‘We give sex a good name’: an interview with Paromita Vohra Darshana S. Mini & Anirban K. Baishya
ABSTRACT
In India's censorial climate where debates about pornography exist only in terms of criminality, illegality, and the underground circuit, a feminist and pleasure-positive space has emerged under the aegis of (non-state-sponsored) sex education. In this playing field, the multimedia project and website Agents of Ishq (AoI) has emerged as a major voice in normalizing conversations about sex, pleasure, and even porn. Founded by the feminist filmmaker, artist, and curator Paromita Vohra, AoI carries essays, videos, and images that focus on fostering a community of readers/interlocutors that talk, teach, and learn freely about sex. In a sense, AoI approaches these matters in the same spirit as Vohra does in her filmmaking and her other work. In this interview, Paromita Vohra speaks to us about her films, artwork, AoI, and the effort to create a stigma-free ‘private public’ where people can talk about their desires, pleasure and sexuality.
Introduction
Speaking about sex, pleasure, and porn is not an easy task in India, let alone South Asia more broadly considered. When conceiving the two issues of ‘South Asian Pornographies’ for Porn Studies, we were hard pressed to find any figures that spoke from the world of porn – quite frankly, we did not have a Candida Royalle or a Tristan Taormino to turn to. What scant voices we did find were all from the world of academia, with one exception – Paromita Vohra.
An eclectic filmmaker, writer, curator, and sex educator, Paromita Vohra's body of work resonates with an energy almost unparalleled in the South Asian context. As a filmmaker working in the documentary mode, her work is exemplary for bringing in a fresh, feminist vocabulary, as well as a welcome touch of intelligent humour at a time when documentaries in India were usually deemed serious (men's) business. While her documentaries are not directly about pornography, she has made it her mission to talk about pleasure, desire, and sex through it – and in a language that is accessible to the masses. Blending a focus on feminist art and thought with references to popular culture, Vohra's work offers a sharp, incisive look into the otherwise repressed realm of desire and pleasure in contemporary India.
Her films include Partners in Crime (2012), a documentary on culture, markets, and the arts (Best Documentary, Ladakh International Film Festival, 2012, Special Jury Mention, SIGNS 2012); Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale (2007), a documentary on tabloid TV news and moral policing (Best Short Documentary, Int. Video Fest, Trivandrum); Q2P (2006), a film on toilets and the city (Best Documentary IFFLA and Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart); Where's Sandra? (2005), a playful exploration of stereotypes of Catholic girls from a Bombay suburb; Work In Progress (2004), an impressionistic portrait of the World Social Forum held in Mumbai; Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City (2004), a short film which explores Bombay's cosmopolitan self-image through land and food politics, which won an award for mixing fiction and non-fiction at the Digital Film Festival, UK; and Unlimited Girls (2002), a personal take on engagements with feminism in urban India (Feminist News Award, Women's Film Festival in Seoul; Best Film Award, Aaina Film Festival, India).
Apart from making films, Vohra is also a frequent contributor of articles on subjects of feminism, sexuality, porn, and desire in popular venues such as Outlook, The Ladies’ Finger!, Time Out Mumbai, and the Times of India. Vohra is also the founder and creative director of Agents of Ishq (AoI), a ‘multi-media project about sex, love and desire’ alternatively described as a website that creates ‘cool video, beautiful images and great audio about sex, love and desire in India’.1 Like Vohra's approach to filmmaking (and life), AoI is marked by a uniquely pleasure-positive and sex-positive, as well as intersectional, way of talking about topics as wide ranging as mental health and masturbation. Combining the written word and visual forms such as illustrations, memes, GIFs, and digital video with the reach of platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, AoI has become a major force in normalizing conversations about love, sex, and desire (and everything in between) in India. In this interview, Vohra gives us a detailed insight into her own work and philosophy, as well as that of AoI.
Darshana Mini and Anirban Baishya, Guest Editors (GE): Can you tell us a bit about your journey as a filmmaker and a feminist educator interested in questions of sex and desire? Where do you see conversations on pornography fitting into the existing discourses on sex and desire in contemporary India?
