February 2, 2024 • 27 mins
Female pleasure and sex positivity are not often talked about very openly. What does sexual agency look like for women in contemporary India? And how does it differ from the ubiquitous images we see in media coverage and pop culture of the sexually liberated western women? In this episode of Love Matters, host Leeza Mangaldas is in conversation with book author and psychologist Amrita Narayanan about the many nuances of women’s sexuality in the context of a patriarchal society. What can sexual empowerment look like within the Indian context? And how does female pleasure pivot between “rapture and distress”?
Leeza Mangaldas’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leezamangaldas/
Amrita Narayanan’s X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmritaShrink
Credits:
Produced by: Patricia Szilagyi (DW), Charulata Biswas (IE)
Research & guest acquisition: Sana Rizvi (DW)
Project Manager: Patricia Szilagyi (DW)
Editorial Support: Shashank Bhargava (IE), Khyati Rajvanshi (IE)
Executive Producer: Melanie von Marschalck (DW Life & Style), Anant Nath Sharma (IE)
Sound Editor: Suresh Pawar (IE)
Love Matters with Leeza Mangaldas is a cooperation between The Indian Express and DW, Germany’s international broadcaster.
Learn more about DW:https://www.facebook.com/dwasia
https://www.dw.com/
Leeza Mangaldas’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leezamangaldas/
Amrita Narayanan’s X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmritaShrink
Credits:
Produced by: Patricia Szilagyi (DW), Charulata Biswas (IE)
Research & guest acquisition: Sana Rizvi (DW)
Project Manager: Patricia Szilagyi (DW)
Editorial Support: Shashank Bhargava (IE), Khyati Rajvanshi (IE)
Executive Producer: Melanie von Marschalck (DW Life & Style), Anant Nath Sharma (IE)
Sound Editor: Suresh Pawar (IE)
Love Matters with Leeza Mangaldas is a cooperation between The Indian Express and DW, Germany’s international broadcaster.
Learn more about DW:https://www.facebook.com/dwasia
https://www.dw.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
I'm Lisa Mangeldas, and this islove Matters. What does sexual agency,
sexual pleasure, and sex positivity reallymean for Indian women? And how might
the ways in which we experience andexpress sexual empowerment differ from the model of
the sexually liberated woman presented by theWest. What are the implications of patriarchy's
relentless control and surveillance on women's sexuality. We're going to be discussing all of
(00:28):
this in Law with our wonderful guest, Amathan r aman Amretha is a clinical
psychologist, psychoanalyst, author, professor, researcher whose work has shone the light
on women's sexuality in so many remarkableways, and most recently, our book
Women's Sexuality in Modern India and aRapture of Distress has for me been such
(00:50):
an insight into what it means tobe a sexual woman and an Indian woman.
And some really excited to be discussingthis book with Amretha today. Aretha,
thanks so much for joining us,Thanks Lisa for having me. It's
a pleasure to be here. Iread it an article he wrote, Amatha
of how food Matter Thoughts translates sonicely to sex. You know, words
like yummy, luscious, delicious,And for most people, most women,
(01:14):
it's quite easy to describe a goodmeal that way, but many of us
would hesitate to describe sex that way, especially publicly. Why do you think
that is well. Language has sucha particular role for our sex life,
doesn't it. It's the conduit bywhich our internal world comes outside. And
this is such a private internal worldin contrast to food, which is communally
(01:38):
shared. Our tastes may differ,but there's something very public about the act
of eating, in contrast to oursex lives are so very private. So
I think using language is a vehicleto describe our sex lives. It's always
a little hesitation there, and there'salways a little discomfort as well, But
I also think it has a lotof potential. When I wrote that article,
(01:59):
I was really focused on the extravaganceof language and of food metaphors.
But it's been maybe seven or eightyears since I wrote that, and I
still think language is critical and usinglanguage is the vehicle to express sexuality is
so important and empowering. But noteverybody has wants to use the rich metaphors
(02:21):
of food and feasting. There mightbe other kinds of language that come to
mind. Even just saying I likesex can be transgressive right for women,
especially Indian women. And you usethe expression sexual agency? So what does
agency mean? What stops women fromfeeling like their agents? And could perhaps
some of that hesitation to describe sexas something you enjoy and participate in also
(02:46):
have to do with sexual agency andperhaps lack of it. Well, how
I use agency is a kind ofconfidence about sexuality, which depends upon also
an awareness what your desires are.So this common nation awareness of desire and
also a power or a confidence thatI can execute these desires. I can
(03:07):
make them happen for me, maybeeither in fantasy or in reality, but
I will give some enactment to them. That's what I meant bi sexual agency.
I used to think that language wasone of the most important ways of
doing that, but I think thereare all kinds of ways of doing that,
and the most important thing is tofind that expression. Why is it
(03:30):
difficult for women? I think thatwomen are very socialized, particularly women in
India but perhaps across culture, socializedto be a bit hyper aware of their
sexuality and also aware that it's dangerousthat their bodies are dangerous, and I
think that leads to a very particularway of experiencing your own excitements. So,
(03:53):
if you have a high degree ofsocialization that your body is dangerous,
it can invite harm. And whenyou experience excitement in that same body,
it might be closer to danger thanyou like. And so when you're closer
to danger than you like than havingconfidence, having agency becomes much more difficult.
