Latest / Love Matters With Leeza Mangaldas / Making Room For Maybe: Understanding the Nuances of Consent ft. Paromita Vohra

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Making Room For Maybe: Understanding the Nuances of Consent ft. Paromita Vohra · Love Matters With Leeza Mangaldas

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I'm Lisa Mangeldas and this is Love Matters, a podcast about the relationship topics
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that matter to you and me. And today we're going to be talking about
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consent beyond just yes and no. How can we make space for the more
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difficult to categorize experiences the feelings that lie in between. After all, to
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quote the wonderful feminist thinker Paramtavora, who happens to be my guest today,
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where is consent without a diversity of desires and a galaxy of desirability? Today,
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Para and I are going to be talking about all the messy human things
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that we don't get to talk about when we usually talk about consent. And
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I want to quickly introduce Sparrow, who is someone I have been a fan
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of forever. She is an extraordinary writer, artist, thinker, filmmaker,
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founder of the iconic digital project Agents of Ish, which explores sex and love
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and pleasure and the body in the most delicious, young, me fun basy
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way. And I'm just so pleased to be able to chat with your power
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today. Thank you, thank you for joining us, thank you for having
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me here, thank you for that loving introduction. And it's really nice to
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be here. I'm so glad. Well, I'm going to dive right in
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because honestly, one of my favorite artistic explorations of consent is Your Love Any
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video The Amorous Adventures of Shaku and Mega in the Valley of Consent, and
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in it, Mega, when describing consent she sees she says nasubi anna ugur
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b And that line really stuck with me. It's delicate and complicated, right,
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and then there's a beautiful refrain of me manally maybe maybe maybe, And
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so I thought we could just start with having you expound upon that idea of
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consent being a delicate, complicated matter, and one way we need space for
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maybe yes, I have you know, other consent love me mean? I
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would love to tell the story of how they love me originated to explain also
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how it was able to present this complex of maybe and many other lived experiences
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around consent that are not incorporated when we make absolute principles. Right now,
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obviously, when we make an absolute principle like yes means yes and no means
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no, there is no essential disagreement with that. It's just that it's not
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always enough to deal with the many different contexts that we actually live in So
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I went to see a performance of the consent of the Lavni dancers, and
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I had never seen a real proper lavenie like outside a movie before it had,
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so for me it was a revelation at several levels. Most of all,
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I just couldn't get over how this delicate balance of teasing the audience,
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pushing their boundaries, and at the same time being so sexual was all happening
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together in this fairly respectable place in Bombay, like the Revendnatan, which Bombay
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people will know is like the kind of center of respectable culture almost right,
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And I just knew that, like I wanted to do some work with the
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Lavni performers because I don't think I had ever really seen some kind of cultural
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artifact where women's desire or other women spoke about desire so freely, so openly,
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and also in such a sophisticated manner, right, Because Lavni is something
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that is done mostly for a male audience, and so there is a power
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dynamic between the woman performer and the masculine audience. But there's also a lot
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of playing with power that happens through the arts, right, Like the way
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that the teasing that happens. So I remember that while watching and looking at
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Shakubai, who is like a really well known performer, I kept feeling that
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feeling that you wanted to pay attention to you, but you're scared that she'll
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pay attention to you, that kind of thing, And I felt like,
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how can I work with them? And then we had just started agents if
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it's just a few months for literally right, I think we had just got
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launched when I watched the Lavni and we knew that consent is something that young
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people are thinking about a lot. Like we are speaking before me to actually
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became so important a way of talking about sexual harassment and violence, but we
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are talking about a time just after the Deli gang Grapehere there's a lot of
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conversations about sexual violence, and some conversation about consent was kind of surfacing.
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And one of the things that we really noticed is that it was very hard
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for people in this yes means yes and no means no binary to speak about
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times when perhaps they hadn't been able to enact perfect consent, and that there
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was a certain sense of unease about being someone who hasn't been able to tick
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the yes means yes and no means no box like a fully formed, pretty
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existing feminist person. And actually it also seemed like even people who've said yes
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means yes and no means no is something I really believe in an enthusiastic consent,
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etc. Struggled to understand how to incorporate it into the actuality of sex.
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So the thing is that many things that we discuss around these issues are
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always in abstraction, you know, they're abstract questions or behavior of politics.
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And too much of sex is discussed as sexuality and not as actual sex because
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an actual sexual interaction there are people. People are a complex intersection of their
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social identity, their personal biography, what the moment is like, I mean,
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what is the relationship between two people, so on and so forth.
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So how do we actually create sets of principles or sets of works which allow
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which are permeable in that way they have that porest kind of quality where many
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people can enter with their experiences and make sense of their experiences and take away
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something that will help them to live their sexual lives better. And to me,
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it seemed really that there was this vast spectrum of maybe that nobody was
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talking about between the yes and the no is there no journey? That really
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the question? And I think you know when you think about the fact that
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we live in a time of dating apps, and even a dating app is
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a yes means yes, no means no mindset for people that once you've swiped
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right, there is a journey still to meeting, to seeing if you like
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each other, to also having fun together, which is kind of lost in
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the idea that once you swiped right, Because the most common question on dating
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apps is what are you looking for here? And the answer I'm not sure,
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I'll know it when I see it or I'm just looking. It's not
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acceptable for many people because I feel like, well, then you're playing games,
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you should immediately tell me what you want. For the pressure to know
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what you want before you've even had an experience, I don't think it really
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does. It doesn't help anybody within that world of consent. So actually,
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when we wrote the Lavni, we wrote this idea of somebody who says yes,
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but says yes to something, not to everything, Like she meets a
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boy in the market and then she decides to go with him for a walk
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or hang out with him a bit, and then he wants to go all
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the way in as she says, like when they get home. So you
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know, Lovenie is full of double meanings. And one of the things we
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thought about when we were writing it was that we must have a double meaning
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otherwise the fun of the Lovenie is gone. And so we came up with
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the he didn't get my point, which really is the double meaning for the
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clitorists as well as the point of the conversation. And so if you watch
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the Lavenie carefully now that I've told you this, you will notice that the
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dance step is like they look down when they say he didn't get my point?
