“…so many of us, especially from genders that are oppressed, never truly get to learn academically or in a formal setting of any sort, what pleasure could mean. It’s always a self-exploration and not that a self-exploration is bad, it’s just that it’s additional effort that someone from an oppressed group is having to put in to be able to learn something that is being provided to others as like way of life.”
— Vandita Morarka on the gendered dimensions of accessing pleasure, in this episode of the podcast.
Feminists and queer activists have rallied against the cisgender hetero-patriarchal conceptions of pleasure for a long time. To reimagine pleasure as not just non-penetrative, to envision relationships as extending beyond just the romantic conceptualization of it, and to challenge the conservative foundations of the family are some of the goals that feminists, especially queer feminists, have been advocating for. What does pleasure really mean for different bodies? Can pleasure be problematic? Why do we attach so much importance to romantic relationships? In this episode of the Nurturing Radical Kindness podcast, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Sanchi Mehra are joined by Apurupa, a sexuality educator, PoSH trainer and co-founder of the wonderful space BiblioTherapy, as they search for the answers to these questions, and many more.
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Love to read or want to revisit your favourite bits? Dive into the full transcript below!
Vandita
Hi everyone, welcome back to Nurturing Radical Kindness, a podcast where we explore radical kindness as a pathway to achieving social justice. My name is Vandita and my pronouns are she and her.
Sanchi
And I’m Sanchi, and my pronouns are she/her. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the podcast with us. We have been loving having these conversations here and we’re so grateful for your participation and feedback and also thanks so much for sharing your reflections and comments with us. We love going through them. And that being said, I am super excited aaj ke episode ke liye (for today’s episode) because today we are talking about sex, pleasure and identity. And to start off this conversation, Vandita, I think that the identity markers that we occupy, which basically say ki hum kaun hai (who we are), determines a lot of things for us, right? Like if we are allowed to have sex, how, how we have sex, right? How many people we have sex with, who are these people, whether we enjoy it or not, and so many other things related to it. And I just think these are all decided by who we are, right? Would you agree to that?
Vandita
Definitely, Sanchi. I think that this is something that I very strongly resonated with as I grew up, right? Especially as I like hit puberty and understood and like, just found sex in my personal life in other spaces as well. I think the idea that our identity can ever be separated from sex, desirability or our sexual identity is completely untrue. And for me, that’s been especially a very strong focus of how I’ve explored my sexual relationships or any sort of sexual identification. I think a lot of the root causes of the concerns we see around sex and how people with certain identities are even able to navigate sex and sexuality comes from, and I always come back to this, to very heteronormative, patriarchal ideals because under the current structures that we live in, the body of a woman or the body of a queer person is seen as property of men, is seen as property of the state and when you see it from that lens, ideas of morality, ideas of what is allowed, what is not allowed and how this shifts in terms of how the state or a man sees you in terms of desirability. I’ll give you a super small example. Virginity is a construct that is expected of certain types of women, of women who look a certain way and who are considered desirable a certain way. On the other hand, for women who are not considered desirable, right? And this may change depending on which society you’re a part of, this could be someone who’s dark skin, someone like me, who’s plus sized or just like to call it what it is, right? Someone who’s fat. I think desirability changes basis that from a societal length, and now, weirdly enough, over here, when you talk about virginity, virginity becomes something that is forced on you because who would even want you? So, the same construct in both situations is being used to shame and to take away the agency of a certain gender or a certain identity. So, I think who we are is definitely the first factor when it comes to enjoying sex or even having sex. What do you think?
Sanchi
Yeah, no, that’s so true, because, like for so many people, I think it’s, I think it on two spectrums, okay? For me, it’s even so freeing to say the word sex out loud on a public forum like this, but on the other hand also mujhe ye bhi lagta hai ki yeh cheez bhi galat hai ke (I think it is also wrong that) we look at sex as the ultimate expression of love, right? And aisa nahi hai (it’s not like that). This approach, I think, is so allo-sexist, right? Ke it just takes the feeling of sexual attraction to be the default and considers it to be the most precious form of love. Whereas I don’t think everybody feels sexual attraction or not everyone feels it in the same way or at the same degree., What do you think about that?