Paromita Vohra (PV): From early in my work life, the landscape of desire, intimacy, and sexual-ness (which I think is different from sexuality) seemed fertile for feminist exploration of a kind that was not neat, easy to categorize, and so, easy to tame or domesticate into ‘women's issues’. I think there were many reasons for this. Within the documentary film tradition, particularly in India, the sexual was a missing element on the whole, primarily showing up only in terms of violence. Even within the feminist space, people did not really talk about these things. This made it an open space, not weighed down with the baggage of pre-existing schemas, because for an artist, a feminist, or a person in general, the worst thing is having to constantly say ‘no, that is not what I meant at all’, to wade against the tide of misperception. It allowed the political to be understood and interpreted in heterogeneous ways, but it also allowed for the full spectrum of the self to be interpreted and understood politically. I think the fact that I came from an atypical middle-class family – mixed parentage through a couple of generations, many migrations, and also, grandparents in the movie industry – made it possible and important for me to find a political language that felt informed by what I had grown up with. And I came to the realization that respectability, as an idea, is highly disciplining and maintains elite power status. The sexual unmoors that respectability and allows us, then, to make new and different political and personal journeys, and establish new genealogies of being. For instance, when I first went to a photographic exhibition of women achievers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I felt that a strange sobriety informed it which left out multiple journeys of women – including the women of my own family – and especially in terms of their passions, their emotions and relationships which had determined their professional and social, even economic journeys, definitely their intellectual ones – as much as being determined by those factors (Figures 1–7).
Figure 1. Two moments from the AoI video A Lavni About Consent: The Amorous Adventures of Megha and Shakku (Dir. Paromita Vohra, Performers: Shakuntala Nagarkar, Megha Ghadge, 2016). Image courtesy: Agents of Ishq.
Figure 2. Members of the audience interact with the installation in the ‘public privacy’ of Love Latika. Image courtesy: Paromita Vohra.
Figure 3. AoI homepage header image with the tagline ‘We give sex a good name’. Image Courtesy: Agents of Ishq.
Figure 4. Illustration accompanying the article ‘I Took a Nude Selfie. It Changed My Life’ on AoI. Illustration by Harjyot Khalsa. Image courtesy: Agents of Ishq.
Figure 5. Illustration accompanying the article ‘What Emraan Hashmi Couldn't Teach Me About Dhichak’ on AoI. Illustration by Maitri Dore. Image courtesy: Agents of Ishq.
Figure 6. Image on the AoI website announcing the 2022 ‘Masturbation Shayari’ contest. Image courtesy: Agents of Ishq.
Figure 7. Paromita Vohra. Photograph by Abhijit Dutta. Image courtesy: Paromita Vohra.
It seemed too, that to talk about sexual-ness bypassed heteronormative and binary assumptions (which can easily enter the rights discourse too), because it was rooted in experience, metaphor, affect, excess, and naughtiness – it refused sobriety and the pre-existing power equations it carried. It was also a way to have conversations about feminism – not conversations about the patriarchy purporting to be about feminism. So, the critique of straightness or men happens very fluidly in this context, and by decentring those things, it allows for something new to be perceived and discussed. It can create a language and tone where people could speak of themselves, without being boxed into a representative version of who they are, only as examples of their identity and not implying their wholeness.
So, from an early time in my work I was intuitively reaching for that tonality, and it existed not so directly or topically but always as a quality, a feeling in the work. It would emerge sometimes as a metaphor – for instance in Partners in Crime (2011), a film about art, copyright, piracy, and capitalism, where love became a conceptual frame of value counter to the logic of capitalism. On the whole, it was present as a pronounced engagement with pleasure and pleasurable viewing that was sensual and often naughty, full of similar pleasures to Bollywood films – music, visual puns and saturation, jokes about things like bras and orgasms. In earlier films like Unlimited Girls (2002), which deals with feminism and urban India, and Where's Sandra? (2005), dealing with the stereotype of the Christian girl from Bombay, it drew to an extent from popular culture, sometimes referencing something ‘sleazy’, like music videos which drew from the visual repertoire of porn. In Unlimited Girls there is a fake advertisement where three women in short, hot-pink clothes promote the Misognenie Feminist Detector, quite like the women on American sex channels of the 1990s. Where's Sandra? re-enacted a Bollywood song with the suggestiveness ramped up. The title Unlimited Girls itself was full of what I shall call a double-meaning energy, preventing you from entering with sobriety, nobility, and respectability in your affect. You had to enter with that uneasy feeling that this might be a serious documentary, or a peep show, and well, maybe it was a bit of both, featuring the director too. You had to enter and undress intellectually and watch the film with your whole body. The film in fact begins with a young woman reading a romance novel in bed, then looking for love on the internet only to stumble upon a feminist chatroom (and perhaps porn plots are not dissimilar, with pizza deliveries leading to sex!). Even now many universities will not let you access web pages which mention this film because it is assumed to be porn.
