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
They were stranded together on an island, the only two English-speaking writers at a conference (this somehow happens in Berkeley). They have wild and instant intimacy of the kind where you tell each other everything. It’s the kind of friendship in which you want to be together all the time, the world is not enough, the day is not long enough to give you all the time you want with your friend.
अब मेरे लिए दोस्ती, बीडीएसएम और सेक्स के परिदृश्य को समझना, संभालना, पहले की बनिस्बत आसान तो है मगर फिर भी कहीं धुंधली लकीरें हैं।कभी-कभी पुरुष मित्रों की आँखों में थोड़ी सी ज़बरदस्ती दिखती है, उनकी साथियों की आँखों में थोड़ा सा शक, या महिला-मित्रों की आँखों में मेरी यौनिक पहचान के बारे में वही अनचाही अटकलें भी।
Every match that came my way, every person I spoke to, every time someone pointed to the word “asexual” in my bio – it was all an exercise in acceptance, compassion, and empathy. People were asking questions because they wanted to know how best to interact with me, how to respect my boundaries, how to to get over their own misgivings about ‘my kind’.
On the other hand, in Abhay’s newly discovered wonderland, everything seemed to be awfully right. Soon, he began receiving proposals for sex-dates. Initially such proposals shocked him; for it took him a few months to get used to the fact that sex with men was only a click away.
It wasn’t that she had never heard of homosexuality; but, in her imagination, gay men and women were an exotic species, not real people who could, perchance, be fellow passengers on a bus, fellow shoppers at a mall, or a fellow beginner in a meditation class.
In the middle of this pandemic, can one seek sexual support in the form of a hook up with one’s best friend, ‘just because’? Is it redefining boundaries, is it sympathy sex, is it simple indulgence, or is it something that one or both might later resent?
As a queer person, it’s hard not to think right away of chosen family. A term that has become relatively well-known by now, but not always understood I find. One of the primary support systems I personally, like many queer folx, depend on, are ones that we develop and nurture over time.
Ethics of Care offers a normative paradigm that goes beyond the neat distinctions of morally guided ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ actions to incorporate social responsibility, wherein we learn how to shape our responses on the basis of the needs of a community’s members.