Vandita
No, definitely. I think when I think about, like, even our general idea of sex and sexuality, it’s so focused on the penetrative aspect of sexuality. All sex is only sex if there is penetration, if a man’s penis, you know, penetrates a woman’s vagina and so much of sex is not about that, both between heterosexual couples, but also between this wide range and spectrum of sexuality that our general penetrative understanding of sex completely ignores. And when we define sex and even other social constructs by that one act, we’re taking away the experiences of so many people because we’re taking away from them the language to say this is the experience I had, or to say that your experience is less than someone else’s because it does not have this. I think even what you’ve said, right? No one’s romantic relationship or friendship or any sort of platonic relationship is less than another relationship just because sex is not a part of it.
Sanchi
And I think platonic relationships if we talk about those, I mean so much can be learned, it can be so fulfilling, right? But we never consider those to be full relationships as we would consider romantic relationships to be. But you know this one TV show called Atypical, I remember this very beautiful scene from it, where it’s just a jump scene where in one relationship is those of two friends and one is between two romantic partners and they just show in that jump scene how both relationships are so fulfilling. And I don’t think we talk about that enough.
Vandita
Thanks, Sanchi. I think that’s so valid and I think that’s why talking about sex positivity just becomes so much more important because sex positivity also recognizes that sex is not desirable for everyone. It’s just not something that everyone wants, and it allows us to break free of, you know, we might not think of it, but we’re very constrained by our ideas and our devotion to sex because so much of our life revolves around that, and more so because we talk about it so little.
Sanchi
And that being said, Vandita- I think it’s also so important to recognize the privilege that comes to you, if your sexuality is the norm in society, right? Maybe it can look like you can easily date people of your same orientation or you don’t need awareness campaigns for your sexuality to be recognized. You don’t need to explain to people what sexual label do you identify with, and then go on to explain also what that label means to you. So, just so much privilege comes with identifying to a certain type of sexuality, right?
Vandita
No, definitely. And I think I would add to that to say that not just the type of sexual orientation we might have, but a lot of our intersecting identities overlap with that, and that’s something we’ve been talking so much about at the podcast, that who we are and the bodies that we reside in determines so much of our interaction with the world. So our religion, our caste, our physical health status, so much of that determines our sexual experiences. For example, AIDS campaigns over the years, instead of focusing just on prevention or trying to provide medication and safety and encourage safe sex practices, have only ended up creating a severe fear of AIDS, which means for those persons who are living with an HIV-positive health status, or for other persons who may be STI positive in different forms, right? There is never a conversation on what sex looks like for them or what safe sex can mean for them and this is just one aspect. I think I’m gonna touch upon a little bit about how this also means that we fetishize certain bodies. Say in the West, Indian bodies are seen as exotic for skin colour, for the length of your hair, for the curves of your body. On the other side of it, certain bodies are never seen as desirable. They’re only seen as a fetish. For example, if you’re ever attracted to someone who’s fat, your automatic default is going to be, ‘Oh, maybe that’s a fetish I have.’ Or that’s what you’re going to be told by other people because you’ve been conditioned to believe that your attraction should be to a certain type of body, which is a general Eurocentric idea of a thin, white, fair person, preferably tall. But attraction doesn’t work that way, and you can be attracted to different types of bodies across different parameters. You can have so many reasons for finding someone sexually attractive, but rather than accepting that you just find them attractive, you find it easier to say that, that’s a fetish I have, and you fetishize a certain type of body because you would never accept that that is desirable to you or that that kind of body can be desirable. So, some words of a poem by Rachel Wiley come to mind. She says that, ‘I’m fat’ and her boyfriend says, ‘no, you’re beautiful.’ And she thinks about why she can’t be both.
And I think that, for me, has always encapsulated what fetishization of certain types of bodies and marginalisation of certain identities and bodies in just all overall general sexual experiences has meant. We don’t allow them to exist alongside our ideas of beauty and desirability at all.
