LGBTQIA
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.
Despite the lack of a formal Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) curriculum in place in India, there has been a growing interest in providing CSE programmes in schools.
Unlike many trans-masculine people who identified as lesbians/tomboys/butch pre-transitioning, I refused to abandon my ‘lesbian’ identity post-transitioning. A negotiation that took time to flourish.
Pandemics have a profound psychological impact. They are known to disrupt one’s sense of safety, security, certainty, control, concordance, and…
Four More Shots Please! moves in the right direction when it comes to women (of a particular social stratum), their lives, and feminism at large – even if it takes small, stumbling, baby steps towards it.
…even if people have little in common, once they enter these spaces of solidarity, they are connected to a larger community. These spaces become wellsprings of an unspoken sense of safety and mutual support between individuals of communities that share a sense of having been othered.
He didn’t wear his identity on his sleeve, and therefore he seemed more real than most people who did.
The desire for intimacy might rob one of the intimacy that one shares with oneself and thus, being with the beloved can leave one feeling even lonelier because of the continuing struggle for validation and comfort.
Ageing vaginas in ageing female bodies are joked about. But a vagina shouldn’t have the task of pleasing anybody but itself first. To begin with, we’ll have to love and respect our vaginas in order to pleasure them. Love them just as they are. If they feel a little dry, don’t despair. Use a lubricant or a little coconut oil. If my labia are unshapely, they’re still my labia and respond very nicely to gentleness and tenderness. If I don’t love and respect my ageing body, in need of gentle, loving, patient care, then who will, for God’s sake?
CSE survives in information as well as in the values that carry it forward.
To be a support system is to be a safe space for them where they can reflect upon, experiment with and understand themselves. A space where people not only come to terms with their individual selves, sexual or otherwise, but also where they become increasingly aware of their own rights.
… spaces led by the desire to not just protect but also educate all who connect with children…
This Parodevi Pictures’ production from Agents of Ishq is a kaleidoscopic must-watch that takes us into the poorly understood ‘galaxy’ of female orgasm and sexual pleasure through a mobile-phone game – A Little Death – that helps people navigate this terrain unfamiliar to many in an exciting and accessible way.
Gender has perplexed me throughout life. I never quite understood femininity or masculinity much – I mostly lived in what other people thought I was. One thing I did know always is that I never, ever, want to be seen as a man. But can I still hold masculinity?
Age is not just a number, like it is often said to be. It is a lot combined together. It is about grace, it is about exposure, it is about knowledge, it is about the ability to fight back. And yet, in endless other ways, age IS just a number.