In 2007, though, I made a film called Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale. It was about an incident of moral policing that took place in the northern town of Meerut and the manner it had been played out on national television news. It had been preceded by an incident with a Hindi film actor who played villainous characters (Shakti Kapoor). A channel called India TV had apparently done a sting operation of him propositioning a reporter posing as an aspiring actor, to prove the casting couch is rampant in the film industry. As I understood then, this idea of the sting operation, the ‘exposé’, became a mainstay of television over time and it always hinged on something being designated obscene, or shall we say designed and then designated as obscene. So, for instance, sting operations would be rigged to be carried out in massage parlours or dance bars and the women caught, paraded on television along with an overheated pulp fiction style commentary, describing the ‘obscene acts’ with relish and then denouncing them. This televised format drew from the language of true crime magazines like Manohar Kahaniyan [Thrilling Tales] and pulp detective fiction to create a landscape of scrutiny for women and a control of their sexual expression and even their economic freedom or mobility for work, by constantly rendering it in terms of obscenity, vulgarity, sexual excess. At the same time, it was effectively creating a kind of non-consensual pornography of its own, where conversations about sex and images of sexual-ness were present right there on national television.
Now, it is very easy to of course label this hypocrisy, which is the classic reading by liberal elites, but it seems to me it is more complex and there is a double-ness involved. A desire to speak of sex that is simultaneously expressed and repressed even while anxieties about class and caste are quelled through talk of respectability. This is a kind of double-meaning energy. I am quoting from an essay I wrote in Outlook here:
Why does the double entendre cause such discomfort? For the simple reason that it disturbs a line of control – respectability. Respectability implies that being rich and being good are the same thing. That being tasteful and being noble mean one thing. That being elite and being meritorious mean one thing. The double entendre disturbs these conflations by its very mischievous Looking London, Talking Tokyo nature. We say one thing, but mean another—and everyone knows this to be so. In this way we defy the line of permissibility, but also toe that line, thus mocking the powerful who impose and maintain this line. The double meaning by its very form communicates that one person's opportunity is another person's oppression; or, that one person's erotica is another's porn. We imply that there is nothing naturally good about this line, but that it has been put in place by those who control our intimacies and our possibilities. In part, this is what is disturbing about double meanings. And from colonial times, the effort to separate things into singular meanings has been consistent.2
What was also very interesting to see at the time was that there would occasionally be narratives that queered this tendency, or this binary. An example is the story of Julie and the Professor – a relationship between a professor (Matuknath Chaudhary) and his student that hit the headlines for a while.3 But their language, which refused to buy into the notions of respectability – either to defend it or decry it – but simply shrugged it off as a construct, made it difficult to pin them down and you saw the entire narrative about ‘obscene relationship using studies as the excuse’ suddenly run out of steam. And often, these ‘manohar kahaniyan’ are based on true stories and experiences which means that many people are eloping, having affairs, or involved in some form of sex work of their own volition.
I understood with a kind of striking clarity, then, that the domain of love and sex is where numerous political disruptions occur, which are intersectional in nature, which rescue feminism from disciplined, well-behaved instrumentality, which are messy in nature but also potent. And the important part of it is that it resonated for me personally, in terms of my own life and experiences as a young woman in Bombay. It was also very clear in the film – which as it happens is the first public documentation of the term ‘Love Jihad’ – that this was a domain that would be increasingly used to control young people.4 As long as the concept of Love Jihad operated in this ‘porn’ world of moral policing, the liberal left paid little or no attention to it. It is only when it entered the overtly political domain that they noted it, by which time there was no real response to be made – the legal one being insufficient in today's context. The fact that the sexual gets spoken of always in terms of violence translates into a language where women must be protected, rather than engaging with their freedoms and their desires; the fact that it is spoken of only as rights means that often the queer must present normatively (marriage equality) – singular meanings, which make intersectionality elusive. So, eventually, this domain of sex is where a different (I want to say more meaningful) politics seems possible – it is fertile with meanings, and it is an inclusive frame. It evades the linearities and binaries of tradition versus modernity, East versus West, left versus right, violence and protection to create a politics of the possible and includes more types of people.
From then on love and desire became a more central exploration in my work and I wrote a column about modern love for a few years as well as several pieces on pornography-adjacent ideas like Sunny Leone's Bollywood career5 and the idea of the selfie,6 as well as bodies, dance, and desires in Bollywood films. In 2015, I created Agents of Ishq (AoI),7 a multimedia project on love, sex, and desire (which I currently run) in which of course sex is more directly spoken of, but in which I also made some films in collaboration with lavani artists (a Maharashtrian song and dance form performed by women, and noted for its sexual innuendos) and more directly worked with this double-meaning energy.