Sanchi
I completely hear you, Vandita and picking up from what you said earlier also and will then come back to the fetishization part. But I really think intersection in all our identities, like there’s no escape for intersectionality, right? All our identities do meet with each other all the time, and I just think about how different it is for somebody who has, say, economic capital as a queer person versus for somebody who does not have that. Say, for me as a queer person, if I do have enough money to shift to a geographical location that has progressive laws, I’m able to very easily convert one capital into another to help my sexual identity, right? But that might not be the case for everybody, and I think our intersecting identities just really come into play every day in our life, even if when we don’t recognize it. And also, about fetishization, I think what you said about, say, Indian bodies or what we call oriental bodies in the West being considered and like going back to what Edward said, like his concept of Orientalism, they are fetishized, right? And I think this happens across identities, whether you talk about nationality, you talk about race, you talk about ethnicity, even a person’s sexuality. Why are lesbians fetishized? And what you said of course about body structure and weight, so it’s just across identities also, right?
Vandita
Definitely, Sanchi. I think those are such incredibly relevant points, and there’s so much that we ignore about the person when we start bracketing them into certain types of identities. Even what you mentioned about economic access, I remember. So, I’m from Bombay, and I remember as a young person, like just if I ever went for a drive to any place near the seaside or just for a walk, you’ll see couples lining up, right? Like, you’ll see pairs of people or just people together and they’re making out and they’re being affectionate towards each other, and as a young person, I was always like, why don’t you do this at home or why don’t they do this in their room? Because I was told, one, that sex is inherently an extremely private thing, but second, it took me a long time to realise that even the privilege of being able to have that space at home where you can make out, even with your married partner, right? So, I’m not even talking about the multiple layers of identities that wouldn’t even have that access. It’s so limited and I think from then on, I’ve just been like, my mind’s been blown thinking about what about access? What does equity in terms of right to like, having sex mean? Does it just mean recognition of your sexuality? But does it also mean economic support to be able to exert your sexuality? So many things, and I’m so glad that today we have with us, Apurupa. Apurupa is the founder of Bibliotherapy and she’s this amazing sex educator, extremely inclusive, extremely cool and someone that we learn a lot from and I’m excited to have her with us to answer a lot of these questions that we’ve been talking about as well. Welcome Apurupa.
Apurupa
Thank you so much, Vandita.
Sanchi
Hi, Apurupa. So glad to have you here for this conversation today.
Apurupa
Hi, Sanchi.
Vandita
Alright, so we’re gonna dive right into the first question that we have for you, which is how do we even develop a positive relationship with our understanding of sex? Like, for so many years or centuries, it’s been couched under a lot of negativity, a lot of like stereotypes and stigma. How do we then develop this positive relationship? And when we do, what does a healthy sex life even look like?
Apurupa
I love that you’ve used the word relationship, right? Because that’s exactly what it is. It takes ongoing work and just like a relationship, there will be ups and downs. I also want to be away from this trap of positive and negative because on some days we may be very comfortable with our own sexual identity and with the sexual behaviours of others and on some days we may judge ourselves or someone very harshly. And also, I feel like saying positive relationship then becomes a dog whistle to say that you are sex-negative if you aren’t positive in a particular way. So, I feel like if you’re open to learning, if you’re trying to engage with the nuances of pleasure and safety and we’re trying in whatever way possible to be accepting, that counts as building that relationship. The second part of your question where you know, you talk about healthy sex life. For that we first need to define sex and health, right? What does sex look like to us? You brought up very interesting points about how sex is not only penetration, but maybe for someone, it’s just penetration. So, what does sex look like for me? And also, what is health, according to me? Because we get our understanding of that from textbooks written by your white, able-bodied, often neurotypical males, and or like controlled studies which happen in random American colleges, suburban colleges, right? I mean, for example, what if a couple chooses the withdrawal method while engaging in the sexual act? For instance, knowing, let’s say that there is a chance of impregnation and they’re aware of this and they’re aware of like the STI risk, etc. If that’s what they choose and that is healthy for them, then that’s a healthy sex life that they have with each other. Look at, look at the current situation- we’re in the middle of a pandemic. The COVID crisis is still very real, but a lot of us are choosing to move out, are choosing to engage with people sexually, even casually for that matter, where we may not necessarily know the different people that the other party or parties might be engaging with, but for us that feels like a healthy choice, and for us that feels like an affirming choice in some way. S,o, therefore, you’re allowed to call that a healthy sex life. So when we really sit with ourselves and understand what health and sex mean to us and what kind of relationship we would like to have with our own sexuality, our body, I think that’s a great place to start. And these definitions can look very different on different people and they can also be dynamic, they can change as the person discovers more about themselves. It just happens upon maybe like listens to your podcast, right? And their mind is blown and they have all this new information. Maybe they change their definition of what it means. So yeah. So basically, each person gets to choose what healthy sex life looks like for them.