And I think that's one of thecentral questions that my book wrestled with,
(04:15):
is that under these conditions of difficulty, where you're socialized to feel that
your body is excitements are dangerous,maybe lethal, how then can you get
pleasure out of them? The samething that's causing you to be so dangerous
and at risk also the thing thatgives you pressure. So if you look
at the cover of my book,for example, I have it over there,
there's a picture for a woman facinga man, and immediately I think
(04:41):
the idea of her discomfort is asmuch of a possibility, maybe more of
a possibility, than the idea ofher pleasure. Now, why is that
and how does that have to dowith us as viewers our own sense of
sexual agency that's been so traumatized.I would say by the amount of feedback
of media coverage of women's distress thatwe have. Yeah. Absolutely, I
(05:06):
mean your title in a Rapture ofDistress has the quality of an oxymoron rapture
and distress. Right. Do youwant to expound on that a little bit
as we talk about agency. Soon one level, what I meant by
that is that we tend to beenraptured by distress when it comes to women's
sexuality. It's almost a crime notto talk about crime when it comes to
(05:28):
women's bodies. And there's a realityto that, right, there is a
lot of unspeakably heinous crime on women'sbodies. But I am interested in how
that functions as a sensoring mechanism totalking about women's pleasure. That we can
be so enraptured by distress that weforget pleasure altogether. So that's one way
of thinking about the title that Ichose. A second way of thinking about
(05:51):
it, which is also important,is that rapture and distress are often closely
intermingled. That's on one hand,that's because of the reasons that are here.
When women are socialized to distress abouttheir bodies. Then their pleasures can
sit closely with their distress, andyou can have pleasure that then turns to
distress, which doesn't negate the pleasure. Lastly, there's the idea that some
(06:15):
women actually enjoy distress in sexuality.You had Jayashallma talking about something of this
kind on a previous episode of yourpodcast. Sometimes distress can be pleasurable,
and we shouldn't rule that out either. So there are all these cadences that
distress has alongside rapture that I wantedto illustrate in my title. And one
of the points that you make alsois that a female sexual agency in the
(06:40):
Indian contacts might not fit Western imagesof the modern woman. What kind of
problems do you think that has caused? And do you think that perhaps because
of the way that patriarchy conditions ourexperiences of sexuality, is some of that
distress something that's so much a partof our experience that we almost miss it
when it's gone. So there's sortof two parts your question, and I
think it might be interesting to answerthem together. One is this an image
(07:03):
that we have of a liberated Westernwoman who in some ways represents liberal sexuality
or access to sexual freedom. Andso first of all, that's problematic for
a number of reasons. It's ubiquitous. Jacqueline Rose, who's a psychoanalytic thinker
that I enjoy, she says,it's the Internet model of feminism, and
(07:24):
it's the most ubiguitous picture that wehave. It excludes a lot of people,
and the woman is pictured, ofcourse by herself, So in some
way it implicitly excludes all the communityassociations to sexuality that women have. It
also excludes distress the modern woman asa Western woman, you know, wearing
a skirt heading to the airport ofher laptop doesn't deliver a holistic enough picture,
(07:48):
I think. And can you expounda bit more on what is missing
or how Indian women, for example, might experience sexual empowerment in ways that
are less legible or less obvious.Then let's say this Western model of the
woman at the airport and has gottenwith a laptop. I mean, I
think in your book you mentioned likeyou could be making dinner in a sari
(08:09):
and also be sexually empowered, whereasyou could be on your way to the
airport with your laptop and not besexual empowered. At these optics of Western
modernity or seeming freedom might not alwayscarry through what they symbolized to the eye,
right. I mean, I thinkwhat I'm talking about I experience is
a sexual liberation that don't fit inwith positivity and confidence culture in neatly.
(08:35):
They are messy experiences. So wecan think of experiences of great sexual pleasure
that happened alongside the experiences of completesubmission to pay phiarchy. So there are
a number of women who I spoketo when I was writing my book that
had, on one hand a vibrant, secret sexual life alongside that a performance
(09:01):
that felt very real and important tothem, of complete assimilation to mainstream patriarchal
culture, for example, a jointfamily, and how is that managed and
where are the places where it getsvery slippery? But also how in such
a setting, you know, beingvery confident, speaking confidently and happily about
(09:22):
sexuality can prevent you from having it. And I'm talking about examples of women
who come from families where they wantto model sexual reserve for their families on
one hand, to preserve those kindsof relations. And I think that's what
I meant by Indian there, andit may not only apply to Indians,
but I think it's particularly important forIndians of all persuasions to have a wide
(09:46):
range of close relationships, including withfamily and relatives, and for sexuality to
ideally not unseat that. So whatI think of as sexual revolution culture is
a a bit of saying up yoursto the entire family and community that doesn't
approve, and that's certainly a verylegitimate way of going about your sexual life.
(10:09):
What I found in my research andalso sometimes in the clinic, is
that for many women born and whowere raised in India, that that's not
the preferred model. That, ofcourse I do want acceptance from their family,
but narrating their sexual lives explicitly wearingliberation and their outfits sometimes works against
(10:31):
and they prefer not to have someof that friction. They prefer to reserve
the drama for the insides of theirsexual lives rather than wearing it on the
outside. I was surprised at someof what I found in my research.
I think I expected to hear moreoppression than I experienced. I also learned
(10:52):
to listen in a very different way. When I first started. What I
found was that if you get pastthat, that's some of the kinds of
sexuality that gets described are so farfrom vanilla that it's quite striking, and
that the patriarchal performance on the outsideis kind of a foil for something that
is a degree of freedom that's unattainablefor some people who on the outside and
(11:16):
you know, seem very liberated andput together, sexually confident, etc.
That's so interesting. Thanks for sharingthat. I feel like there's a lot
of things to think about that.But another of the themes that your work
brings up is the generational conflict betweenmothers and daughters in regards to sexual agency.
Can you tell us about that?So worldwide, it's an empirical finding
(11:39):
that the mother daughter relationship is oneof the factors around which woman's sexuality pivots.
Now, of course, this getsexpressed and worked out in all kinds
of diverse ways, and I don'tmean to say that I've captured even close
to you know, a tenth ofthat, probably, But what I did
notice in the stories that women toldme, and just to give you some
(12:03):
background, I asked the women whoI interviewed to speak about their sexuality,
and that's it. That's really theonly question that I asked in the process.