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Right. So everything also served as a metaphor for I agreed to make
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out a bit, but I didn't want to go all the way, so
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on and so forth. So there was this one idea of a yes that
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is not like an unconditional yes. There was a no which wasn't meant as
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a no. And I thought it was very important to present this because the
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most common thing that men say about women when they override women's consent is that
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it's now on her lips, but it's yea in her heart. And women
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don't really mean know when they say now. The thing is most fast want
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to immediately counter that because we know that it is used in order to override
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what women are saying. But it's also true that many women find it difficult
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to say yes because there is such a stigma on being a woman who is
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sexually open and sexually desiring. Of course, it is slightly decreasing today,
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but this is still an overall sense that, you know, we don't see
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women and their desire like presented in our culture or in most cultures, so
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we actually don't have any concept that women have desire, and therefore women have
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a choice of whether they want to go forward or not go forward with something
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sexual. So I think it was important to say that when women say no,
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that they want to say yes, it is because of the largest surrounding
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patriarch of context in which a woman who says yes is not respected or is
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not seen like he'll think, I'm Charlow seen as a fast girl. A
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person who's who actually wants she has said yes, has no other agency or
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no other choice in anything that she wants to do going forward. And so
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of course, like in this complex no, even the yes and the no
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are complicated in the love of me, right, So then Finally, when
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we get to the maybe, the maybe seems so much less complicated than the
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yes and the no, because in a sense, it just says, let's
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see, let's see how I feel, and I think. The other thing
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that resuides in the maybe is the idea of pleasure that you know, pleasure
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is something that we will feel out because pleasure is not a one size fits
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all and what I find pleasurable and what you find pleasurable may be very different,
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and they would be very different because not just a matter of taste,
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but it's a matter of whole cultural backgrounds. It's a matter of my cast,
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my gender, my sexuality, what I've been exposed to, and yes,
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of course my tastes all of those things. So actually, the maybe
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is also time of understanding each other and understanding what is pleasurable to the other
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person bit by bit before we can arrive at a yes or a no.
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And of course, in a utopian sense, we imagine that if we lived
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in a world where sexualness was comfortable, it was not tabooed, it was
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not so rife with questions of power, where it was about pleasure and relationality,
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that even hearing a no may not feel like such a rejection and may
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not feel like such a crushing end to a story, but could also be
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arrived at lovingly. So actually, this idea of the maybe holds in it
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the entire sense of sexual relationships, as pleasurable relationships, as mutual relationships,
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and I think that's why it becomes a really useful kind of way to think
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about consent beyond the yes and the law, which is like without without taking
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away the yes means yes and no means no in some some kind of a
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perfect world. I don't even know if that would be a perfect world,
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but in some kind of an equal world where yes and no are very simple
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and can be said at any time. But other than that, the maybe
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is about mutuality, and I think it really helps us to think afresh about
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many different things. I think so too, And you've already touched upon so
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many different aspects of consent that I wanted to draw out in subsequent questions.
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I could just be quiet, I feel like we could. This could just
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be be all you. I love listening to you, but thank you for
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touching upon so many things. I'm going to get you to sort of elaborate
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on some of those points a little further, and I wanted to start with
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gender roles, which you touched upon a little bit. When I look back
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at my own personal experiences navigating, you know, sexual negotiations, I guess,
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especially in my teens and early twenties, when you're really just starting to
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figure out who you are and having your first relationships and really without any roadmap
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to do so, I think these, you know, the legal or sex
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educative framework of yes means yes, no means not does indeed become much more
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difficult to practice when you're physically in the same you know, close proximity with
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another body. And when I look back at my own experiences, despite you
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know, all the wokeness or feminism or whatever else that I may have tried
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to acquaint myself with, I would be lying if I didn't say that there
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have been several experiences that I regret because I went along with sex because it
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seemed like the safest way to exit the situation, that the easiest way to
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actually get done with this would be to just do it. I've also I
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think I had at least one interaction where I was really attracted to a man
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and you know, he seemed into me, but then didn't want to do
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anything physical, and part of me thought, like, what kind of a
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man is going to turn down sex? You know? Even though I'm like,
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we internalize the gender stereotypes right somewhere, it is so hard not to
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let that play into your experiences, This idea that the woman is the necessary
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sexual gatekeeper, the man is the necessary sexual predator, you know, or
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that somehow it is, as you said, desires like this place of degradation
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for women, so we wants down unplayer desires and so yeah, how do
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you think those gender roles and sort of the expectations and pressures that society places
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upon the genders in different ways play into how we are able to navigate consent?
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I think, I mean, I think that gender roles obviously are part
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of again a larger kind of idea of heteronormativity that we all grow up with,
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right, And I mean heteronormativity is beyond the idea of only patriarchy,
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although it exists in fact to uphold the patriarchy, but it is intertwined with
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many ideas of what makes a worthwhile man or a worthwhile woman. And when
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we use the term worthwhile, it is helpful to ask worth who's wile and
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worth what right, because it is that that your worth to patriarchy or to
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the system is decided on the basis of how you look, what your cast
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is, what your class is. Can you speak English? I mean,
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for example in India, how much money do you make and how do you
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behave in public? So you know, for example, sometimes when we have
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spoken to young men at Agents of Fish, we have heard them talk about
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how when they're young, they are taught to think of certain kinds of women
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as high value women. And obviously those are girls who are pretty in a
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certain kind of way, who are a little bit sexy but not aggressively sexual,
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or who make the man feel a bit powerful and strong. And also
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that if they can have one of those high value women, then they become
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high value men. So the way in which we actually value each other as
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people becomes all about these external ideas of who the system has decided is a
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high value man and a high value woman. But in essence, all of
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hyterronorminativity is about, you know, burrowing into our self worth, taking away
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our sense of individual journeys, and telling us that we have to conform to
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some external structure and are higher emotional, sexual and social universe must be decided
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by these external ideas. So I think within that a man is one who
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pursues, and a woman is one who is pursued, And the more a
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woman is pursued, the higher value becomes. And the more that a man
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who pursues is able to conquer and have conquests of women, the more his
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value goes off right. And then this is a kind of continuously it's around,
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it's a circle that keeps reproducing itself. I think the reason I stress
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the heteronomativity idea is that queerness, of course changes all of these things.
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Or say, if you're a feminist who refuses to accept any of these ideas
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that if I'm thin, then I'm attractive. If I'm fat, nobody can
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want me, and we all know that's not really true on the ground.
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But if you have the courage to say that, actually I don't agree with
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what everybody's saying in the world, then you queer the pitch in a sense.
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So queerness and feminism and trans and other ways of being the netronormative displayed
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to us. But there are in fact other sexual universes. We already know
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that they're there. But the norm continuously that we all live with and grow
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up with is that romance is also about being pursued by a man for a
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woman. If a woman pursues a man is not all that romantic, So
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you had a lesser romance if you had to do the work right. So
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there are all these hierarchies, and because of those hierarchies, we are creating
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a passive role for women and a kind of well, I won't say predatory,
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but definitely that kind of I have to not take no for an answer.
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A real man doesn't take no for an answer. That's also how a
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man's worth is judged in the social work, right, A woman is really
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liked if she is very acquiescent, Like if you're a very opinionated woman,
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as I am, for instance, and you speak your opinions freely, people
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are always a little bit uneasy about that. And like, for example,
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with a person like me, people are uneasy also because they don't know,
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like they like some things about me, and then they say like, oh,
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you're writing is a compassion and the flower in your hair, but oh
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my god, your opinions are so strong, So what do I do?