Vandita
Thank you so much for that Apurupa. I think those were some excellent points. Definitely. I think ideas of what sex, health, and even the relationship with our body and our sexuality can be so different for so many people. I find that as long as it’s built on mutual respect and consent, where each party has adequate information to be able to give informed consent and there is no coercion, we should be able to engage in sex the way we want to. Thank you for that.
Sanchi
Absolutely, and I loved how you explained that as an ongoing and dynamic process where like one day we might be feeling very positively towards ourselves and our bodies or the other day it might like be that we do feel some negative emotions. So, I really love that how you acknowledge that and say that out loud that it is a dynamic process and that it’s okay. Really, thanks for that. And this begins me to another question that I have in mind. We talk about healthy relationships, right? And in a culture like ours which prizes virginity so much, why do you think that is? And do you think that there can be a healthy relationship with virginity as well?
Apurupa
The answer to why do I think that is, is the holy trifecta of casteism, colonialism and capitalism. We are an extremely casteist culture and we are so big on purity and chastity and we often conflate sexuality with morality, and commitments to purity are part of like this larger system of patriarchal control and heteronormativity and the belief that like, like Vandita also very rightly said, that people with particular bodies have particular identities and therefore have particular desires. It’s also very rooted in establishing paternity, right? I mean, those are the origins of virginity, so to say, which is why people assigned female at birth are more likely to be policed about it. And these ideas are also very colonial in nature, where there’s a lot of shaming for like, “savage” behaviour. People are taught that they are not to have sex until marriage so that they may remain pure, and then this purity becomes such a key feature of a person’s worth individually and within a community as well. And I mean the commodification of female bodies, AFAB bodies is such a long-standing tradition of capitalist patriarchy, right? If your body is an object, then, therefore, virginity is a condition, but virginity is obviously a social construct. You don’t lose anything when you have sex for the first time. You don’t gain anything when you have sex for the first time. It’s just an experience. It could be very meaningful to some people, and that’s very valid. It could just be meh for some people, and that’s also valid. And what is virginity really? The presence or absence of the hymen on an AFAB’s body. Well, the news flash the hymen actually is an elastic membrane and it covers the mouth of the front hole or the vagina and it can be impacted by several activities, which have nothing to do with penetration. Even if that is our idea of sex, it has nothing to, it could break through physical activity, horse riding, cycling. Some people aren’t even born with the hymen. Some people may have really elastic hymens that don’t even break after some kind of penetrative sexual act. So, it’s such a, the very idea itself is so fallacious and then again like it brings me back to my previous question, what is sex, right? So, if you’re saying that sex is only penetration, well that’s very ableist. That’s very queerphobic, transphobic and that’s also very uninformed. That’s not all that is there to sex and that could be all that is there to sex for some people. So yeah, this idea of virginity has always had me perplexed. But I mean of course, having said that, I also want to take a minute to validate the experiences of people who want to identify as a virgin or who don’t want to identify as a virgin. Really if we understand that it is a choice and if a label feels affirming to us and if a label makes sense to us and therefore, we want to identify with it and we’re not necessarily policing other people based on the value that we attached to a particular label, then I suppose it’s absolutely all right, but inherently it does not have any value to a person’s worth or identity.