Many of them. I think allof them spoke about their mothers.
And what I noticed is that whenthere's a mother whose sexuality is imagined as
happy or content, that this freesup daughters in a way. And the
(12:26):
converse of that is that there's somethinglike a survivor guilt when women feel that
their mothers have been sexually unhappy.They may go on to have sexually happy
or unhappy lives themselves, but there'ssomething like a weight that needs to be
worked through or shaken off that theirmothers didn't have that kind of experience.
Now, how is this affected andwhat consequence does it have? You know,
(12:50):
this is one of the questions thatI really picked up. I bid
a lot of attention to how interviewsreported their moms getting anxious about their sexual
excitement, whether it was them beingsqueally, loud, giggly young girls,
so not even genital sexuality, butjust excitement of any kind. To what
(13:13):
we hear about more commonly, whichis, you know, conflicts over speaking
to boys or wearing certain clothes.If there was a high degree of distress
in these conflicts, in these interactions, if the mother seemed to be extremely
appalled, it said, then thenthis became something that sometimes got internalized,
and it added for the young girlsgoing into their womanhood a degree of anxiety
(13:37):
and danger to their sexuality. Thatif I'm a sexual being, it could
really upset mom, it could makeher love me less, or it could
just get her really agitated. Idon't even know why these kinds of messages
and experiences seem to hover in women'simaginations, I think through the course of
their life. I'm thinking of awoman that I spoke to who's a grandmother,
(14:00):
and she worried both about her motherand her daughter when she experienced actually
quite a bit of sexual freedom,but it was accompanied by this intense anxiety.
And so one of the takeaways Ihave is that just because it makes
you anxious doesn't mean you shouldn't doit. And even if it makes you
guilty and ashamed afterwards, maybe that'sa sign that you need more exposure therapy.
(14:24):
In other words, a certain numberof times of doing it might get
you through some of that intergenerational guilttrauma, heaviness of having your mother and
grandmother, women of your family havinghad to bear that load. You also
speak on sauces of sexual suppression forwomen and at this talk about the mother
(14:45):
has made me think of it.You mentioned gossip, reputation, and maternal
socialization to some extent, perhaps themother is the first exposure to our maternal
socialization as potential mothers ourselves. Right, Can you talk those three foss that
idea comes from? You know metaanalysis that these Western psychologists, American psychologists
(15:07):
Bamaster and French do, and they'vecome up with these three sources of sexual
suppression, which is worldwide. Ithink it functions much more strongly in countries
that have a strong group affiliation,as India does. When I get on
interviews about this, people often saythat, well, no, many people
are nuclear families now in India.And it's true, there are many nuclear
(15:30):
families now in India. But theidea of the group, the fantasy of
uncles, aunt's extended family jati communityis still writ very large in the Indian
imagination, and those extended communities area source of gossip and reputation. Now,
much of this is in the imaginationand that's what makes it so tricky.
(15:52):
It makes the unhappiness around it alsotricky because one of the things that
bothers me is that it's anachronous taketo the reality. So in the real
you might be surrounded by a communitythat doesn't gossip negatively at least about a
woman's sexual exploits. I hope forpositive gossip about a woman's sexual exploits.
(16:12):
But in the imagination, at theconsequence of memory, and a consequence of
cultural memory, including cultural mythologies,there still hovers this critique, self loathing
policing of women's sexuality. And Ithink that women recoup it in very interesting
ways, the most obvious being thatyou have the experience of sexual experience,
(16:36):
and I'm thinking of a specific womanfrom my book here, you really enjoy
the experience of a fantastic time,and then afterwards you're kind of reckoning with
that same body that had such awonderful time, feeling very hollow and empty.
In response to an imaginary audience ofuncles, aunt's grandparents, figures that
at a one point, a historicalpoint, stricted sexuality. Now I may
(17:02):
not even be around in reality,but nevertheless exercises force upon the imagination that
brings kind of a damper to sexuality. I think that can be worked through,
and when many people do work itthrough, for some people it remains
as some kind of still belonging.There's an unbelonging about freedom, just the
(17:22):
word itself connotes unbelonging. And noteverybody gets a pleasure out of experiencing that.
It's distressing for some people to experiencethat, but that distress doesn't mean
they don't want liberation and sexuality.It just means that they have something else
with which to wrestle. It mademe think of shame as well as a
consequence of gossip or your reputation beingtarnished, or the fear of that.
(17:45):
Right, there's a sense of shameif people find out or I shouldn't do
this because it's shameful. And yetshame is also, in a strange sort
of way, something that eroticizes,right, that which is taboo becomes erotic.
So we feel ashamed of certain desireswe may have and don't want others
to know. And yet perhaps wehave those desires because there's a certain amount
(18:08):
of forbiddenness to having them. Right. Do you think in the Indian context
shame is a particularly prominent and perhapseven erotically charged emotion. Yeah, yeah,
certainly, I'm glad you reminded meabout the erotic charge to it.
So on one hand, yes,shame and the idea of being shame faced.
Women will come and say that theyfeel they look different because they're feeling
(18:30):
such a high degree of embarrassment forpleasure and to look in pleasure in public,
for example, when talking about sexuality. That's a source of eroticized shame.
I think it's at once embarrassing andpleasurable because it crosses a tamboo.
So some of the women that Iwould sit with from my interviews would say
(18:52):
this is so embarrassing, but they'dsay with a great deal of joy.
So that's one of the ways inwhich I think it comes forward. Also,
as I think what you're alluding tois that early experiences of being shamed
for sexuality can make those experiences moreexciting and can lead us to even seek
out shame in sexuality in order toget this erotic resoul out of it.