In India, I think conversations on pornography seem to hinge on ban or not ban, but we must understand that porn is a very routine part of a young person's life today, thanks to the internet. It is the first sex education most people get, and it also massively shapes the experience of sex even for adults. The conversation on banning or not banning is feeble. I think young people have moved on from that conversation on the one hand. They are relieved to find spaces where they may speak of sex without stigma. At the same time their lived experience of eroticism is limited because porn might make sex familiar but it does not always make sex intimacy-ready.
GE: Your work involving sexual-ness and eroticism clearly moves beyond just films. Can you talk about the electronic installation that you have curated as a part of Goethe-Institut's ‘Five Million Incidents’ and the sensory pleasures that it works with? The installation includes erotic poems – in today's political climate in India, do you see a work like this being tagged as ‘pornographic’ (not that it is a bad thing, but perhaps as a way of delegitimizing the heterogenous sexual cultures that preceded and even now co-exist with ours)?
PV: The installation ‘A Love Latika’ was part of Five Million Incidents, a series of art events organized by Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi and Kolkata.8 I describe it as an electronic forest of erotic poems. It featured four screens with flora and fauna that were uncontrolled, the colour of fever dreams, and often imaginary. If you clicked on a flower it would bloom – or animate into something, a leaking breast, a carnivorous fruit, a frog with a long tongue – and simultaneously play an erotic poem on the audio track. The poems were from all over the world but with a focus on Indian ones. Four people could listen to the installation at one time and the entire installation was enclosed in a net curtain with a forest printed on it.
The installation played with the senses, flooding the eye, the ear, and even the skin with eroticism and sensuality. It played with the idea of translucence and a concept I like to call ‘public privacy’ – where people were sitting together doing something very private. Reading erotica or porn is something people are expected to do alone, but here it was a double-meaning energy – they were alone with their headphones, yet side by side with others. Enclosed in a curtained space, but a translucent one, being made of a netted fabric, covered in print – so they could in fact be seen, their blushes, their intensity, everything visible to those sitting outside. After they listened, they were invited to write an erotic poem of their own and a remarkable number of people did.
The installation aimed to represent the heterogeneity of desire, to muddle the porn versus erotica hierarchy – the poems were tender, carnal, arch, voracious, dreamy, yearning, explicit, oblique, and dwelt on different sexual acts – kissing, anal sex, fucking, cuddling, oral sex. I asked different kinds of ‘regular people’ to read them, but some of these people were famous with recognizable voices (Sanjana Kapoor, Devdutt Pattanaik, Dhruv Sehgal), which also added frisson of a different kind.
With that experience, a kind of saturated silence ensued (perhaps the kind of velvety dark or ‘makhmali andhera’ mentioned in seductive Bollywood songs) where people connected deeply with their own sexual self, emotionally, with beauty and emotion. Many people cried – for their own locked up selves maybe. This catharsis, which was both emotional, sensual, and creative, is what I think of as erotic. It may come through any means, but of course in art it allows our many selves to co-exist, to embrace each other – which can also be thought of as a different kind of orgy, I guess.
There is a political suggestiveness to such a work which refuses to put its politics into words, but everyone leaves knowing for sure what that politics is, and it cannot be constrained by anything literal – not academic sorting, nor capitalist imperatives to speak, nor mealy-mouthed left-liberal rebellions. It is deeply private, a thick river of meaning inside people setting off other meanings and ideas. To me, this is the political power of eroticism. I suppose if someone wanted to tag it pornographic – they could. But the fact that it is poetry and such fluid imagery makes it harder to do so.
I think there is a discourse – the sexually backward India full of toxic masculinity versus the enlightened urban India that knows how to treat ‘its’ women. I think you can see how it is a colonial discourse mapped onto a caste and class context, to put it a bit simplistically. I do think that putting things in that binary generates a confrontation and then the conversation becomes reactive and violent. It is in itself a censorious position, which meets an answering censorship. It is not a conversation about sex, but about power. I think there are other culturally resonant ways in which one can talk of desire, sex, and feeling, and not be waylaid and sidetracked by the censorious forces. These become inclusive frames which allow for engagement and mutuality, rather than conformity of any kind (progressive or conservative), and so are less likely to confront force.
GE: Speaking of the censorial, in the heavily censored climate of India, what are the challenges faced by feminist collectives and sex educators in facilitating conversations on safe sex and pleasure?
