Latest / Love Matters With Leeza Mangaldas / Women’s Sexuality in Modern India ft. Amrita Narayanan

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Women’s Sexuality in Modern India ft. Amrita Narayanan · Love Matters With Leeza Mangaldas

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I'm Lisa Mangeldas, and this is love Matters. What does sexual agency,
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sexual pleasure, and sex positivity really mean for Indian women? And how might
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the ways in which we experience and express sexual empowerment differ from the model of
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the sexually liberated woman presented by the West. What are the implications of patriarchy's
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relentless control and surveillance on women's sexuality. We're going to be discussing all of
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this in Law with our wonderful guest, Amathan r aman Amretha is a clinical
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psychologist, psychoanalyst, author, professor, researcher whose work has shone the light
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on women's sexuality in so many remarkable ways, and most recently, our book
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Women's Sexuality in Modern India and a Rapture of Distress has for me been such
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an insight into what it means to be a sexual woman and an Indian woman.
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And some really excited to be discussing this book with Amretha today. Aretha,
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thanks so much for joining us, Thanks Lisa for having me. It's
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a pleasure to be here. I read it an article he wrote, Amatha
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of how food Matter Thoughts translates so nicely to sex. You know, words
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like yummy, luscious, delicious, And for most people, most women,
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it's quite easy to describe a good meal that way, but many of us
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would hesitate to describe sex that way, especially publicly. Why do you think
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that is well. Language has such a particular role for our sex life,
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doesn't it. It's the conduit by which our internal world comes outside. And
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this is such a private internal world in contrast to food, which is communally
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shared. Our tastes may differ, but there's something very public about the act
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of eating, in contrast to our sex lives are so very private. So
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I think using language is a vehicle to describe our sex lives. It's always
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a little hesitation there, and there's always a little discomfort as well, But
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I also think it has a lot of potential. When I wrote that article,
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I was really focused on the extravagance of language and of food metaphors.
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But it's been maybe seven or eight years since I wrote that, and I
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still think language is critical and using language is the vehicle to express sexuality is
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so important and empowering. But not everybody has wants to use the rich metaphors
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of food and feasting. There might be other kinds of language that come to
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mind. Even just saying I like sex can be transgressive right for women,
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especially Indian women. And you use the expression sexual agency? So what does
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agency mean? What stops women from feeling like their agents? And could perhaps
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some of that hesitation to describe sex as something you enjoy and participate in also
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have to do with sexual agency and perhaps lack of it. Well, how
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I use agency is a kind of confidence about sexuality, which depends upon also
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an awareness what your desires are. So this common nation awareness of desire and
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also a power or a confidence that I can execute these desires. I can
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make them happen for me, maybe either in fantasy or in reality, but
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I will give some enactment to them. That's what I meant bi sexual agency.
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I used to think that language was one of the most important ways of
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doing that, but I think there are all kinds of ways of doing that,
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and the most important thing is to find that expression. Why is it
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difficult for women? I think that women are very socialized, particularly women in
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India but perhaps across culture, socialized to be a bit hyper aware of their
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sexuality and also aware that it's dangerous that their bodies are dangerous, and I
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think that leads to a very particular way of experiencing your own excitements. So,
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if you have a high degree of socialization that your body is dangerous,
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it can invite harm. And when you experience excitement in that same body,
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it might be closer to danger than you like. And so when you're closer
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to danger than you like than having confidence, having agency becomes much more difficult.