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Should I like her? Or should I not like her. So there is
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this kind of a conflict that if a woman is not acquiescent, then somehow
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she's not so appealing. And there is an idea that if a man's not
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an alpha man, a man who goes out and gets people to do his
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bidding, a man who is so virile that he can go out and command
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the entire world to do what he tells them to do, and that you
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can see in like male directors of films are supposed to be that way.
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The men that we venerate always you know, people who have startups who basically
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men who treat a lot of people like shit in order to become really successful,
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are elevated onto a pedestal. And we are all taught to desire a
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man like that. So it also really complicates for women where they end up
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being in their sexual journey is that they are schooled to desire a man like
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that, but the experience of the desire is often quite violent and not pleasant,
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and there is a confusion and a conflict about well, I wasn't able
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to resist this thing because I was attracted to this person, having taught to
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be attracted to somebody, So actually, like unpacking all of that requires a
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certain set of experiences. You know, I also think things unfair, Like
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we expect people within the kind of accorond conversations about consent. We expect people
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to be like deconditioned in advance, but we have to create some space to
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decondition ourselves. I mean, that is why I always say that sex is
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the education. You can't actually do a full sex education beforehand. You can
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teach people a little bit about sexual health and some basic concepts, but eventually,
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as you proceed on your sexual journey, you start to learn what you
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like and what you don't like. And I think that is a really important
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thing, learning to know what you like and don't like outside of what society
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has told you you ought to like and not like. And once you can
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say I like something, to follow that journey a little bit more and it
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might lead you to a pace very different, a very different destination than the
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one that society tells you you should go to. Our consent is like surrounded
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by this idea of gender, and that is why men don't hear women's Do
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you think that the men who have continuously violated the consent of women did not
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know that it was wrong? For them to do that, did know it,
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but the fact that they are not used to listening to women. Like,
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where in our culture are we given the habit of listening to women.
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How many women on the covers of magazines for being just awesome? But you
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know, to be on the cover of a magazine, women has to be
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very good looking, or she has to have done something so outlandishly successful that
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we will then venerate her. But for men, their achievements are continuously celebrated,
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right, So we are used to listening to men. The majority of
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people we listen to our men, not women. So if you're not used
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to listening to women, you just say, well, I mean she said
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a feeble no, right, Like that's the famous judgment in the case she
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sort of feeble no. She didn't really mean. I didn't I didn't hear
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her demoral I didn't sense her discomfort because I've not been trained to listen,
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to listen to the unspoken. Absolutely, I want to talk about the unspoken,
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actually in more details, but I also want to just sort of focus
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for a little bit longer on this idea of women's acquiescence that you mentioned,
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you know, even legally to some extent, women's agency is considered irrelevant.
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Right, marital rape is still legal, And when we think of how women
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are taught to see sex, it's as if our agency is irrelevant. It's
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a it's some sort of duty, something you simply tolerate. Neither are you
20:45
allowed to say no to it, nor are you allowed to be somebody very
20:49
interested in it or assertive about what you want. Right, You're supposed to
20:53
let it happen to you as opposed to be something you participate in. And
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so on the one hand, you know, there's this negation of our saying
21:03
no to sex as something valid, but there's also this shame around sort of
21:07
asserting our desires, as if desire itself is a space of degradation for women,
21:12
where we almost are meant to be ashamed if we are desirable, even
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right, And so it's such a it's like you're damned if you do,
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you're damned if you don't. And even the legal framework that's supposedly here to
21:26
uphold our rights as citizens or whatever right is in this case, denying us
21:32
any agency, I think is very confusing then for women like you don't even
21:36
have legal recourse to some extent to support you in this idea of your own
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agency. I think, like you know, the question of marital rape,
21:44
like I obviously to agree that it's emblematic of a certain perception about sex self,
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I would just step away for a second from talking about gender to again
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talking about the way that heteronormativity and patriarchy function within which sex is seen is
22:00
something that's primarily to be had within marriage for the purpose of reproduction. Right,
22:06
that is a primary location, and therefore whether women enjoy sex or not
22:11
is really not important. And to be honest, I'm not very sure whether
22:17
it's important that men enjoy sex or not either. Like the pressure once you
22:21
are married is are you going to have a baby? Like? What's wrong?
22:25
Why aren't you pregnant? Right? So, yes, while the idea
22:27
of men's pleasure is of course institutionalized, and it's expected that men will seek
22:32
their pleasures, but the whole idea of sex for pleasure is seen as a
22:36
degraded idea, Like a man who wants too much pleasure is maybe not taboo
22:41
in the way that women get you know, women get ostracized for wanting pleasure,
22:45
but men are also sometimes called ayash and seen it's a little too much,
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you know, the pleasure loving person is generally considered decadent, and decadence
22:53
is allowed to somebody who's privileged, but it's still seen as decadence. So,
22:59
in other words, sex itself is a kind of idea that creates a
23:02
lot of unease, and sex as something that you desire and pursue and you
23:07
steep yourself in pleasure's always seen as somehow a dodgy idea. It makes even
23:12
a man a little bit less of a man if he's really into the pleasures
23:18
of sex. That is why when you see how men talk about sex,
23:21
it is always in terms of achievement. You know, how much did you
23:25
score? Like did you manage to get her? So this kind of idea
23:30
of battle and the hunt also pervades the way that men think about sex.
23:34
If men began to think about genuine pleasure right, not just like penetration,
23:41
hannimal orgasm, But if they started thinking about pleasure, they would have to
23:44
rethink their whole being. They would no longer be able to think only in
23:48
terms of power. They would have to think in terms of mutuality, and
23:52
that would definitely make them less of a man. But of course, when
23:55
it comes to women. There is so much more control over women's bodies because
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women are seen as belonging to a community, belonging to a family, not
24:03
as autonomous beings who and pleasure and desire are part of that autonomy. Right.
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That is why this inextricably linked The idea of pleasure and autonomy is linked
24:14
to the idea of overall autonomy. Because if I cannot have autonomy over my
24:18
body and my desires, how am I going to exercise other autonomies? And
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there will always be something that holds me back, something that circumscribes me.
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But even if I am taught to be this person who achieves a lot,
24:27
and I will know no boundaries and I will just keep going, Am I
24:30
a full person? And am I really happy if all of my autonomy is
24:36
not intertwined? So I think that within For example, now the law on
24:41
adultery has changed, but earlier, if there was adultery, the woman was
24:47
always seen as an innocent somebody who has been preyed upon by the adulterer.
