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And video turned into peep booths, and peep booths became the VCR, and the VCR became the CD-ROM, and the CD-ROM became the internet, and the rest, as they say, is browser history.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that art, ideas or women that disrupt a stale moral universe must be in want of a comparison to prostitutes.
These become our lenses for the world, and as long as those with power and privilege continue to monopolize the roles of sifting and sorting, all is well.
But unlike the Little Dutch Boy who uses his finger to prevent the flood, there are too many holes in the wall and the dyke is now at breaking point.
And that for every boy who doesn’t like your prom dress, there are probably 500 others who will. You just have to be brave enough to find them.
Would a film with a romance in it skip over sexual aspects? Unlikely. So why should stories or fics? I love very explicit fic, and both read it and write it.’
Writing but second-guessing ourselves, keeping the words closest to our hearts bound inside unread notebooks. Our words feel like a trespass on to someone else’s land, and we speak them softly, if at all.
‘And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.’
Kalyug is also sometimes known as the era of WhatsApp—at least according to the sarpanch of Suraj.
Throughout history, technology has been seen as a source of danger to women. When steam trains were invented, people believed that women’s uteruses would fly out at fifty miles per hour. When landlines were introduced into American homes, people panicked that girls and women would be lured into depravity by disembodied male voices.
And the idea that we can come up with a number that, across the board, represents when someone’s experience of sex is coercion rather than agency is totally off the mark.
‘Unnatural, it seems, covers a lot of the fun stuff.’
the ‘suspension of disbelief’ was the ability to pause logic and rationality in service of enjoyment or pleasure.
The idea that we both love and fear what lives inside us has been explored by psychologists and philosophers through the ages.
One of my best friends and I have a private language. One of us asks the other, ‘Too much?’ This could refer to face glitter, excessive complaining about a fellow friend, or a skirt that barely covers the ass. No matter the subject, the other person will always have the same reply: ‘Not enough.’ There is no part of each other that we believe is too much
We are best in our fullness, ugly or beautiful, and encouraging fullness in each other is an embrace (though in fairness, sometimes it is simply an excuse to be a little bitchier about someone we’re irritated with). He is never too much, and equally valuable to me is the notion that I’m not, either. That I can go far, spread myself out into the world, and there’ll always be someone who is cheering me on to go even further.
They are unashamed of their bodies and their desires, and what’s even worse, they’ve replaced shame with the pursuit of pure, unadulterated pleasure. And as we are reminded time and time again, pleasure-seeking women just do not sit comfortably inside the world’s power structures.
But every time someone posts a picture, shares a video or smiles into a camera, they are stepping across the border of shame, into a land where the unspoken question they nervously ask is: ‘Too much?’ And my hope for this world today is that your answer will always be, ‘Not enough.’
The phrase ‘stolen glances’ is one I think of a lot here. Their glance steals something from you, and that something has nothing to do with virtue and modesty, and everything to do with power.
George Bernard Shaw calls dancing ‘the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music’, and
[M]en act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
‘It is about who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are.’
closer. The mass frightens those with power, and the sexual mass, even more
The mass is also about how people self-organize and claim spaces outside of officially sanctioned boundaries. The mass is about ‘undesirable’ groups coming together, and as a result, their intimate unions are often seen as a threat to institutional power.
Even at its best, porn is not for the everyday: it’s for the occasional, the rare, the special. Otherwise it would get to be too much.
Low-cut dresses. Profile pictures. Dance moves. Any and all expressions of a woman’s desire is crossing a line.