PV: As of now, I think as a woman sex educator the resistance you face is not so much from the contemporary political context as this theme is still a bit under the radar – it is from the old morality of not ‘putting ideas in children's heads and corrupting their innocence’ and not ‘misleading women’. The government has made official programmes difficult – rerouting sexuality education into ‘life skills’ and the idea that there should be sex education without using the word sex. This resistance has always existed, but it may be more stated through the system now than before. It is not as if the right-wing alone have been using the idea of sanskar [sacred, traditional, or relating to morality], Indian culture, and so on. With the coming of digital media, communities are ever more anxious about what women are exposed to and want to control conversations about sex. I think from time to time censorship and backlash does surface with the language of ‘disgusting un-Indian acts’, but the backlash is stronger to women being seen as free and assertive. I think the climate is one where women's political opinions invite verbal sexual violence.
For influencer type of sex-education content producers, who, as women, speak openly about sex, there is more direct violence in terms of unsolicited dick pics and accusations of destroying Indian culture. But it has not reached a place for extreme censorship yet. That is partly because the real censorship is from social media platforms themselves, which, in the six years I have been running AoI, has gotten more and more constricting. For instance, promotions of sex-education posts are denied because they are seen as porn, soliciting, or adult content of some kind. Notices that deny promotion also say things like ‘we do not allow promotion of posts about sexual health which promote pleasure’.9 So, these so-called community standards do the work of censorship very effectively and see sex education as porn-adjacent or sex-work-adjacent in practice even though they may not do so in speech. This itself is an interesting subject of study – should it not be seen in that way? Should sex education see itself as a different ‘respectable’ caste? Any serious engagement with sexuality constantly brings us up against this central idea of respectability versus respect and the necessity of dismantling it. The other thing is that so many people, irrespective of political leanings, really do have a need for sexuality education – they have questions, they have confusions, and they have a lot of emotional turmoil and shame they are dealing with, and they are seeking this for now, where they can get it. So at least online, there is a push and pull in that sense.
However, the word feminist does now frequently crop up in the list of anti-national characters and it is a matter of time before these conflicts become more edgy. Also, on AoI one of the things we have seen some trolls come in on more recently is our use of popular culture imagery, for instance Raja Ravi Varma, which has got demarcated as Hindu (‘you are insulting our rishi munis [sages or saints]’). The conflict of sex and culture keeps taking different shapes, telling us something about the importance of sex.
GE: Can you tell us about the genesis of AoI? How did you arrive at using the platform of AoI for sex education? As a multi-media project about sex, love, and desire, what were the immediate challenges and lacunae that the project was attempting to fill?
PV: I thought of creating AoI in 2014, as a response to the kind of discourse around women's sexuality that had grown following the Delhi gang rape of 2012.10 It is true that sexual violence was finally on the front page – but two things were happening. The only ‘women's issues’ being discussed were sexual violence. And the only way we were discussing sex was in terms of violence, a negative thing. This resulted in several protectionist responses over the years which also de-sexualized women: ‘Selfie with Beti’,11 ‘He for She’,12 and so on. In a way it was a more sophisticated Manohar Kahani – telling the story of how the outside world was rife with sexual danger for women and that you could prove how liberal you were by saying how you cared for, respected, or protected women from an obscene gaze (that gaze somehow often belonged to men of marginalized identities). Conversations on consent emerged that seemed to be helpful but were in fact binary and did not engage with the granular complexities of sexual interaction. They repeatedly presented women as passive figures – men desire sex, and women either agree or disagree aka consent. The government then asserted a ban on sex education in several states and this too resulted in an odd public conversation which was rooted in caste and class – where it was always the provincial man who was a hypocrite, reading porn, while skipping the chapter on reproduction, and the woke-bro who was sexually open. An example of this is AIB's Creep Qawwali (2015), where the man in the ‘others’ inbox was a creep, and, by implication, English-speaking liberal men were not.13 Many internet videos mocked sexual ignorance, usually of provincial or ‘vernie’ men.14
Alongside this, one knew that young people are dating online, watching porn online, and do not have sex education or a genuine culture of sexual conversation. They were turning to Western sources which were helpful with information but were not culturally helpful and were full of Americanisms like ‘vajayjay’ and ‘coochie’. So, it created a kind of fake cool which was unrelated to people's own context. Third, there was constant conversation about agency and the sexual revolution (which is apparently always arriving), and a greater commonality of hook up culture and casual sex. This created a kind of double shame where people did not want to admit they were sexually ignorant, while also dealing with the usual sexual shame and did not want to talk about emotional hurts or expectations for fear of seeming old-fashioned.
