Young People
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.
In a society that restricts one’s expression of sexuality and perpetuates patriarchal gender norms, there is little room offered for open exploration. With no Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in schools and no conversation about sexuality with parents, children are ill-equipped to navigate their puberty as adolescents, and dating and relationships as young adults.
If students of such young ages can have the agency to work around hard-wired issues of sexuality and privacy, bearing in mind consent, choice and failure as part of life, we see no reason for this sense of agency to not expand one’s sense of belonging and easily create change.
There may already be another organisation in the community to share resources with but for community-led initiatives, a shared perspective on Safe, Inclusive, Sexuality-Affirming (SISA) spaces is also important. Sometimes when the shared perspective is not there, that becomes a challenge.
As we grow older, moral codes, conventions of appropriateness and shame, and the utilitarian and income-focused education we get make us lose that stability. The idea of play to me is about bringing back that ability and comfort into the lives of people so that they can actually play.
In our mid-month issue, Anjali Hans, in her mid-twenties, writes with insight and humour about learning and becoming a woman while navigating the terrain between the world as feminists want it to be and the world as it is. Manak Matiyani in an interview with Shikha Aleya tells us why he foregrounds his identity as a feminist…
In our mid-month issue, we have Mamatha Karollil writing about how she asserted herself after an incident of privacy violation when a nude picture of herself was seen by someone from work without her consent, and how ripping through, or not getting into, the cocoon of shame and dishonour, can prevent much distress…