24:52
The adulterer is always outside and praying upon the property of the man who is
24:56
married to this woman. So the idea that the woman might self desire to
25:00
have an affair is also absent. Right, So the sheer absence of women's
25:04
desire, and the idea that women are the property of men, community,
25:08
casts, and family, and that you have to like they have to their
25:12
womb has to be protected to ensure endogamy and inheritance. Like these are all
25:19
the ideas which underlie the notion that women don't have desire, and women's desire
25:23
must be controlled and constrained. So when women don't enjoy sex, which is
25:27
something they do bring up right, Like if you look at what researchers have
25:30
found when women are unhappy in marriages, and one of the things they say
25:33
is that sex is horrible. They're told sex is horrible. Women are very
25:38
rarely told that most sex can be awesome, it can be fun, and
25:41
you should be enjoying yourself it only it is awful, like you know,
25:44
men are that way. Only now the thing you can do about men like
25:47
you just have to bear it. So the idea it's sold to women has
25:51
an idea that you are not supposed to feel that way. If you are
25:53
going to talk about pleasure, you're shameless. And shame is a very important
25:57
part of how we think about sex. But it is also told to men
26:00
that if you don't want to have sex all the time, you're less of
26:03
a man. Your job is to make sure that you get a woman.
26:07
If a woman says no to you, your entire manhood has been thrown into
26:11
question. And that is also why we have like acid attacks. We have
26:15
so much kind of violence around rejection, or even violence for the self around
26:19
rejection, because for men, the idea of rejection puts all of their masculinity
26:25
into question. There's so many things you've said that I want to like touch
26:29
upon, but let's talk about power dynamics, because you know, I happened
26:33
to in the research for this conversation, I happened to chance upon this article
26:37
that Monica Lewinsky had written for Vanity Fen twenty eighteen, twenty years after the
26:42
initial investigation into her relationship with Bill Clinton. She's now in her forties.
26:47
This is in the aftermath of Me Too, and she wrote that while for
26:51
decades she had seen her relationship with the former president as consensual, now she
26:57
was beginning to consider that actually, the our differentials between a White House intern
27:03
and the President of the United States of America is so vast that perhaps the
27:10
very idea of consent is rendered mood and I think you know you briefly sort
27:14
of mentioned the complications in an endogamous society of cast, class, religion,
27:18
all of that, and there are so many power dynamics that play often right
27:22
in the way that we experience sex. So how do you think that factors
27:27
in and particularly in the Indian context. I think, I mean already the
27:32
idea that women are supposed to acquiesce to men is about a power dynamic of
27:37
gender right that somehow a woman doesn't feel, you know, and by consent
27:41
we don't only mean like having sex, but what type of sex you have,
27:47
or to use contraception in sex. For example, women find it very
27:49
difficult to negotiate condom use because they don't feel able to talk about sex.
27:55
They don't feel able to counter what is being said because that's not something that
27:57
they have been taught to do and that's not something ever discussed in public.
28:03
So I think like gender obviously comes with that power dynamic written into it very
28:07
clearly, and then other layers of our social identity. For example, yes,
28:11
if there's a huge power differential between the person who is pursuing the sex
28:18
and the person who it's not sure they want to have that sex. Right,
28:22
Like, for example, you may be very flattered by the attentions of
28:26
somebody who is powerful. That should not in itself be stigmatized. And being
28:32
flattered by somebody's attention does not mean that you have to give in to their
28:34
attentions. Right. You may just simply feel flattered, and that's actually human
28:38
and it's all right. But the idea that you even allowed yourself to feel
28:44
pleased that somebody paid attention to you because they are a powerful person translates in
28:49
your mind to meeting whatever is the requirement of the person in power. Right,
28:55
You're not responding to the idea of sexualness there, but to the idea
28:59
of that person's pay. It's not about you being attracted to them, but
29:02
you having to give into whatever they want. So I think yes, Like
29:04
at the workplace, this is very clearly obvious to us that people who are
29:08
in a position of power, or not only a position of power in the
29:12
hierarchy of the organization, but who may be very successful in the world,
29:15
who may be seen as very powerful. I mean, the President of the
29:18
United States is as because that gets that the idea that that is an element
29:23
in the interaction is important to consider. That's why I think that you know
29:29
that one has to think about with some tenderness as an older person, Like
29:34
if you're an older successful man, there has to be some kindness in you
29:38
to knowing that the younger person that you are making advances towards isn't fully able
29:45
to resist your power, and how are you going to ensure that it's really
29:48
consensual. I do think that onness is on you. It's very easy to
29:52
say that person consented, but it's important to be aware of what are the
29:56
many kinds of layers of power working on yourself of things you know, So
30:00
for that you need a very different attitude towards sexual relationships and relationships in general.
30:06
Actually, so I think that cost is another obvious example that cast plays
30:12
such a big role in Indian society and how we think about purity, and
30:17
how we think about our dominance and acceptance non acceptance, whom we can treat
30:23
in what way, and that you know, all of those things are so
30:27
there's a subterranean level at which they're operating. Sometimes people may end up saying
30:33
yes because they don't feel able to stay there. So that is why Actually,
30:37
I feel that when we're talking about consent, we do talk about sex,
30:41
but we must also talk about emotionality, relationality, love or loving mess
30:48
I would say, rather than how are we going to create a society that
30:51
is that kind hearted? And you know, without taking away the fact that,
30:56
yes, eroticism is about many different elements of our being, and that
31:02
power is one of those elements, but all of these other things, that
31:04
how do we look at each other as people is actually central to the idea
31:08
of consent. Without a real conversation about that, and without a real transformation
31:14
in that, it's very difficult to have meaningful consent. Absolutely, I have
31:18
boost pumps when you talked about how you know people in positions of our men,
31:22
older men need to simply be kind. It makes me reflect back on
31:26
several relationships I have had that have thought of as consensual, and as I
31:30
age, realize that I think, you know, I think that, I
31:36
mean, it just complicates things, you know, where I think were I
31:41
to encounter the adulation of a very young person a thirty three, if a
31:45
teenager was like throwing themselves at me, I would politely dissuade them, tell
31:51
them to do their homework something, you know, whereas I feel like I've
31:55
been on the other side of that as a very young person, where my
31:59
admiration for like an accomplished man, as you were saying, you're taught to
32:05
admire powerful people or accomplished people, intellectually brilliant people, et cetera. And
32:10
instead of that remaining platonic, I feel there's too often the invitation from the
32:16
older powerful man to sexualize the admiration that were a man providing that admiration,
32:22
they're becoming their mentor or something, you know, which when a woman is
32:24
admiring of a man's work, he expects to be able to sleep with hers
32:29
anyway. I mean the thing that also connected to the fact that men do
32:31
not see women as full people exactly translate everything into a sexualization, and that
32:37
men that we need actually not just men, but the world needs to start
32:42
seeing women as full people. There has to be more and more of that
32:45
in society, right so for us to engage with each other in that way.