Vandita
Thanks, Apurupa. I think even the very fact that virginity is seen as a construct where a man sort of penetrates something for someone who’s assigned female at birth. I think that in itself is just a demonstration of how patriarchy would manifest physically or in a sexual relationship. And I think everything you’ve shared is so valid. So, much of this is just a way to ensure that certain lineage is passed on in terms of our ancestry, in terms of ensuring that a certain paternal right is maintained over the child, and all of this is very, very closely linked to how patriarchy aims to constantly control certain types of bodies. So, in keeping with what we’ve been talking about, Apurupa, I think my next question for you is just around this. It’s how our conversations around sex and sexuality are often very limited to the gender binary and even when there are conversations in spaces beyond the gender binary, it’s always as a separate conversation. It’s never something that is mainstreamed into a general sex-ed class that you would give a child, right? And I feel that till the time we don’t mainstream these conversations; we’re doing a great disservice to them. So how do you think we can make space for these conversations around the sexual health and pleasure of all gender identities, and not just the two that we seem to see the most?
Apurupa
Yeah, Vandita, I think you’ve actually answered the question by not making them an afterthought and not othering them to start with. We always say men, women and non-binary folks or the use of the word ‘third gender’ for instance. We obviously need to work at a policy level to protect the rights of peoples of, people of all genders. Look at the Trans Act for instance- it’s so violent and there is no right to self-determination and I’ll just take a moment here to check my own privilege. I’m very cognizant of the fact that I’m a cis woman. I’m able-bodied. I come from a suburban location and I am talking about how I can make space for non-binary and gender-non-confirming folks, and I see the irony in that because we talk about passing the mic, we talk about paying people from marginalised gender identities, we speak about learning from them but we also forget to include them in the conversations which directly impact them. So that infantilizing of people from marginalized identities has to stop. And we also obviously, which is something that you brought up briefly, was that we need to look at intersections and Sanchi said this as well. Like both gender and social class shape access to information and tools for sexual health and pleasure. So we need to be very cognizant of that as well, and even within the binary, we need to expand our ideas of what sexual health and pleasure means because we still have a very binary understanding of sexual health and pleasure. So you either have it, have sexual health or you don’t. You’re sexually healthy or unhealthy. You’re experiencing pleasure or you’re not. Like there is not a lot of space for simultaneity even within the binary, right, where we have everything at our disposal, and even there we are so oppressed in our understanding of what sexual health and pleasure can look like. So that must expand, and like you very rightly said, the conversations have to be mainstreamed. It cannot be an afterthought. It cannot be something that you save to the end of the session, let’s say in a sex-ed class. Like I often see where you know you, you have this whole conversation about how ‘Oh, reproduction is this, sexual act is this, masturbation is this. porn is this’, etc etc. and at the end of the session, there will be like a gender sensitization kind of segment and that needs to stop. And yeah, there has to be just more space for affirming conversations around pleasures and health of different kind. And yeah, we need to pass the mic. We need to invite people into conversations that directly concern them and we also need to, and, and, and this is something that I learned at the One Future Fellowship. You always need to, if you have privilege and you’re trying to use your privilege for social good, then you need to check with the people. You need to involve the people in the process and you need to figure out what social good looks like for them and I would extend that answer to sexual health and pleasure as well.
Sanchi
That’s such a wonderful approach, Apurupa and I love like all that you brought up and just not making people an afterthought, just calling them in, passing the mic. I think these are very simple approaches that make so much sense, right? And we can do that. So why not? And I think my next question to you is also related to the same. Even though hum kabse sex ke bare mein baat kar rahe hai (we’ve been talking about sex for a while), and I think I said this before also, that we do sometimes see sex as the ultimate form of pleasure, but not everybody enjoys sex or they may enjoy it only in a specific setting. And we know that there are so many myths around asexuality, and under asexuality also, we only mostly look at a singular definition of it. So can you tell us a little about what asexuality is, what it can look like for different individuals? And how is it that asexual people might want to be represented in the media, in their relationships or just what can we do to make more space again?