(19:17):
When that happens, I think Ican face the gossip, reputation, maternal
socialization even more. But worse ofall, I think you face health culture.
So mental health culture says that ifyou're feeling ashamed, then that's not
what you want to be feeling.You want to be feeling happy, positive,
confident, and so that becomes ahurdle that women have to work through.
(19:40):
So I will meet women in theclinic, for example, to say,
shouldn't I be feeling better about this? I had so much fun?
Shouldn't I be feeling better about it? And the answer is not necessarily yeah.
I mean, I think there's alsothe tendency to when publicly talking about
sex, have very sort of needand tidy answers, very palatable answers that
you know, stay within the Ithink there's like a moralitis that suffuses discussions
(20:04):
of sexuality publicly, where there's notenough room for these uncomfortable or slightly less
easy to categorize experiences, realities ofeven seeming contradictions. And I'm glad we're
able to talk about that because Ithink sex positivity, especially the Western Internet
version of it, does not reallyallow for some of these more nuanced and
less conclusive observations about sexuality. Andso I want to hear from you about
(20:30):
what you see as the gaps insex positivity and sex positive discust, especially
with regards to how Indian women canrelate to or consume what's often very Western
in its positioning. Well, oneof the gaps is, I think in
the way we're seeing I really likefor us to be able to see the
(20:51):
more subtle sexual excitements that run throughour everyday lives, and run through women's
everyday life, that somehow don't getcounted if we're thinking about explicit sexuality.
So what's actually happening in women's mindsand hearts, which is I think something
that you attend to a lot inyour talks, and that's something also I
tried to attend to in my books, and looking behind the initial optics,
(21:14):
looking behind also the distress optics,but also giving room for something that's not
necessarily healthy, to widen our ambitof the positive, to include what we
might think of as negative to thingslike disgust or shame, for those to
be part of what we consider anerotic experience, and for us to be
(21:37):
able to actually see them in themany snapshots that they occur to us during
our lift lives. I think wemissed that. I think we're looking too
much for very explicit genital sexuality,and there's a reason for that. I
think we haven't had sufficient images ofthat in our popular culture and in our
media, in India until after liberalization. Right, So there's a way in
(22:00):
which we tend to count those moreand we certainly need plenty of that,
but to also count the more subtleexperiences. And the reason I would like
to count that is not only justto be inclusive, but I think there's
a better chance of us to havea community around sexuality if all kinds of
(22:21):
experiences are accountable, and that wealso don't have to account for ourselves sexually,
that all kinds of things can becounted and we don't press for that
you're only liberated if you had Xnumber of genital sexual experiences. There's a
way in which sex positivity and liberationculture can be very excluding and untruthfully excluding
(22:44):
of a lot of people. SoI'd like to say that shift made.
I think the effect of such ashift it's not just to have a more
cohesive community, but also to preventenactments of women who think they have more
liberation or less libation upon other women. The very notion of liberation, I
think is very problematic. I thinkit will be much more useful for us
(23:07):
to think about those who are gettingtheir desires met and those who are not,
and to have some compassion for thosewho are not, but not pity.
Maybe not pity because maybe they're gettingother needs met as well, and
because nobody really wants pity when itcomes to their sexual life, unless they
get pleasure out of pity, whichis yet another possibility. Let's talk about
(23:30):
pleasure as we wrap up this conversation. You've written a collection of erotic short
stories titled A Pleasant Kind of Heavy, And I remember, in reading about
the context for that book, youspoke of how so much of what we
hear about Indian women's sexuality is eitherreports of violence or sex and the context
(23:51):
of marriage and reproduction. We neverreally hear about women enjoying and experiencing pleasure,
you know, with agency and autonomyand ofity. And so I think
that you had to publish that undera pseudonym. It's a transgressive thing to
do, right, to talk aboutwomen's pleasure unabashedly. Can you tell us
a little bit about what you wantedto achieve with that book. I think
(24:11):
it was a transgissive thing to doat that time. Perhaps it's less so
now. This was a little morethan ten years ago, and it was
my first work in this arena ofwomen's sexuality what I wanted to do with
it. Of course, I think, like many women of my generation,
I was raised on this diet ofwomen's stories of pleasure narrated primarily by men,
(24:33):
and that too white men. Soone of the things I wanted to
do is to have a collection ofpleasure stories written by a woman of color,
written Inian women. And my hopewas really that this would invite other
people's stories, fictional or real,forward as well. And my fantasy,
if you will, at that time, was to have lots and lots of
(24:55):
a collective and archive, if youwill, of women's stories of sexual pleasure,
Indian women's stories is sexual pleasure,so that the brown bodies that were
not represented, the names, thegeographies, in the settings, that to
give them some representation. That wasone of my wishes. I think I
also had maybe a more youthful fantasythat if we have enough images of positive
(25:19):
sexuality, that this could be mybook. Was I thought one of them
that this would be a foil topatriarchal culture, this would push up against
it in a very important way,and that lots of these accounts could push
up against it. I still feelthat that's true, but I feel that
we're women are so much in smallpockets and silos doing that kind of work
(25:40):
sharing their sexual stories. Really,even the women I interviewed for the book.
For this most recent book, Ithink socioeconomic barriers, language difference,
various forms of cultural difference within Indiakeep women from sharing with each other.
Their stories are sexual pleasure. AndI think writing a pleasant kind of heavy
(26:00):
was my way of saying, like, you know, here's some of what
I have, what are some ofwhat you have? Thanks so much for
sharing that, Amretha. I reallyhope that women can perhaps gossip positively about
us, say things like Lisa andAmatha seem like women having great sex.