So, I decided to create a project that would try to address this very knotted-up gap. That would talk about sex and love not as different things but as part of a continuum. That would give information in a culturally relatable language, and an enjoyable form, like film songs do, that would work to co-create – not simply dole out – an Indian language of sex, that would centre the experiences of women and queer people and reframe the terms of the discourse around sex. It would be a universe of pleasure – pleasure positive over sex positive, which would be inclusive and let people enter on their own terms to deal with their confusions in a loving and friendly atmosphere. It would be beautiful and friendly and inviting. It would give sex a good name – whatever that good name might be. We did not define what it meant but, rather, we would invite numerous definitions. It would be a non-hierarchical, non-prescriptive project about sex and also about education, which we see as co-created and dynamic. AoI was one of the first such projects in India. I am happy to say that I think it achieved many of the goals it set out to achieve and opened the portal to so much online sex education.
GE: In AoI, there seems to be a concerted effort to normalize the conversation on sex – from the phrase that appears on the homepage ‘We give sex a good name’, to tags such as ‘Sex ki Baatein-Sex Ke Khayaal’ [Sex Thought, Thoughts on Sex], to sections such as ‘Doing it Right’ that features articles on orgasm and masturbation. In what ways does AoI extend the sex-expert advice columns that were part of the print culture of yesteryears?
PV: To normalize, one must act as if something is normal, as one might in a dance party, not simply exhort others to say it is normal, as one might in a religious gathering.
This is why AoI uses a language that is both celebratory and mundane. I do not believe in using the emergency mode of politics – that is to say pinpointing a crisis (sexual oppression) and then saying we can be ‘saved’ from it. That results in evangelism and then, the idea of sex and pleasure become instrumental, rather than acknowledged as a domain of life on its own terms. This only repurposes normativity.
If it is considered shameful to talk about sex, then it will be countered by talking ‘openly’ about sex. If heterosexuality is designated the regressive norm, then homosexuality gets held up as the idealized norm. If monogamy is decried as restrictive then its opposite, polyamory, gets notified as liberated. Hence all you do is replace old norms with new norms and keep enforcing a conformity and a silencing. It is as if sex has to be justified on the basis of some ‘higher’ purpose (progress and to establish one's enlightened identity rather than be present as itself). And the question arises, to whom are we justifying it? To the existing authority or normative community, right? So, in a way, our efforts to speak for sexual freedom or equality all end up acknowledging the existing power as the real power, if inadvertently, and asking to be ‘included’ in their framework, without dismantling that framework. Which means you also always exclude someone or something (for instance, you may eventually include sex education, but not, say, porn; or set up porn/erotica, courtesan/prostitute hierarchies).
While this seems to signify change, it in fact merely refreshes a status quo because the terms of engagement are always in binaries. Liberation from binaries does not have a fixed destination. Rather, it is the possibility of constantly moving forward into experience and ever new understandings, fluid insights, and the constant possibility of changing – or change with a capital ‘C’ – and movement, with a small ‘m’. It cannot be guaranteed that this will be purely progressive or useful. But it could be radical in all sorts of ways, we do not yet know. Erotics – creativity, sexual-ness, pleasure, play – in that sense release something moist into the air which keeps life going. These things are the opposite of pure, neat, and disciplinary. That is why, for me, in all my work the starting point is always as if it is perfectly normal to be talking about sex, or feminism, or whatever theme I am working with – making that the compass which guides us in unmapped territory.
So, AoI was created with a built-in aesthetic or tonal assumption: sex is there, it is normal to talk about it not in some performative or declarative sense, but as it is normal to talk about life itself. Perhaps ordinary is a better word to use than normal – it is ordinary to talk about sex. It is special to talk about yourself, but everyone is special, therefore it is also ordinary – it is just something we do. The aesthetic, the language and tone, the questions and information are all crafted for that. The questions we ask before we create any content are as follows:
Is this helpful? Will people be able to use this information to help themselves?
Is this answering a question people have in their heart, but may not even have articulated yet?
I think the relationship to the ‘sexpert’ columns is accurately noted. Sexpert columns were the only place that sex was spoken about on its own terms and also as if it was a part of life. Only sexpert columns had the compassion for people's sexual doubts – and even in the most ‘nichle sthar ki’ [low-end] versions of Manohar Kahaniyan, there were sexpert/agony aunty columns (I myself have written three agony aunty columns in my career: ‘Extc Aunt’ at Time Out Mumbai for three years, ‘Ask the Billi’ on The Ladies Finger! for a year or two, and then the ‘Sex Ett’ comic on AoI). These columns never laid down norms so strongly for sex, but somewhat dealt with each question on a case-by-case basis. They fluidly considered and braided the private, the public and the personal – the social, the ethical, and the individual. This braiding is something that rarely happens in more public politics which are unable to accommodate emotion and desire, and so, remain partial and always potentially exclusionary while imagining they are inclusive. So yes, we (AoI) are part of a continuing legacy of that idea, but through art and creativity – and this creates an interesting difference.