Apurupa
So the textbook definition, the ghisa pita (stereotypical) definition of asexuality, is that they are people who experience very little to no sexual attraction, and of course, it’s an umbrella term within which people may experience sexual attraction like you very rightly said, in certain situations, some people may not experience it at all, etc. so on and so forth. Some people may need some kind of a connection or a precursor to that sexual attraction. All of that, right? But our sexuality is fluid and a person can choose to identify as asexual for a particular period of time. They can just identify as asexual for like the next one hour. They can just try out that label if that’s something that they want to do. Some people may be born asexual, but a person’s asexuality is just as valid if it’s in response to some kind of a trigger. Well, on that note, I would like to give you a trigger warning. I am going to be talking about my own assault experience here. I won’t get into any graphic details but yeah. After I was assaulted for a period of time, I felt asexual and the resources around asexuality, the validity that I found within the community was very meaningful to me and now I identify as allosexual and I’m allowed to do that, and it can look so different in different people. My dear friend recently introduced me to this term called cupiosexual, which basically means a person may want sexual relationship but they do not experience sexual attraction. Now how fascinating is the human sexuality like that right? Like it, it’s a summation of so many things and so many different facets of our personality and this invisiblizing of asexual identities and aphobia. Again, like I would, I would really trace it back to like patriarchy, right? And capitalism, where we need this normative idea of what family is and we need to create these individual spending units and when people don’t understand what asexuality means and then there is this pressure to kind of perpetuate the human species, which is to like give birth and like raise children, etc. People also look at asexuality from a very negative lens. There is also so much gatekeeping within the queer community. I’ve heard people say that asexual people aren’t actually queer people because ‘okay, they may be cis and they may be attracted to a person of the other gender. Therefore, oh, they’re not, they’re not queer.’ They’re not queer. They’re not queer enough. Also, like within the asexual community, about how you are allowed to experience your asexuality if you are, if you are someone who talks about your sexuality or sex, for instance, you’re not asexual enough for some reason, but really, each individual person, like I said, with sex and like I said with sexual health and like I said with pleasure, is allowed to define what asexuality means to them. Now, all these labels exist and all these different identities kind of exist. These community groups exist so that we can collectivise, fight for our rights, do research, you know, create access to resources, etc., but if something is not serving you, then you’re allowed to discard it. If something is serving you and you don’t necessarily identify as that particular, let’s say you are somebody who identifies as allosexual and that’s how you like to go about your life, but you like to maybe access asexual resources and you like to look at asexual content creators and you like to learn more about asexuality, you’re allowed to do that. You can identify as allosexual and you may never experience sexual attraction and vice versa for asexuality as well. Even if you, other people think that you are actually experiencing sexual attraction but if you say that you’re not, and if you say that you’re asexual, then you are asexual, right? So, so really, if we start allowing space for people to identify as anything that suits them at any point, and if we allow people that autonomy, that is how we need to start thinking about sex and sexual health and pleasure and that is how we will be liberated ourselves.
Vandita
That’s such a beautiful way to put it Apurupa. I think just centering people and their experiences can be so transformative in, just like you mentioned, like our collective liberation, sexual and otherwise. Just giving and creating space for that agency can be so meaningful and so powerful. Thank you. I think we’re just as guilty of relegating this part of the conversation to the end, but we know that this is something we don’t generally talk about as much. We do sometimes talk about sexual health but the pleasure part of it is very missing, especially what pleasure can look like in different ways. There are so many things to explore, so many resources. How do we, one, make resources around sexual pleasure more accessible? And what do we even mean by sexual pleasure? How do we expand this understanding of the idea of sexual pleasure for different types of people and do this for everybody? So, to do this for different people so that if I’m someone who experiences pleasure in a different way, I’m able to find that with people who understand what pleasure means to me.
