Mumbai: US-Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy has a vision of what life will look like without shame, taboos and guilt: in a room with a high ceiling, everyone can enjoy sex in whatever way they want; people of all shapes and varieties fit into that room. On the other hand, a room that zealots and conservatives create has a low ceiling. “All the zealots are tiny men in these tiny rooms.” She tops that vision with a no-holds-barred ‘declaration of faith’ that says: “F*** the patriarchy!”
Speaking at an ‘ adda ’ on ‘What’s sex got to do with it’ at the India Culture Lab on Tuesday evening, Ms. Eltahawy said, “So much that has to do with sex happens in the dark and under taboo circumstances, surrounded by so much shame. And when that happens it means the ones who are most vulnerable are hurt the most, and usually they are girls and women and people of other sexualities.”
For Ms. Eltahawy, as for the other participants and audience members, sex was often the hidden elephant in their private spaces: pleasure and uninhibited desire, pornography, the freedom to express their sexual selves, to fantasise without guilt, the fact that sex is still a forbidden topic of discussion with parents. Like Ms. Eltahawy, who spoke about her sexual and physical assault at the hands of security forces in Egypt in 2011, personal stories segued into ideologies and opinions. Amidst laughter, lots of laughter, feelings were shared openly, and language saw no barriers; in two hours, everything to do with sex was out there.
Bishakha Datta, co-founder of the non-profit Point of View, which was celebrating its 20th anniversary, said the division of women into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ was one of the methods institutions use to control women’s sexuality. Paromita Vohra, filmmaker, said shame and taboo “separate us from ourselves.”
Geeta Patel, associate professor at University of Virginia, said there are a few things she wants to reclaim: one, make sex as important to everyday life as eating and breathing. “I want to reclaim sex from power.” She also wants to reclaim fantasy. “Open up the body to other ways of imagining and being. You also engage the other, which in some ways allows you to release yourself into someone else.”
Making room for desire, fantasy, reclaiming the self and detaching from the shame and guilt was about being ‘sex-positive’. Pornography, too, has its place in this scheme of things. “If we don’t think sex is dirty in the first place why do we think something meant to create sexual arousal is intrinsically dirty?” Ms. Datta asked. “Pornography is meant to create sexual arousal.”
Ms. Vohra believes that though there are things within pornography that disturb us, that perpetuate violence, sexism and misogyny, the only way to counter is with other types of images of sex. “One of the reasons all sex accumulates in mainstream, industrialised pornography is because we don’t want to talk about it anywhere else; we don’t want to have it in the movies, or read about it. Counter that with the kind of sexual material that we think is beautiful, arousing and exciting, and have that multiplicity.”
Ms. Datta said it was important to “dismantle norms around sex.” Sex-positive does not mean everybody has to have sex all the time in the same way, or as frequently. “It’s absolutely fine to position yourself wherever you want on the spectrum. The question underlying that always is, ‘who’s making the choice? The decisions?’”
During the course of her work with female genital mutilation activists in Ethiopia, Prof. Patel had an ‘eye-opening’ moment as she spoke to one woman. “I just made the assumption she didn’t have sex. I thought it was about vaginas. She said, ‘What makes you think my entire body is not an erogenic zone? I have learnt to have sex with my entire body and do all sorts of things to get pleasure.” For Prof. Patel, it was more than about learning something. “For me, that’s a fantasy. When we’re with each other, one of the ways you can figure something out is by sharing fantasies.”
The very definition of sex needed expansion. “You don’t mandate that there’s one type of sex,” said Ms. Vohra. “People need to be able to find eroticisms and different textures in their life, so that they can define their own sexual journey.”
To an audience question on writing about sexual violence, women’s legal rights activist Flavia Agnes pointed out that violence at home was hardly ever highlighted. To that, Prof. Patel added, “The bulk of sexual violence is at home. And you don’t tell people not to go home. In fact, in this narrative that most women face you’re asked not to leave home.”
Not every discussion on the topic was as serious though. The adda had its moments of fun, too. When one of the younger members of the audience wanted to know “when, why and how the f-word became bad and abusive,” Prof. Patel’s answer was simple: “Go to the Oxford English Dictionary. It has a brilliant time line. I have a feeling Chaucer didn’t know the word was bad.”
