science and religion for the examination of the ‘abnormal’ and the ‘imperfect’. As a result, some bodies are normalised while others become oddities.