32:50
But I think that so many women also are taught that they get their
32:52
value from the attention of men, that the approbation of a man means that
32:55
you are intelligent and so it's very confusing. It's very confusing if men are
33:01
given the position in a society of being the ones who decide the worth of
33:05
everybody else, it creates a real conflict of not even sometimes knowing what you
33:10
are feeling towards somebody exactly exactly. Gosh, I feel like this shouldn't become
33:19
about me, though, but I have so many feelings. This is bringing
33:22
up all the fields that I shall professionally segue into my next question. We
33:30
briefly talked about the fact that there are unspoken elements, non verbal elements if
33:36
you will do a sexual encounter, and they are I mean, I think
33:39
we're so often over emphasizing this yes, no and communicating verbally, but we
33:45
if we're honest, there's so much that is sort of intuited or body language
33:51
is sort of the means of communication, and it can often be misinterpreted,
33:54
but it is a means of communication, and we do use it, so
33:58
we can't pretend it doesn't exist. And how would you advise young people who
34:04
might not be so comfortable or even equipped with the vocabulary to always verbalize their
34:09
desires? You know, how can I think you spoke of kindness, but
34:13
perhaps along with kindness the other tools in the kit in terms of navigating the
34:21
non verbal, which which I believe should be able to coexist with the verbal
34:25
in our sexual interactions. So I think that, you know, if one
34:30
while to do like a step by step thinking about consent, then what we're
34:34
really saying is that at a very basic level, when we say yes means
34:38
yes and no means no, this is the kind of principal idea, right
34:44
like, but how is yes said? And how is no said? Is
34:47
multiple? And why is yes not always a yes? And why is no
34:52
not always a no? There are multiple reasons for this, and these reasons
34:57
exist underneath the verbalization and when actually I find that, like a lot of
35:02
young people, their education on consent is not going beyond the yes means yes
35:07
and no means no. And so they also like land up in social media
35:12
comments to shout at everybody and say enthusiastic consent is the only consent. But
35:17
I really wonder if they are in a position to make that enthusiastic consent as
35:22
we call it, in every interaction of their So I first of all feel
35:27
that we should expand the iterations of consent and also the iterations of non consensuality
35:35
that we not not consensuality, but when somebody is not consenting, how do
35:38
we see that? You know? So I'll take an example of the Hindi
35:42
film song, which I think like certain elite kind of young feministish type of
35:50
you know, commentariat tend to always homogenize and say, oh, all Hindi
35:54
film songs about stalking, et cetera, et cetera. And I think there
35:58
are at least a million Hindi films, maybe more. And as a person
36:01
who's seeped in enjoyment of that entire musical culture, I can say there are
36:08
definitely a few stalking, ef teasing or a few there are several stalking and
36:14
e feazing kind of songs. But there are dozens upon dozens upon dozens of
36:17
examples of consent also available to you in that flirtation, in what we call
36:22
no choke, in playing together, right, and the idea of playing together
36:28
is actually based in pleasure. So I think, first of all, the
36:30
culture needs to present these many, many, many iterations of how people interact
36:36
with each other and arrive at consent. And they do it with romance,
36:40
they do it with sexiness, because that's the other thing we hear right like,
36:44
if everything is going to be so like formatted, then romance is dead.
36:49
But that's actually not true. And I recently actually watched the Korean drama
36:53
which was full of consensual lines like to have your permission, and which was
36:57
pretty steamy. So I was like, well, this is a good example
37:00
of how there can be lots of romance and steaminess, but not in this
37:02
very tinny way that you find put out in the you know, like enthusiastic
37:07
consent doesn't have to be so tinny as the way that it is talked about
37:12
in public, but there can be many versions of it that you see playing
37:15
out. One of the things that we do on Agents of Fish, which
37:19
I think has been a response to this absoluteness which creates confusion. Two things
37:22
that we did actually, one is we created several you could call them primers
37:28
or manuals on Like one we made was called how to make an Ish Move
37:31
without making a Dick Move, which we retitled to how to make an isk
37:36
move without being a creep. But in that we actually broke down. Let's
37:38
say you meet somebody and you fancy them, can you make a move?
37:43
And then we put down all the kinds of possible relationships that you are in
37:47
with them, like are you working with them? Are there subordinate? Are
37:52
theyre a student? Okay, you can't make a move on this person.
37:54
Supposing then none of these things and it is okay to make a move.
37:57
Okay, you've made a move. Now what is that person's response? And
38:01
so actually we wove into that the idea that sometimes discomfort is expressed nonverbally,
38:08
and you should watch out for that. Sometimes interest is also expressed nonverbally,
38:14
and you can look out for that. But the thing is that, too
38:17
is a step by step thing, like people may show a little bit of
38:20
interest but then not feel that much interest. Actually, nobody has ever broken
38:23
it down for most people that way. So if you just break it down
38:28
into these stages of interaction, which you can call the maybe stage if you
38:31
like, then it actually helps people to understand that, Okay, I can't
38:36
go beyond this. Now I thought this person was interested, but perhaps I
38:38
was mistaken. Yes, this person was interested, but now they don't like
38:43
me all that much as they thought they liked me. That hurts, but
38:45
I have to let this go. So actually we need to make this very
38:47
routine very ordinary. We have to take a sting away from rejection in a
38:52
sense by talking about these things so that people are not so panic stricken about
38:55
hearing the no, which is what is also happening I think on the ground.
39:00
The other thing that we have done is like created something we call sexual
39:05
etiquette, so the idea that you know, because I also think that it
39:08
all becomes very alarming and very sort of catastrophized the way that we talk about
39:15
what happens within sex. But if we were to speak about it not in
39:17
terms of a cup of tea, which is that video that everybody likes to
39:21
show, and as a person who hates ta, I'm like, this video
39:22
doesn't even apply to me, so I don't know what to do with it.