I love that you talked about positivegossip, and I'm going to definitely be
(26:22):
gossiping positively about this conversation. Well, you know, Lisa, the fact
that you exist and that you're talkingabout sexuality running this podcast in the way
that you are was unimaginable twenty yearsago. Was definitely unimaginable when I was
a teenager, and that makes mereally hopeful. And I'd like for us
to imagine more widely, imagine impossiblethings, because I think it has an
(26:45):
effect and kind of transcend that allof this heaviness of patriarchy. I think
that having pleasant fantasies, positive gossipabout the pleasure of widely experienced, diversely
experience sexuality for women is really reallyexciting and hopeful possibility for our future.
(27:06):
Thanks so much, I'm so gladwe could speak to their and thank you
so much for tuning in to LoveMatters. I hope that you enjoyed this
episode, and we'd love it ifyou shared it, readed it wherever you're
listening, and left us at comment. If you'd like to email us,
you can do so at Lovematters atDW dot com. Lovematters is produced by
The Indian Express and DW Germany's internationalbroadcaster. And this is me Liza Amongolas
(27:30):
signing off. I believe Love Matters
I'm Lisa Mangeldas, and this islove Matters. What does sexual agency,
sexual pleasure, and sex positivity reallymean for Indian women? And how might
the ways in which we experience andexpress sexual empowerment differ from the model of
the sexually liberated woman presented by theWest. What are the implications of patriarchy's
relentless control and surveillance on women's sexuality. We're going to be discussing all of
(00:28):
this in Law with our wonderful guest, Amathan r aman Amretha is a clinical
psychologist, psychoanalyst, author, professor, researcher whose work has shone the light
on women's sexuality in so many remarkableways, and most recently, our book
Women's Sexuality in Modern India and aRapture of Distress has for me been such
(00:50):
an insight into what it means tobe a sexual woman and an Indian woman.
And some really excited to be discussingthis book with Amretha today. Aretha,
thanks so much for joining us,Thanks Lisa for having me. It's
a pleasure to be here. Iread it an article he wrote, Amatha
of how food Matter Thoughts translates sonicely to sex. You know, words
like yummy, luscious, delicious,And for most people, most women,
(01:14):
it's quite easy to describe a goodmeal that way, but many of us
would hesitate to describe sex that way, especially publicly. Why do you think
that is well. Language has sucha particular role for our sex life,
doesn't it. It's the conduit bywhich our internal world comes outside. And
this is such a private internal worldin contrast to food, which is communally
(01:38):
shared. Our tastes may differ,but there's something very public about the act
of eating, in contrast to oursex lives are so very private. So
I think using language is a vehicleto describe our sex lives. It's always
a little hesitation there, and there'salways a little discomfort as well, But
I also think it has a lotof potential. When I wrote that article,
(01:59):
I was really focused on the extravaganceof language and of food metaphors.
But it's been maybe seven or eightyears since I wrote that, and I
still think language is critical and usinglanguage is the vehicle to express sexuality is
so important and empowering. But noteverybody has wants to use the rich metaphors
(02:21):
of food and feasting. There mightbe other kinds of language that come to
mind. Even just saying I likesex can be transgressive right for women,
especially Indian women. And you usethe expression sexual agency? So what does
agency mean? What stops women fromfeeling like their agents? And could perhaps
some of that hesitation to describe sexas something you enjoy and participate in also
(02:46):
have to do with sexual agency andperhaps lack of it. Well, how
I use agency is a kind ofconfidence about sexuality, which depends upon also
an awareness what your desires are.So this common nation awareness of desire and
also a power or a confidence thatI can execute these desires. I can
(03:07):
make them happen for me, maybeeither in fantasy or in reality, but
I will give some enactment to them. That's what I meant bi sexual agency.
I used to think that language wasone of the most important ways of
doing that, but I think thereare all kinds of ways of doing that,
and the most important thing is tofind that expression. Why is it
(03:30):
difficult for women? I think thatwomen are very socialized, particularly women in
India but perhaps across culture, socializedto be a bit hyper aware of their
sexuality and also aware that it's dangerousthat their bodies are dangerous, and I
think that leads to a very particularway of experiencing your own excitements. So,
(03:53):
if you have a high degree ofsocialization that your body is dangerous,
it can invite harm. And whenyou experience excitement in that same body,
it might be closer to danger thanyou like. And so when you're closer
to danger than you like than havingconfidence, having agency becomes much more difficult.
And I think that's one of thecentral questions that my book wrestled with,
(04:15):
is that under these conditions of difficulty, where you're socialized to feel that
your body is excitements are dangerous,maybe lethal, how then can you get
pleasure out of them? The samething that's causing you to be so dangerous
and at risk also the thing thatgives you pressure. So if you look
at the cover of my book,for example, I have it over there,
there's a picture for a woman facinga man, and immediately I think
(04:41):
the idea of her discomfort is asmuch of a possibility, maybe more of
a possibility, than the idea ofher pleasure. Now, why is that
and how does that have to dowith us as viewers our own sense of
sexual agency that's been so traumatized.I would say by the amount of feedback
of media coverage of women's distress thatwe have. Yeah. Absolutely, I
(05:06):
mean your title in a Rapture ofDistress has the quality of an oxymoron rapture
and distress. Right. Do youwant to expound on that a little bit
as we talk about agency. Soon one level, what I meant by
that is that we tend to beenraptured by distress when it comes to women's
sexuality. It's almost a crime notto talk about crime when it comes to
(05:28):
women's bodies. And there's a realityto that, right, there is a
lot of unspeakably heinous crime on women'sbodies. But I am interested in how
that functions as a sensoring mechanism totalking about women's pleasure. That we can
be so enraptured by distress that weforget pleasure altogether. So that's one way
of thinking about the title that Ichose. A second way of thinking about
(05:51):
it, which is also important,is that rapture and distress are often closely
intermingled. That's on one hand,that's because of the reasons that are here.
