Gender
Men perform an identity that they don’t fully understand. The pressure to appear strong while feeling the full range of emotions that they cannot express creates a hollow inside, creates a quiet dissonance, a loneliness that is rarely spoken of but deeply felt.
Z is forced to wear the mask of masculinity, a mask made of the various tropes of stereotypical masculine energy…
Adolescence manages to highlight the reality of growing up in a world with the Internet where everything – the good, the bad, the questionable – is only a touch away.
Masculinity is like a script given to boys early in their lives. There is a constant pressure to fit into the box of toughness, and be silent and dominating. But what if we all rewrite this script?
पितृसत्ता ने मर्दानगी को विषमलैंगिकता और यौनिक वर्चस्व से जोड़ा है, जिससे पुरुषों पर ‘सच्चा मर्द’ बनने का दबाव बढ़ता है। यह न केवल समलैंगिक और द्विलैंगिक पुरुषों को हाशिए पर डालता है, बल्कि विषमलैंगिक पुरुषों के लिए भी यौनिक अभिव्यक्ति को सीमित करता है।
Looking down upon the earth from many miles up in the sky, the divisions between land masses and water bodies…
Language can be a limiting thing when it alone is considered to be the marker of success or failure in intimate spaces. Sometimes we get stuck on what is said and fail to notice what is done in relationships. At other times, denial of a need, request, or crossing of one boundary can make us feel like the entire relationship has lost its value.
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.
शहरी पुणे के एक नगरपालिका स्कूल की आठवीं कक्षा – एक सह-शिक्षा कक्षा जिसमें 18 लड़के और 12 लड़कियाँ हैं – के कुछ अनुभव
When a woman, in her own house, is told by her family members, to always seek their consent before doing anything, and to always keep them informed of every activity she engages in, or even to seek a job in her chosen field, her freedom is taken away from her. She is expected to take their consent for anything and everything, but her own consent is taken away from her.
… when they believed we were of the right age to marry, they urged us to “leave everything behind and get settled”. When marriage is considered such an important institution in our society, why not teach us about consent as well?
This awareness of the status ascribed to women – the status of being the objects of men’s desires – affects every aspect of a woman’s life. Desire then, in particular, becomes an aspect of a woman’s life where navigation becomes tricky.
Each time a child or adolescent asks a question that may be (even indirectly) related to sexuality, many parents and teachers get squirmy and nervous. This may be because they themselves do not have the information required, but in most cases, it has more to do with the ‘hush-hush’ that surrounds sexuality.
I feel that parents, teachers and CSE can make room for these disparate realities of adolescents by first acknowledging the limits of formal sexuality education, that the curriculum imparted formally fails in providing the kind of learning that happens through other sources.