39:25
But I think that if we were to think about sex is just a
39:29
routine part of our lives, and we were to intertwine it with other routine
39:34
parts of our lives, like for example, good manners, right, Like
39:37
sometimes people would ask us questions on agents of fish which were not exactly questions
39:43
about sexual sex education questions In that sense, we would often think, like,
39:46
how should we reply because there is no one reply to this person's question,
39:51
But when the questions accumulated, what we really thought was, these are
39:53
all questions of how to behave with each other's sexual contexts. Like somebody will
39:58
ask, you know, if I if somebody goes down on me, am
40:05
I expected to go down on them as well? So the idea is,
40:08
of course you're not expected to. But for example, if we reframe the
40:13
answer in terms of good manners and the idea that within good manners we don't
40:17
force people to do something they don't want to do. That's just good behavior
40:21
with each other, I think it becomes like you know, it brings the
40:23
temperature down on these things a lot, so it becomes very possible to think
40:28
about it, very possible to do it. Or we received the question from
40:30
a guy saying, you know, if I find if I see a girl
40:32
on the bus and I think she's attractive and I stare at her, how
40:36
does that violate her consent? So the idea that if you're staring at her
40:39
and she's uncomfortable, you're making her uncomfortable. That violates the consent. You
40:43
can take a peek. It's not bad to find the girl on the bus
40:46
attractive. It is not fair to force your attractions upon her. There's a
40:52
distinction, and I don't think this distinction is always made when we are talking
40:55
about consent. We have to be kind of aware to not stigmatize desire,
41:00
to not you know, taboo the idea of feeling attracted itself, but to
41:05
separate the two. And I think that doesn't always happen in the conversation and
41:08
concern so sexualitic. It has been really a useful way I found on Agents
41:13
of Fish to address a number of ways of thinking about the situations in which
41:16
consent operates. Or you know, if I hook up with somebody as at
41:22
my place, am I expected to ask them to stay the night? Now?
41:24
You know these are not like you already have sex with this person,
41:28
But it's a question of intimacy, like how much intimacy do you want with
41:31
this person that you've hooked up with? Are you comfortable having them stay or
41:35
not? And I remember that we asked this question on Twitter and somebody answered
41:37
it beautifully and said that a good host always offers, a good guest never
41:43
imposes, And I felt like, wow, this is really a nice way
41:47
to think about it. So I don't think it's very useful to think in
41:51
terms of like you know, my personal space and oh my like you know,
41:53
these hard edged kind of frames, they make us adversaries to each other,
42:00
so they take away the idea of mutuality. How many frames can we
42:02
create that reiterate mutuality and pleasure and work out the idea of consent within those?
42:10
I think that is productive. And similarly, we've done a bunch of
42:15
stuff about flirting and how flirting without an agenda actually helps us to learn about
42:22
consent. Yeah, because you're flirting to say I think you're attractive, but
42:24
that doesn't mean you have to do anything. And I can enjoy being floated
42:30
with and enjoy flirting back without it meaning it has to lead somewhere. So
42:32
actually it's like an entire education in you know, amorousness that we really want
42:38
in order to have a consensual world, along with all the political change that
42:43
brings equality otherwise. I love that. I mean, I think flirting can
42:47
be a way of being in an ideal world where there's where there's no expectation,
42:52
and where simply desiring does not entail an expectation of action by either party.
42:59
But you mentioned hook ups and it made me think of in a very
43:04
sort of practical way, you know, a lot of young people's courtship rituals
43:07
or when you're just meeting someone and figuring out whether things can go the sexual
43:10
route, alcohol and other substances are often involved. Right. It's almost like
43:15
drinking particularly is like the social lubricant that allows for the courage to ask someone
43:23
to take things to the next level physically or whatever. Personally, I don't
43:28
drink actually because I think sex and alcohol am not a good mix and I
43:30
love sex. But I want to hear from you, and I'm sure many
43:36
people deal with this conundrum of informed consent, how substance can complicate that,
43:40
and how you know we can navigate that too in a safe way while still
43:45
having fun. Yeah, I mean I think that people drink, you know,
43:49
it's like a thing that young people do that to drink is school and
43:52
to be like totally brotto is a mark of your like machismo, like drinking
43:57
muchismo. So there's a kind of bad practice of you that many people go
44:00
through. I do think that. Yeah, Like people end up, people
44:07
end up having sex when they are drunk, and it's not always consensual.
44:10
Sometimes it might be like again, I don't know if it's a one size
44:15
fits all rule. But I do think it's a good idea to maybe,
44:20
like, not do it habitually, because there will be many situations which you
44:24
might end up in which you don't like, where not only your consensuality but
44:30
just your feeling of worth and enjoyment are kind of taken away from you,
44:35
right because I think like, when we are young, we do a lot
44:37
of immoderate things. We are experimental, and I would really hesitate to tell
44:43
young people that you shouldn't be experimental. And you know, you are a
44:46
bit of a not case when you're young and you are a little wild and
44:50
you do things that are ill advised. But somewhere I don't I would not
44:53
ever want to tell young people to not be adventurous. But when you're adventurous,
44:59
you know there are going to be some missteps, There are going to
45:01
be some dangers and risks, And the really important thing is how are you
45:06
going to build your resilience rather than let your adventures excoriate you to the point
45:09
where you become embittered, where you feel disempowered, and where you simply are
45:15
not able to navigate a life where you can say, well, I made
45:19
some mistakes, so some things happened which were not great, and I don't
45:21
really want them to happen again. So here are the things I'm going to
45:23
do for myself to keep myself feeling good and feeling safe in a way.
45:30
So I think we are kind of missing that conversation on like we actually we
45:35
have a new project that agentsy Fish about the idea of the safe space,
45:38
and the central question we're asking in that project is we always talk about a
45:43
safe space as being safe from something, But what about if we asked about
45:46
safe for what? Like if I could say I want to be safe to
45:51
have fun, to do a few stupid things and not then run into like
45:55
horrible dangers or you know, end up raped or that kind of a thing,
46:01
then I think, yes, ideally you shouldn't drink and like mix sex
46:07
and alcohol too much. But I mean, am I really going to say
46:12
that, well, you shouldn't have got drunk that's why this started happening to
46:15
you. I think there's a very fine line between the two at a more
46:20
simple level where we're not talking about this polarity of violence. I do think
46:24
that, you know, That's why I'm a big proponent of the idea of
46:29
talking about sex, not in terms of the penetration and the hook up as
46:34
the score kind of idea, but the idea of sexual ness. And I
46:38
mean that's why I also stress the words lovingness and sexualness, because they're not
46:43
about having a type of relationship or a type of connection, but rather about
46:46
the behavior towards each other and towards yourself. So I even think that,
46:50
you know, like the idea of cuddling and making out a little bit is
46:53
something one should really talk about a lot, because you may want a little
46:58
Like you become a little sentimental and silly when you're drunk, and if you
47:01
see that your friend has become that way and you cuddle a little bit,
47:06
that's not disastrous, right, Like it doesn't feel like you did something you
47:09
wouldn't have done were you in your senses, And I think that's important.
47:14
How does one create that context? I love that I wish that we could
47:19
have fun without having to exercise so much caution. I feel like, even
47:22
in my own life, you know, it would be my fault if something
47:27
bad happens, so I'm constantly having to choose to exercise caution even when I
47:30
would like to have fun. And I wish we weren't to put into you
47:35
know, that corner where you have to choose between your safety and fun and
47:37
you as a result, I feel like women aren't I aren't expected to have
47:42
fun. You shouldn't have fun, and bad girls have fun. You know.