When women are socialized to distress abouttheir bodies. Then their pleasures can
sit closely with their distress, andyou can have pleasure that then turns to
distress, which doesn't negate the pleasure. Lastly, there's the idea that some
(06:15):
women actually enjoy distress in sexuality.You had Jayashallma talking about something of this
kind on a previous episode of yourpodcast. Sometimes distress can be pleasurable,
and we shouldn't rule that out either. So there are all these cadences that
distress has alongside rapture that I wantedto illustrate in my title. And one
of the points that you make alsois that a female sexual agency in the
(06:40):
Indian contacts might not fit Western imagesof the modern woman. What kind of
problems do you think that has caused? And do you think that perhaps because
of the way that patriarchy conditions ourexperiences of sexuality, is some of that
distress something that's so much a partof our experience that we almost miss it
when it's gone. So there's sortof two parts your question, and I
think it might be interesting to answerthem together. One is this an image
(07:03):
that we have of a liberated Westernwoman who in some ways represents liberal sexuality
or access to sexual freedom. Andso first of all, that's problematic for
a number of reasons. It's ubiquitous. Jacqueline Rose, who's a psychoanalytic thinker
that I enjoy, she says,it's the Internet model of feminism, and
(07:24):
it's the most ubiguitous picture that wehave. It excludes a lot of people,
and the woman is pictured, ofcourse by herself, So in some
way it implicitly excludes all the communityassociations to sexuality that women have. It
also excludes distress the modern woman asa Western woman, you know, wearing
a skirt heading to the airport ofher laptop doesn't deliver a holistic enough picture,
(07:48):
I think. And can you expounda bit more on what is missing
or how Indian women, for example, might experience sexual empowerment in ways that
are less legible or less obvious.Then let's say this Western model of the
woman at the airport and has gottenwith a laptop. I mean, I
think in your book you mentioned likeyou could be making dinner in a sari
(08:09):
and also be sexually empowered, whereasyou could be on your way to the
airport with your laptop and not besexual empowered. At these optics of Western
modernity or seeming freedom might not alwayscarry through what they symbolized to the eye,
right. I mean, I thinkwhat I'm talking about I experience is
a sexual liberation that don't fit inwith positivity and confidence culture in neatly.
(08:35):
They are messy experiences. So wecan think of experiences of great sexual pleasure
that happened alongside the experiences of completesubmission to pay phiarchy. So there are
a number of women who I spoketo when I was writing my book that
had, on one hand a vibrant, secret sexual life alongside that a performance
(09:01):
that felt very real and important tothem, of complete assimilation to mainstream patriarchal
culture, for example, a jointfamily, and how is that managed and
where are the places where it getsvery slippery? But also how in such
a setting, you know, beingvery confident, speaking confidently and happily about
(09:22):
sexuality can prevent you from having it. And I'm talking about examples of women
who come from families where they wantto model sexual reserve for their families on
one hand, to preserve those kindsof relations. And I think that's what
I meant by Indian there, andit may not only apply to Indians,
but I think it's particularly important forIndians of all persuasions to have a wide
(09:46):
range of close relationships, including withfamily and relatives, and for sexuality to
ideally not unseat that. So whatI think of as sexual revolution culture is
a a bit of saying up yoursto the entire family and community that doesn't
approve, and that's certainly a verylegitimate way of going about your sexual life.
(10:09):
What I found in my research andalso sometimes in the clinic, is
that for many women born and whowere raised in India, that that's not
the preferred model. That, ofcourse I do want acceptance from their family,
but narrating their sexual lives explicitly wearingliberation and their outfits sometimes works against
(10:31):
and they prefer not to have someof that friction. They prefer to reserve
the drama for the insides of theirsexual lives rather than wearing it on the
outside. I was surprised at someof what I found in my research.
I think I expected to hear moreoppression than I experienced. I also learned
(10:52):
to listen in a very different way. When I first started. What I
found was that if you get pastthat, that's some of the kinds of
sexuality that gets described are so farfrom vanilla that it's quite striking, and
that the patriarchal performance on the outsideis kind of a foil for something that
is a degree of freedom that's unattainablefor some people who on the outside and
(11:16):
you know, seem very liberated andput together, sexually confident, etc.
That's so interesting. Thanks for sharingthat. I feel like there's a lot
of things to think about that.But another of the themes that your work
brings up is the generational conflict betweenmothers and daughters in regards to sexual agency.
Can you tell us about that?So worldwide, it's an empirical finding
(11:39):
that the mother daughter relationship is oneof the factors around which woman's sexuality pivots.
Now, of course, this getsexpressed and worked out in all kinds
of diverse ways, and I don'tmean to say that I've captured even close
to you know, a tenth ofthat, probably, But what I did
notice in the stories that women toldme, and just to give you some
(12:03):
background, I asked the women whoI interviewed to speak about their sexuality,
and that's it. That's really theonly question that I asked in the process.
Many of them. I think allof them spoke about their mothers.
And what I noticed is that whenthere's a mother whose sexuality is imagined as
happy or content, that this freesup daughters in a way. And the
(12:26):
converse of that is that there's somethinglike a survivor guilt when women feel that
their mothers have been sexually unhappy.They may go on to have sexually happy
or unhappy lives themselves, but there'ssomething like a weight that needs to be
worked through or shaken off that theirmothers didn't have that kind of experience.