As soon as we launched, a lot of people began writing to us saying ‘I too want to be an “agent of ishq”’ (and in fact, ‘ishq’ means love, or passion) – and often this meant they wanted to recount a sexual experience of their own, the impact on their lives and beings and their learning from it. We worked with these accounts to create readable, reflective pieces and what it turned into is a repository of lived sexual wisdom of people, a community of wisdom so to speak. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Even when I was very young, I understood in an inarticulate way that my body was capable of eliciting desire, but not the wholesome kind that runs cursive in rose day cards, smiling in living room photographs, and is given a U certificate. Bodies like mine, it was indicated in several different, deliberate ways, were suited for a different kind of desire – one that was between sheets, either on the bed or in a magazine. And in a world spun into a digital web, this other kind of desire was the lifeblood of its most profitable industry, porn. And so, the word best suited to my body was not just illegitimate, it was also illicit.15
Finally, somehow, one of my friends got a cellphone with an Internet connection after trying to convince her parents for more than a year. And that was our ticket to watching actual porn. I was in the 9th standard at that time. Back then, we didn't think about pleasure or pain, just the idea of a penis entering into a vagina was too much (especially because until then, I imagined sex as two people lying together under a blanket, and only smooches were involved). We discovered that the actors were actually enjoying (or pretending to enjoy) the things that they were doing. It was surprising – seeing that sex could give you pleasure. And while mainstream movies only seemed to show us one position in which people had sex, we were suddenly seeing that sex could be had in various kinds of positions. The desire and lust shared by the couple we were watching seemed mutual. After that, our attitude towards sex began to change, and we began to realise that it could be a fun and pleasurable activity shared by two people.16
Such personal accounts are examples of people learning from their own lives and sharing it and learning from each other and then sharing some more – people being able to articulate what works for them outside the norms – old or new – of what is considered acceptable or cool. So, in a way, the project is a deconstructed sexpert column where there are several sexperts including the contributors – although primarily they are the sexperts on their own lives. The digital as a form is a lot about this idea of remixing and deconstructing concepts and forms to recuperate what is meaningful from the ‘past’ and link it to the new, the incoming, the ongoing – aka create new genealogies outside the logic of social identity alone, a third or fourth domain of being and power. I think where AoI takes forward the sexpert columns is in being deeply aware of context and intersectionalities and trying to constantly craft formats and contexts that will energize the intersections and create a new sexual politics. Where it expands the role of the column is breaking the idea of an expert versus the sufferer and makes a space for people as experts in some way.
GE: Fascinating! Do you find any resistance to the kind of work that you and AoI are trying to do? If so, how do you negotiate such roadblocks?
PV: On the contrary we have not faced any resistance – I think because we do not take the tone of confrontation or upliftment. But that is not a coincidence. We use a language that is cheerful, that is not calculated to shock, that is an invitation to play, and we create a frame that is emotional as well as sexual/informational so that people of diverse backgrounds may enter on their own terms. You do not need a pre-existing ideal identity to partake or participate. This creates a comfort and there may be many in the AoI community who might disagree with each other if mainstream political topics were discussed.
The roadblocks we do confront are mostly with regards to the protectionism that comes through community standards – which deem posts acceptable or not on social media – the internet's structure right now which is highly based on social media and its algorithms (so, in a nutshell corporate capitalism).
GE: The Instagram and Twitter pages of AoI make use of popular culture through memes and GIFs. What is the target constituency that AoI caters to in these posts?
PV: I think I want to answer ‘everyone’ but perhaps it is more ‘potentially everyone’. The use of memes and GIFs and pop culture is in order to make it part of the culture of young people and their lingua franca. But in a way this very desi [South Asian] treatment is also to appeal to the kind of audience that is not doing the usual woke performance of sexual politics through terminology and discussing ‘problematic tropes’ [eye-roll]. It is to appeal to an audience that might want to talk about love and sex and have doubts and questions but feels a little culturally uncertain. There is such an identification with English when it comes to talking about sexuality and by extension elite metropolitan or Western culture. But we want to reach an audience which is not just a part of that space – rather one that is quite rooted in India and wants a language to talk about sexuality as Indians. They could be located anywhere, their first language may not be English.17
The assumption that sophisticated thought about these issues resides in English is something that one still (surprisingly) has to counter and visuality allows for a certain inclusiveness. Proof of that is also that we receive submissions in Hindi – and when we do our annual masturbation shayari [poetry] contest, in several languages.