47:45
I often feel a lack of fun in my own choices and life,
47:50
almost as if that's the default setting. Like I have to challenge myself to
47:52
have fun. You know. Well, women are supposed to account for their
47:57
existence all the time, right, Like we are expected to like we're supposed
48:00
to justify that we have been allowed to be out in the world and to
48:06
make some choices, and then we have to make good those choices. So
48:08
for women to make a mistake, it's very fraught. Like women feel a
48:14
sense of like I have to I have to be top of my class,
48:17
I have to do really well at work. I have to tell people that
48:22
it was worth letting me have all these choices. But it shouldn't have to
48:25
be. You should be free to not be an achiever as a woman.
48:30
You should be free to just like drift if you want to drift. I
48:34
mean, I call the kind of feminism that I love a poetic feminism for
48:38
that reason like, your life has to be an exploration you want to do,
48:43
not an exploration somebody else tells you to do. Right, So,
48:45
even as a feminist, I'm not going to tell somebody that, Look,
48:47
you have to go out and achieve everything, but you have to achieve a
48:51
truthful relationship with yourself and then hopefully be able to enact that relationship in the
48:55
world, right, And that can mean being an achiever, it can be
48:59
meaning I mean being a drifter who likes to read magazines and meet her friends
49:01
and it's pretty happy that you recently paid job and that school absolutely Okay,
49:08
I want to go back to two very important themes that came up, shame
49:14
and pleasure. Let's start with shame, though, because shame often interferes with
49:19
pleasure, and I think that many people find that the shame that their conditioned
49:24
to feel around sex ends up interfering both with their ability to express what they
49:30
want when they want something, as well as with their ability to deal with
49:36
rejection. And so would you like to share your thoughts on how shame functions,
49:43
especially in well, the whole world is quite sex negative to be honest,
49:46
but how shame functions and how we can get better at stopping it from
49:52
interfering with our pleasure. I know, yeah, I think you know.
49:57
For me, the idea of pleasure comes first because I think pleasure is not
50:00
just sex, right, Pleasure exists in so many domains. It exists,
50:05
and I mean it's in food, it's in reading, it's in what you
50:09
watch, it's in what you like to wear, how you like to be,
50:13
the things that you enjoy, basically the things that make you feel good.
50:16
And I think like if you proceed from a place of thinking that pleasure
50:21
is important part of life. Pleasure is an important way of identifying for yourself
50:24
who you are, what kind of person you are, what kind of life
50:29
you would like to have, and what kind of days you would like to
50:30
be able to live, then you might shape a very different trajectory for yourself,
50:36
and the world itself would perhaps be shaped very differently. Right now,
50:38
the world is not shaped for pleasure. It's because we have, you know,
50:43
a dozen OTT channels and so much entertainment supposed entertainment on tap. That's
50:47
the sort of kind of a false patina of pleasure. But pleasure is something
50:52
that makes you feel connected to yourself and good is actually not encouraged. I
50:57
mean, think about the way that even social med which started out as being
51:00
something which was meant to really encourage fun and fil dugid, you know,
51:06
like you're just wasting time and poking each other and playing vampire slayer. And
51:09
there was so many meaningless activities we did online. But now the whole social
51:14
media has become this kind of puritanical productive space, and people are continuously checking
51:19
how many likes, how many views like. Even if you are not working
51:22
as an influencer or somebody who uses social media for your work, you think
51:27
of yourself as a being who must succeed on social media, and that success
51:31
is measured with numbers and responses. Where in this landscape is the place for
51:37
pleasure because pleasure is fundamentally not about productivity. Pleasure is about just for itself.
51:43
It's not in order to serve some other purpose. It can't be made
51:45
to serve another purpose. Hence, we talk about consent, because not everything
51:52
that is pleasurable is necessarily good, right, Not everything that I find pleasurable
51:59
is the not full of the potential for violence to you. And that is
52:02
why consensuality is important, because when we recognize that every being has a different
52:09
definition of pleasure, then we wait to understand whether our definitions of pleasure match
52:16
before we move forward with something. And consensuality is really that concept, and
52:21
hence then maybe kind of encapsulate this idea of getting to know one another and
52:27
getting to know what are each other's boundaries, what other places where you can
52:30
have a commonality or mutuality. But I think pleasure also is full of hierarchies
52:37
of cast, of gender as well and of race nationality. So, for
52:44
example, romance novels consider to be inferior things that girls enjoy are often mocked
52:52
as being unimportant. But I think that for me, romance novels open up
52:57
a world of fantasy. And because I fantasy so much, I fantasized myself
53:01
right out of reality and refuse to accept that what the world told me is
53:05
supposed to be my journey in life is a journey that I want. I
53:07
didn't want it. And I think that I had not read so many like
53:12
hot and heavy romance novels as a young person, you know, I might
53:15
have been encouraged to stick to a certain kind of very conventional, respectable path.
53:21
Actually, the idea of what gives us pleasure being dismissed as unimportant as
53:27
being superfluous is a way that we are taught to have shared. For example,
53:31
if I say I simply love hot chocolate fudge, I'm a fat woman
53:38
who is not supposed to say that with so much pleasure, because the thought
53:42
that the person in front of me is going to have is well, I
53:45
mean, that's why you're putting on so much weight. So I'm supposed to
53:49
feel ashamed both about how I look and about the things that I find delicious
53:52
to eat. Right, So, and there will be days when with somebody
53:55
I can say it freely, and on a day even a person like me
53:59
will feel that slow I think in the gaze of someone who looks at me
54:01
as cants when I say this kind of thing. So, actually, the
54:06
things that I might find pleasurable, like say eating meat because of my cast,
54:10
will be looked down on by somebody as like, oh my god,
54:13
people who eat meat are inferior. So we are taught to have shame about
54:16
the food that we eat. When you go abroad, right, one of
54:20
the things that Americans would often say when I was working there was oh,
54:23
Indian food smells, and so you would feel ashamed of the smell of the
54:28
food, which actually gives you immense pleasure, Like I remember coming home from
54:31
school and smelling all the pulkas being made and all the flats as all the
54:36
kids were coming home from school, Or the way that we feel when onions
54:39
hit the oil and we can smell that, you know, like lovely smell
54:43
of onions cooking. Like these are the things that give us joy. But
54:45
we learn to be ashamed of those things. As we are learning to have
54:49
shame about those things. We are aring to be ashamed of who we are
54:52
essentially and to accept power and hierarchy. So shame is a very powerful tool
54:59
to keep us all in place and to continuously override our consent. Shame is
55:04
a way that we're educated not to have consent actually and to give others power
55:07
over us. And it operates so insidiously because it's I mean, you might
55:13
overtly say everybody is equal, but then in these very insidious ways you would
55:19
poke away at our equality by making us feel lesser because we don't read the
55:22
same things, enjoy the same movies, love the same songs, appreciate the
55:28
same kind of colors or whatever it is, and also the kind of sex
55:31
we might like to have, or how we might like to express ourselves sexually,
55:36
of course, is intertwined with that, and the larger idea of taboo
55:39
operates even more deeply within sex. So actually we are all the time ashamed
55:45
of many aspects of ourselves and the taboo on sex, which taboo is a
55:50
thing which you just intrinsically feel, you know, like, all of that
55:54
is a toxic mix which makes it very difficult to know who you are.