Apurupa
Oh, absolutely, Vandita, and that’s such an interesting question. We also dilly dally around this conversation about pleasure because we don’t want to shock people and it doesn’t feel the most natural for people to maybe attend a course or sit at a workshop or even in a social gathering to start talking about what makes them come, right? It doesn’t feel natural. So you kind of build to it and that’s the culmination of the conversation, but I strongly believe that these conversations need to start happening in non-sexual settings. They need to happen in classrooms. They need to happen in theatres. They need to, we need to find like, “teachable” moments or cues around us where let’s say we see an ad or let’s say we see a particular scene in a movie and it makes the people watching it together feel a certain way. There has to be a conversation to process those emotions or to process what we’re viewing on screen. Vandita, you mentioned how you know, growing up, you saw these couples make out with each other, you know, on these promenades or at Marine Drive or wherever outside, right? Like while you were travelling and who had that conversation with you, right? As to what is it that you’re seeing? Why are they, for instance, that question, very pertinent question that you had, why are they not doing this at home? Are they allowed to do this in a public space like this? And well, I remember the time that, you know, I was, I was just like canoodling with my, with my then partner and obviously I was, I was young, we had no space to go to and I remember you know, a cop walking up to us and you know, demanding money etc, basically demanding a bribe, right? But the overwhelming feeling was that of shame and guilt because I had never, nobody had ever had this conversation with me before or I hadn’t heard, even overheard people talking about this before, right? We need to start having these conversations in non-sexual settings and it can’t be something that you reserve just for the bedroom or you reserve just to have with your intimate partner or partners. You also, you know, asked me about accessibility and again like I feel like I keep checking my privilege, but well, I am having this conversation in English and up until last year English was the only language that I could facilitate in. So, what about, you know, the slice of society that does not speak English? It’s still a very elitist thing to have access to language and to have access to resources and resource persons and the Internet for that matter. So, what about other people, right? And also like we need to explore different mediums through which we can impart sex education and also have more conversations around sex and pleasure in general. I know of this one organisation who made a bunch of music videos around the topic, and I thought, what a wonderful way for people who may not necessarily understand the nuances of something like consent through a conversation, maybe a song and dance can actually help them understand. I also pursued a course wherein we were taught; we taught a bunch of modules using clips from Bollywood and analysing them. So, I thought that was also a very interesting way because we talk about how violent Bollywood is and how violent the film culture is and the stereotypes it perpetuates. So okay, where are we having those conversations then? And another thing is schools. So, I work in a sex-ed company and I work as a facilitator and I noticed that schools will often call us in response to an external trigger, right? When there is some kind of an abuse case or when there is somebody, there’s been a bullying incident in their school, or when there’s been a WhatsApp group where certain messages were exchanged-that is when we are called to schools. That’s not ok. We need to have conversations about sex and pleasure beyond safety and beyond violence and beyond those concepts where we’re trying to protect people, right? We need to build it in, infrastructurally. They need to be these year-on-year programs growing up. It needs to start early and it needs to be something that’s kind of like womb to tomb, whatever that means. We need to continue to have these conversations from a very rights-based approach, the right to have a complete and accurate understanding of our body and sex and sexuality. Well, that’s what it is. It’s a right and also of course like policy-level change needs to be affected, right? And this is something that I remember Sanchi had brought up in one of the discussions that we had where she said that the NEP doesn’t even allude to sexuality education or any kind of conversation around it. And so, I feel like it needs to really become a culture where we have these conversations and that’s literally what they are. They are, they are conversations where there is space. It’s not a lecture. It’s not one way. There is space for a person to maybe give information and there is space for the other person to process that information and have conversations around that information, right? And even challenge that information if need be. So, so I feel like yeah there needs to be a culture which will then create more accessibility and which will then, and also like where we explore different languages and mediums so, so that more people have access to it, and they’re not dependent on knowing the language or being a certain kind of learner and adapting to a certain kind of pedagogy to be able to access this information.
Vandita
Thanks for that, Apurupa. I think those are some excellent points, I think just in terms of ensuring greater accessibility and pushing the needle forward. But what do we talk about when we talk about sex? Do we talk about things beyond protection? Do we talk about things beyond our general understanding of health? I think even when it comes to pleasure, we’re so restricted in thinking about what pleasure looks like and what it could mean. And so many of us, especially from genders that are oppressed, never truly get to learn academically or in a formal setting of any sort, what pleasure could mean. It’s always a self-exploration and not that a self-exploration is bad, it’s just that it’s additional effort that someone from an oppressed group is having to put in to be able to learn something that is being provided to others as like way of life. I think that is also extremely important. Thank you so much for sharing this with us today.
