relationships
Often when we speak of families and family history, we talk genetics, traditions and inheritance of all kinds. Somehow our relationship by blood or otherwise to a clan is supposed to help us identify our place in the universe. So there’s family medical history, family culture, family traditions of food and career. But sexuality? A family history that focuses on sexuality? What would that even mean?
As we move toward destigmatising the topic of sex for all genders, we should include the language of intimacy as we collectively create a new cultural grammar around sex.
Emma Watson spoke to British Vogue about the incredible amounts of stress and anxiety that follows, “…if you have not built a home, if you do not have a husband, if you do not have a baby, and you are turning 30, and you’re not in some incredibly secure, stable place in your career, or you’re still figuring things out…”
Both rejections and affirmations of the couple are skewered on this doubleness: It is the fullest expression of love and proximity available to us, and it bears all the insufficiencies of present social relations. Monogamous romantic commitment, like infallible lifelong attraction to only men or only women, is surely a minority tendency expediently elevated to a general social principle.
Sexuality makes me think of an erotic adventure. Something that helps us be alive to the world around us, and to life around us.
Sexuality is fluid, embodying my emotions, and their expression, thereby creating an aspect of my identity central to me.
The pandemic and lockdown isolation made recovery harder for people with sex or porn addiction because of a lack of support systems that enabled their recovery.
The lovers enact many recognizable hetero-normative romantic tropes – the wronged petulant woman pacified via kisses and caresses, the woman too tired for sex who then tries to placate the sulking male lover.
What does belonging, then, look like in urban India for people from different social, economic and political backgrounds?
In this video, Nisha and Chetan set the record straight about love, attraction, and disability. Nisha’s life changed after a spinal cord injury that led her to use a wheelchair. She thought romance was off the cards for her – until Chetan came into her life.
Risk by itself is not a stigmatised subject, but sexuality is, and has been for generations. This has led to closeting, to shutting the door, on many necessary conversations about the risks to rights that millions of vulnerable individuals and many vulnerable communities live with, across the globe.
In a world of prescriptions of performance and perfection, there isn’t truly that much space built in to risk non-performance, not being perfect, or to risk not fitting the prescription.
All I have known of loving men is emotional labour, And by that, I mean back-breaking, soul-sucking toil, Oh, the relief of carrying nothing but yourself, Oh, the relief of taking nothing but pleasure from their sex
Over the years, my understanding of pleasure has changed. However, much of it is thanks to external inputs. It is thanks to people of all gender identities sharing how they feel pleasure in different ways.
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.