55:58
If you don't know who you are, the question of rights is not sufficient
56:04
to exercise your personhood rights are basic, but to exercise your person To be
56:07
recognized as a person means your pleasure has to be recognized, and the id
56:13
that pleasure is diverse has to be recognized and accepted and even woven into the
56:19
fabric of society, the idea that children will do some things for enjoyment,
56:23
not all the time, do some things to come first in class and become
56:27
like perfect little capitalist citizens. I mean, there has to be a place
56:30
for that right in our world. Yeah, yeah, shame, shame sort
56:34
of makes us the gatekeepers of our own access to pleasure. You know,
56:37
we deny I mean, and despite knowing it one still does it feel so
56:44
trapped in many of the capitalism, productivity, good girl syndrome, all of
56:49
it. But you know, we've talked about so much that many people to
56:53
whom this might be slightly new information or might not have had the chance to
56:58
think deeply about it, might find it a lot too process. And so
57:00
I wanted to also leave our listeners or viewers with some very sort of practical
57:07
tips if possible, around navigating consent, you know, or we can start
57:13
with your top tip for asking for consent perhaps, and then we can move
57:16
on to withdrawing consent and dealing with rejection, if that's okay. Yeah,
57:22
I mean, I think there are some simple things. One the first and
57:24
most important thing is to know yourself well. I think very often we are
57:30
so concerned with being selected or being selectors whatever, that we aren't even thinking
57:37
whether we really want to think that we are chasing right. So, I
57:40
think there are many young women we speak to have more restricted lives, right,
57:46
Like, they live in traditional environments where they're not given that much freedom.
57:52
So for the person who doesn't have that much freedom, the chance to
57:54
have sex, so the chance to have romance is so tough that they often
58:01
accept many non consensual and violent context because it's the only way to experience a
58:07
little bit of that romance. So I think that they are not even thinking
58:09
do I really want this person or not? They're just thinking about how to
58:13
get that little window of exploration. So I think that but for those of
58:16
us who are like not leading such constricted lives, I think it's a pretty
58:20
important to think do I really want this person? Do I really want this
58:23
thing? How much do I want it? To know yourself well and to
58:27
know that what you're looking for is something you desire first of all, and
58:30
I think that will automatically reduce your anic about consent, whether you know,
58:36
should I say yes, should I listen to the know all of those things.
58:39
I think reading nonverbal cues is something that you should educate yourself in and
58:45
if you are uncertain, you should step back. So, for example,
58:50
if somebody is is being polite, somebody is not outright telling you no,
58:54
but you can sense that they're not warmly responding to what you're saying, if
58:59
you can understand, and when company is not welcoming you to do more,
59:01
they're not stopping you, but they're not actually inviting you to do more,
59:06
and it's confusing you step back. So I think feeling that this is my
59:12
only chance is something you should stop feeling. Because we often think this is
59:15
my only chance to get love, sex, desire. We don't respect consent.
59:21
We don't even respect consent within our own selves, like we allow non
59:23
consensuality to happen to us, and definitely we override other people's consent. But
59:28
remember that there will be other chances when you can explore desire, And in
59:32
fact, the more relaxed you become vias of a desire, the more likely
59:36
that you will see those other chances and be able to avail all those other
59:38
chances. So you know, actually having an idea of plenty, not having
59:44
an idea of scarcity about yourself, about the world, and about desire,
59:49
will open up the landscape for you such that you don't make every interaction,
59:53
every swipe, and every hook up into an emergency judgment on your worths and
1:00:00
what you have gained or lost. I think if you are rejected, it's
1:00:04
tough, and you should not pretend it's not tough. The way that you
1:00:08
should not pretend is by crying. If you want to cry, talking to
1:00:14
your friends. You know, if you can like behave in an undignified way
1:00:19
by yourself or with your friends, but you can't do it to the person
1:00:22
who's rejected you, right you. I think like it's important for us to
1:00:25
acknowledge it's painful to be rejected. It's embarrassing at best and hurtful at worst.
1:00:31
But it's not a judgment on who you are. You are not forever
1:00:36
and ever the person who was rejected today. You are still you tomorrow,
1:00:39
And even if you're rejected tomorrow, day after tomorrow, you may not be.
1:00:44
And it's I guess okay to be rejected. So I think that will
1:00:46
automatically make it so much easier to navigate consent, not seek rejection as failure
1:00:51
of some time, and I think to think a lot more about what kind
1:00:55
of relationships you'd like to have. Don't think about relationships in terms of destinations,
1:01:00
in terms of yes and no score or no score, having and not
1:01:04
having. But I actually spend some time imagining what is the kind of amorous
1:01:09
life you want? Like, do you want lots of fun romance? How
1:01:13
can you have that life? Rather than just like I can I have it
1:01:15
or not have it? I think like making our idea of ourselves and of
1:01:21
sexual relationships much more expansive. Will Really, I know it sounds very general,
1:01:27
but actually it's the key to being able to then pursue the things you
1:01:30
really want. A lot of the time we are pursuing things the world tells
1:01:34
us we ought to pursue, and we become very anxious, and so we
1:01:37
override consent. But think of the kind of person you want to be like.
1:01:40
If you don't want to be an asshole, it is not so difficult
1:01:45
to think about how to be consensual. So actually to ask yourself, do
1:01:49
I want to be a joke? Or do I want to be like somebody
1:01:52
who's got the confidence to accept rejection and to and to look for other things
1:01:58
in the world. So I think that goes a long way in helping us.
1:02:01
Thank you so much, A It's been such a pleasure chatting, and
1:02:06
thank you for being so generous with your time and your magic. And I
1:02:10
really hope that anyone watching on listening this and listening to this today is inspired
1:02:16
to approach consent with more love and more tenderness and more kindness and more pleasure.
1:02:22
So thank you so much, and I want to thank everyone who's tuned
1:02:27
in today as well. Thanks so much for joining us. Love Matters is
1:02:31
produced by Indian Express and DW, Germany's international broadcaster, and we'd love to
1:02:37
hear from you, so if you have a story or an insight that you
1:02:40
might like to share, you can email us at Lovematters at DW dot com.
1:02:45
And please do rate this podcast. Please do share it with your friends,
1:02:50
leave us a review till next time. I'm Lisa amongled Us and I
1:02:52
think that love Matters