Apurupa
Thank you so much, Vandita. I really enjoyed reflecting on some of these things that are so close to my heart and I feel like I’ve come such a long way from being slut shamed and from being ostracised from my friends’ groups for being promiscuous or for just even talking about sex. I was the last person to have engaged with anybody, but like just because I was talking about it, I was penalised. But I feel like, I love it that I can come on this platform and I can talk about these things that are meaningful to me and have those ideas affirmed. So, thank you so much for this opportunity.
Sanchi
Thanks so much, Apurupa. I think I learnt so much from you here today, as I always do, and I think like just going beyond a medical legal understanding of what sexuality is or what sexual pleasure can look like, it can serve us so much purpose, right? It can liberate us so much, and I think a wonderful thing that I learned here also today is that our journeys with our sexuality are dynamic and it’s ok if aaj mujhe ek label pasand aa raha hai (if I like a label today) I’ll go with it, but agar kal (if tomorrow) I think it doesn’t fit me. I am like, I have the right to discourage. So really thanks for those conversations here today Apurupa. Really learnt a lot.
Vandita
I’m just gonna add to that to say that we really need to expand our understanding of sex and sexuality beyond protectionism, because so often for certain genders our bodies are seen and are treated as sites of violence, that we lose connectedness with pleasure, either by ourselves or through other people. We just forget that pleasure is also something that can exist within us, or it is something that we can give to ourselves or that we can seek. And I think that is such a detriment to our human experience, if sexual pleasure is something that we do want and that we do want to seek.
Apurupa
Absolutely Vandita. We need to move as a collective. We need to move beyond this whole ‘Madonna-whore’ dichotomy where you know people of certain genders, especially marginalised genders, are viewed as good and chaste and you know these pure Madonnas are bad and promiscuous and seductive whores. So you know if a person chooses to have sex and seek pleasure that they’re not good and if a person chooses, like in the case of any sexual person, to not, then they are somehow wrong. So, we can never be enough and I feel like we need to move past this and we need to heal from this collective trauma.
Sanchi
Yeah, and I think that’s so true. And one quote from Sex Education, the TV show, comes to mind wherein an asexual person is really confused as to are they broken because they don’t feel sexual attraction and I think something that the sex therapist says which is so important is that how could you be broken? Sex doesn’t make us complete. So, if you don’t feel sexual attraction, how does it make you incomplete? And I think that’s a wonderful thought.
Sanchi
Until next time then, stay with us on our journey towards a radically kinder world.
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For more delightful discussions on practicing feminism and fostering communities of care, check out the other episodes of the Nurturing Radical Kindness podcast! Until then, here’s a reflection activity for you to mull over.
| Reflection Activity – Sex, Pleasure and Identity Take some time out, spend about 15 minutes in a quiet space, and reflect: What are some aspects of your identity that shape your ideas and experiences of sex and desirability? |
About the Nurturing Radical Kindness Podcast
Radical Kindness is the ethos and practice that forms and informs One Future Collective. It guides our constitution as an organisation and is the core value that guides our work. It is a politics of love, fighting against apathy and hopelessness. Often being ‘hard’, ‘stoic’ or ‘rigid’, is considered crucial for social change, and it is this very notion that radical kindness challenges. It espouses that being kind, compassionate and loving in our activism can still pave the way for dissent, defiance, growth and rebuilding. It is a tool we seek to use to rebuild our systems with care, nurturance and justice at their core. It allows us to hold various stakeholders, including ourselves, accountable in how we interact with ourselves and our communities and to build towards a lived reality of social justice collaboratively.
Hosted by Sanchi Mehra and Vandita Morarka of One Future Collective, this podcast attempts to unpack what it means to be radically kind and how we can practice it through conversations with members of the One Future Collective community.