GE: In AoI, you also work with very locally specific idioms of sex and desire. How do you see conversations of globalization fitting into such themes and concerns, especially as we are at a juncture where populist politics is trying to homogenize even sex and desire under the sign of some primordial civilizational culture?
PV: In continuation with the earlier answer – one might say the mission of AoI, politically speaking, is to recuperate a meaning of Indianness that is far more heterogeneous, far more lived, and encompassing. It is to avoid the ‘India is the land of the Kama Sutra’ pablum, which locates Indianness in a glorious liberal past, and to ignore the ‘sex is a Western import’ notion and enter a third space, where people remix many cultures and influences to constantly create numerous renditions of what it means to be Indian.
To me it seems very important to hold on to it in the face of globalized culture which also does what populism in a way is doing – encourages binaries of ‘backward’ and ‘progressive’ cultures which leave people excluded and behind. This also leads people to conform to a homogeneous idea of the cool, the ‘progressive’ or the modern. Influencer culture is a sign of that, some critiques of Pride touch on this. Such tendencies disallow the fecundity of sexual life, its bio-diversity so to speak, to grow and develop and transform our culture and politics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 See the ‘About Us’ page on AoI. https://agentsofishq.com/about-us/.
2 See Paromita Vohra, ‘Tumhara Ishq Ishq…? The Double Meanings Of Desire, Porn And Erotica’, Outlook. August 13, 2021. https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/entertainmentnews-tumhara-ishq-ishq-the-double-meanings-of-desire-porn-anderotica/304872.
3 For a contemporary report of the incident, see ‘Love in the Time of Media’ in the Times of India (2006).
4 Charu Gupta describes this as an Islamophobic conspiracy theory floated by the Hindu right wing. Love Jihad is ‘supposed to have been launched by Muslim fundamentalists and youthful Muslim men to convert Hindu and Christian women to Islam through trickery and expressions of false love’ (‘Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2009, 44 (51): 13–15, at 13).
5 See Paromita Vohra's ‘What Sunny Leone's Success Tells Us about Indian Society’ in The Ladies’ Finger! (June 24, 2015 http://theladiesfinger.com/the-baffling-success-of-sunny-leone/#:~:text=She%20owns%20her%20work%20completely,themselves%20apart%20from%20other%20natives.).
6 See Paromita Vohra's ‘Sexist ya feminist? Whose selfie is it anyway?’ in the Times of India (July 5, 2015, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/all-thatmatters/Sexist-ya-feminist-Whose-selfie-is-it-anyway/articleshow/47940649.cms).
7 For the AoI website, visit https://agentsofishq.com/.
8 For a description of the project on the Goethe Institut Indien website, see https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/kul/art/fmi/pav.html.
9 For instance, Facebook's advertising policy puts it as: ‘Ads must not promote the sale or use of adult products or services. Ads promoting sexual and reproductive health products or services, such as contraception and family planning, must be targeted to people aged 18 and older, and must not focus on sexual pleasure.’ See https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/adult_products_or_services.
10 The Delhi gang rape of 2012, often called the ‘Nirbhaya’ case (after the media-endowed moniker meaning ‘fearless’), involved the brutal rape and murder of a young woman on a bus at night in Delhi, and sparked off a series of conversations about women's safety (and later the death penalty) in India, particularly in the city of Delhi. The event also saw the outbreak of major public protests in Delhi which were met by repression and violence by the police. For more details see, Esha Shah's ‘Delhi Gang Rape – Understanding the Structure of Violence’ in Kafila (February 2, 2013, https://kafila.online/2013/02/01/delhi-gang-rape-understanding-thestructure-of-violence/).
11 Paromita Vohra, ‘Sexist ya feminist? Whose selfie is it anyway?’ (2015).
12 See https://www.heforshe.org/en/wheels-change.
13 AIB or ‘All India Bakchod’ is a comic collective. The Creep Qawwali video was created with the Indian mobile phone dating app, Truly Madly, which promoted itself as a ‘safe’ dating app for women, drawing on the discourses of safety after the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder. For more details see, Vishnupriya Das’s ‘Dating Applications, Intimacy, and Cosmopolitan Desire in India’, in Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia, edited by Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan, 2019, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 125–141.
14 Clearly making an implication that the ‘vernacular’ is a lower-class space rife with danger – an idea that this special issue of Porn Studies and the one preceding it actively push against.
15 See Ini’s ‘I Took a Nude Selfie: It Changed My Life’ on AoI (13 July 2020).
16 See Ankita Salian's ‘What Emraan Hashmi Couldn't Teach Me About Dhichak’ on AoI (19 August 2019).
17 Which brings us back squarely to the question of the vernacular.
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