Now, how is this affected andwhat consequence does it have? You know,
(12:50):
this is one of the questions thatI really picked up. I bid
a lot of attention to how interviewsreported their moms getting anxious about their sexual
excitement, whether it was them beingsqueally, loud, giggly young girls,
so not even genital sexuality, butjust excitement of any kind. To what
(13:13):
we hear about more commonly, whichis, you know, conflicts over speaking
to boys or wearing certain clothes.If there was a high degree of distress
in these conflicts, in these interactions, if the mother seemed to be extremely
appalled, it said, then thenthis became something that sometimes got internalized,
and it added for the young girlsgoing into their womanhood a degree of anxiety
(13:37):
and danger to their sexuality. Thatif I'm a sexual being, it could
really upset mom, it could makeher love me less, or it could
just get her really agitated. Idon't even know why these kinds of messages
and experiences seem to hover in women'simaginations, I think through the course of
their life. I'm thinking of awoman that I spoke to who's a grandmother,
(14:00):
and she worried both about her motherand her daughter when she experienced actually
quite a bit of sexual freedom,but it was accompanied by this intense anxiety.
And so one of the takeaways Ihave is that just because it makes
you anxious doesn't mean you shouldn't doit. And even if it makes you
guilty and ashamed afterwards, maybe that'sa sign that you need more exposure therapy.
(14:24):
In other words, a certain numberof times of doing it might get
you through some of that intergenerational guilttrauma, heaviness of having your mother and
grandmother, women of your family havinghad to bear that load. You also
speak on sauces of sexual suppression forwomen and at this talk about the mother
(14:45):
has made me think of it.You mentioned gossip, reputation, and maternal
socialization to some extent, perhaps themother is the first exposure to our maternal
socialization as potential mothers ourselves. Right, Can you talk those three foss that
idea comes from? You know metaanalysis that these Western psychologists, American psychologists
(15:07):
Bamaster and French do, and they'vecome up with these three sources of sexual
suppression, which is worldwide. Ithink it functions much more strongly in countries
that have a strong group affiliation,as India does. When I get on
interviews about this, people often saythat, well, no, many people
are nuclear families now in India.And it's true, there are many nuclear
(15:30):
families now in India. But theidea of the group, the fantasy of
uncles, aunt's extended family jati communityis still writ very large in the Indian
imagination, and those extended communities area source of gossip and reputation. Now,
much of this is in the imaginationand that's what makes it so tricky.
(15:52):
It makes the unhappiness around it alsotricky because one of the things that
bothers me is that it's anachronous taketo the reality. So in the real
you might be surrounded by a communitythat doesn't gossip negatively at least about a
woman's sexual exploits. I hope forpositive gossip about a woman's sexual exploits.
(16:12):
But in the imagination, at theconsequence of memory, and a consequence of
cultural memory, including cultural mythologies,there still hovers this critique, self loathing
policing of women's sexuality. And Ithink that women recoup it in very interesting
ways, the most obvious being thatyou have the experience of sexual experience,
(16:36):
and I'm thinking of a specific womanfrom my book here, you really enjoy
the experience of a fantastic time,and then afterwards you're kind of reckoning with
that same body that had such awonderful time, feeling very hollow and empty.
In response to an imaginary audience ofuncles, aunt's grandparents, figures that
at a one point, a historicalpoint, stricted sexuality. Now I may
(17:02):
not even be around in reality,but nevertheless exercises force upon the imagination that
brings kind of a damper to sexuality. I think that can be worked through,
and when many people do work itthrough, for some people it remains
as some kind of still belonging.There's an unbelonging about freedom, just the
(17:22):
word itself connotes unbelonging. And noteverybody gets a pleasure out of experiencing that.
It's distressing for some people to experiencethat, but that distress doesn't mean
they don't want liberation and sexuality.It just means that they have something else
with which to wrestle. It mademe think of shame as well as a
consequence of gossip or your reputation beingtarnished, or the fear of that.
(17:45):
Right, there's a sense of shameif people find out or I shouldn't do
this because it's shameful. And yetshame is also, in a strange sort
of way, something that eroticizes,right, that which is taboo becomes erotic.
So we feel ashamed of certain desireswe may have and don't want others
to know. And yet perhaps wehave those desires because there's a certain amount
(18:08):
of forbiddenness to having them. Right. Do you think in the Indian context
shame is a particularly prominent and perhapseven erotically charged emotion. Yeah, yeah,
certainly, I'm glad you reminded meabout the erotic charge to it.
So on one hand, yes,shame and the idea of being shame faced.
Women will come and say that theyfeel they look different because they're feeling
(18:30):
such a high degree of embarrassment forpleasure and to look in pleasure in public,
for example, when talking about sexuality. That's a source of eroticized shame.
I think it's at once embarrassing andpleasurable because it crosses a tamboo.
So some of the women that Iwould sit with from my interviews would say
(18:52):
this is so embarrassing, but they'dsay with a great deal of joy.
So that's one of the ways inwhich I think it comes forward. Also,
as I think what you're alluding tois that early experiences of being shamed
for sexuality can make those experiences moreexciting and can lead us to even seek
out shame in sexuality in order toget this erotic resoul out of it.
(19:17):
When that happens, I think Ican face the gossip, reputation, maternal
socialization even more. But worse ofall, I think you face health culture.
So mental health culture says that ifyou're feeling ashamed, then that's not
what you want to be feeling.You want to be feeling happy, positive,
confident, and so that becomes ahurdle that women have to work through.
(19:40):
So I will meet women in theclinic, for example, to say,
shouldn't I be feeling better about this? I had so much fun?
Shouldn't I be feeling better about it? And the answer is not necessarily yeah.
I mean, I think there's alsothe tendency to when publicly talking about
sex, have very sort of needand tidy answers, very palatable answers that
you know, stay within the Ithink there's like a moralitis that suffuses discussions
(20:04):
of sexuality publicly, where there's notenough room for these uncomfortable or slightly less
easy to categorize experiences, realities ofeven seeming contradictions. And I'm glad we're
able to talk about that because Ithink sex positivity, especially the Western Internet
version of it, does not reallyallow for some of these more nuanced and
less conclusive observations about sexuality. Andso I want to hear from you about
(20:30):
what you see as the gaps insex positivity and sex positive discust, especially
with regards to how Indian women canrelate to or consume what's often very Western
in its positioning. Well, oneof the gaps is, I think in
the way we're seeing I really likefor us to be able to see the
(20:51):
more subtle sexual excitements that run throughour everyday lives, and run through women's
everyday life, that somehow don't getcounted if we're thinking about explicit sexuality.
So what's actually happening in women's mindsand hearts, which is I think something
that you attend to a lot inyour talks, and that's something also I
tried to attend to in my books, and looking behind the initial optics,
(21:14):
looking behind also the distress optics,but also giving room for something that's not
necessarily healthy, to widen our ambitof the positive, to include what we
might think of as negative to thingslike disgust or shame, for those to
be part of what we consider anerotic experience, and for us to be
(21:37):
able to actually see them in themany snapshots that they occur to us during
our lift lives. I think wemissed that. I think we're looking too
much for very explicit genital sexuality,and there's a reason for that. I
think we haven't had sufficient images ofthat in our popular culture and in our
media, in India until after liberalization. Right, So there's a way in
(22:00):
which we tend to count those moreand we certainly need plenty of that,
but to also count the more subtleexperiences. And the reason I would like
to count that is not only justto be inclusive, but I think there's
a better chance of us to havea community around sexuality if all kinds of
(22:21):
experiences are accountable, and that wealso don't have to account for ourselves sexually,
that all kinds of things can becounted and we don't press for that
you're only liberated if you had Xnumber of genital sexual experiences. There's a
way in which sex positivity and liberationculture can be very excluding and untruthfully excluding
(22:44):
of a lot of people. SoI'd like to say that shift made.
I think the effect of such ashift it's not just to have a more
cohesive community, but also to preventenactments of women who think they have more
liberation or less libation upon other women. The very notion of liberation, I
think is very problematic. I thinkit will be much more useful for us
(23:07):
to think about those who are gettingtheir desires met and those who are not,
and to have some compassion for thosewho are not, but not pity.
Maybe not pity because maybe they're gettingother needs met as well, and
because nobody really wants pity when itcomes to their sexual life, unless they
get pleasure out of pity, whichis yet another possibility. Let's talk about
(23:30):
pleasure as we wrap up this conversation. You've written a collection of erotic short
stories titled A Pleasant Kind of Heavy, And I remember, in reading about
the context for that book, youspoke of how so much of what we
hear about Indian women's sexuality is eitherreports of violence or sex and the context
(23:51):
of marriage and reproduction. We neverreally hear about women enjoying and experiencing pleasure,
you know, with agency and autonomyand ofity. And so I think
that you had to publish that undera pseudonym. It's a transgressive thing to
do, right, to talk aboutwomen's pleasure unabashedly. Can you tell us
a little bit about what you wantedto achieve with that book. I think
(24:11):
it was a transgissive thing to doat that time. Perhaps it's less so
now. This was a little morethan ten years ago, and it was
my first work in this arena ofwomen's sexuality what I wanted to do with
it. Of course, I think, like many women of my generation,
I was raised on this diet ofwomen's stories of pleasure narrated primarily by men,
(24:33):
and that too white men. Soone of the things I wanted to
do is to have a collection ofpleasure stories written by a woman of color,
written Inian women. And my hopewas really that this would invite other
people's stories, fictional or real,forward as well. And my fantasy,
if you will, at that time, was to have lots and lots of
(24:55):
a collective and archive, if youwill, of women's stories of sexual pleasure,
Indian women's stories is sexual pleasure,so that the brown bodies that were
not represented, the names, thegeographies, in the settings, that to
give them some representation. That wasone of my wishes. I think I
also had maybe a more youthful fantasythat if we have enough images of positive
(25:19):
sexuality, that this could be mybook. Was I thought one of them
that this would be a foil topatriarchal culture, this would push up against
it in a very important way,and that lots of these accounts could push
up against it. I still feelthat that's true, but I feel that
we're women are so much in smallpockets and silos doing that kind of work
(25:40):
sharing their sexual stories. Really,even the women I interviewed for the book.
For this most recent book, Ithink socioeconomic barriers, language difference,
various forms of cultural difference within Indiakeep women from sharing with each other.
Their stories are sexual pleasure. AndI think writing a pleasant kind of heavy
(26:00):
was my way of saying, like, you know, here's some of what
I have, what are some ofwhat you have? Thanks so much for
sharing that, Amretha. I reallyhope that women can perhaps gossip positively about
us, say things like Lisa andAmatha seem like women having great sex.
I love that you talked about positivegossip, and I'm going to definitely be
(26:22):
gossiping positively about this conversation. Well, you know, Lisa, the fact
that you exist and that you're talkingabout sexuality running this podcast in the way
that you are was unimaginable twenty yearsago. Was definitely unimaginable when I was
a teenager, and that makes mereally hopeful. And I'd like for us
to imagine more widely, imagine impossiblethings, because I think it has an
(26:45):
effect and kind of transcend that allof this heaviness of patriarchy. I think
that having pleasant fantasies, positive gossipabout the pleasure of widely experienced, diversely
experience sexuality for women is really reallyexciting and hopeful possibility for our future.
(27:06):
Thanks so much, I'm so gladwe could speak to their and thank you
so much for tuning in to LoveMatters. I hope that you enjoyed this
episode, and we'd love it ifyou shared it, readed it wherever you're
listening, and left us at comment. If you'd like to email us,
you can do so at Lovematters atDW dot com. Lovematters is produced by
The Indian Express and DW Germany's internationalbroadcaster. And this is me Liza Amongolas
(27:30):
signing off. I believe Love Matters
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