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And I think that's one of the central questions that my book wrestled with,
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is that under these conditions of difficulty, where you're socialized to feel that
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your body is excitements are dangerous, maybe lethal, how then can you get
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pleasure out of them? The same thing that's causing you to be so dangerous
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and at risk also the thing that gives you pressure. So if you look
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at the cover of my book, for example, I have it over there,
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there's a picture for a woman facing a man, and immediately I think
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the idea of her discomfort is as much of a possibility, maybe more of
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a possibility, than the idea of her pleasure. Now, why is that
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and how does that have to do with us as viewers our own sense of
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sexual agency that's been so traumatized. I would say by the amount of feedback
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of media coverage of women's distress that we have. Yeah. Absolutely, I
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mean your title in a Rapture of Distress has the quality of an oxymoron rapture
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and distress. Right. Do you want to expound on that a little bit
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as we talk about agency. So on one level, what I meant by
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that is that we tend to be enraptured by distress when it comes to women's
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sexuality. It's almost a crime not to talk about crime when it comes to
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women's bodies. And there's a reality to that, right, there is a
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lot of unspeakably heinous crime on women's bodies. But I am interested in how
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that functions as a sensoring mechanism to talking about women's pleasure. That we can
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be so enraptured by distress that we forget pleasure altogether. So that's one way
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of thinking about the title that I chose. A second way of thinking about
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it, which is also important, is that rapture and distress are often closely
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intermingled. That's on one hand, that's because of the reasons that are here.
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When women are socialized to distress about their bodies. Then their pleasures can
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sit closely with their distress, and you can have pleasure that then turns to
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distress, which doesn't negate the pleasure. Lastly, there's the idea that some
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women actually enjoy distress in sexuality. You had Jayashallma talking about something of this
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kind on a previous episode of your podcast. Sometimes distress can be pleasurable,
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and we shouldn't rule that out either. So there are all these cadences that
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distress has alongside rapture that I wanted to illustrate in my title. And one
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of the points that you make also is that a female sexual agency in the
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Indian contacts might not fit Western images of the modern woman. What kind of
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problems do you think that has caused? And do you think that perhaps because
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of the way that patriarchy conditions our experiences of sexuality, is some of that
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distress something that's so much a part of our experience that we almost miss it
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when it's gone. So there's sort of two parts your question, and I
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think it might be interesting to answer them together. One is this an image
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that we have of a liberated Western woman who in some ways represents liberal sexuality
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or access to sexual freedom. And so first of all, that's problematic for
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a number of reasons. It's ubiquitous. Jacqueline Rose, who's a psychoanalytic thinker
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that I enjoy, she says, it's the Internet model of feminism, and
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it's the most ubiguitous picture that we have. It excludes a lot of people,
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and the woman is pictured, of course by herself, So in some
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way it implicitly excludes all the community associations to sexuality that women have. It
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also excludes distress the modern woman as a Western woman, you know, wearing
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a skirt heading to the airport of her laptop doesn't deliver a holistic enough picture,
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I think. And can you expound a bit more on what is missing
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or how Indian women, for example, might experience sexual empowerment in ways that
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are less legible or less obvious. Then let's say this Western model of the
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woman at the airport and has gotten with a laptop. I mean, I
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think in your book you mentioned like you could be making dinner in a sari
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and also be sexually empowered, whereas you could be on your way to the
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airport with your laptop and not be sexual empowered. At these optics of Western
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modernity or seeming freedom might not always carry through what they symbolized to the eye,
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right. I mean, I think what I'm talking about I experience is
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a sexual liberation that don't fit in with positivity and confidence culture in neatly.
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They are messy experiences. So we can think of experiences of great sexual pleasure
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that happened alongside the experiences of complete submission to pay phiarchy. So there are
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a number of women who I spoke to when I was writing my book that
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had, on one hand a vibrant, secret sexual life alongside that a performance
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that felt very real and important to them, of complete assimilation to mainstream patriarchal
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culture, for example, a joint family, and how is that managed and
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where are the places where it gets very slippery? But also how in such
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a setting, you know, being very confident, speaking confidently and happily about
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sexuality can prevent you from having it. And I'm talking about examples of women
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who come from families where they want to model sexual reserve for their families on
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one hand, to preserve those kinds of relations. And I think that's what
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I meant by Indian there, and it may not only apply to Indians,
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but I think it's particularly important for Indians of all persuasions to have a wide
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range of close relationships, including with family and relatives, and for sexuality to
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ideally not unseat that. So what I think of as sexual revolution culture is
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a a bit of saying up yours to the entire family and community that doesn't
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approve, and that's certainly a very legitimate way of going about your sexual life.
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What I found in my research and also sometimes in the clinic, is
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that for many women born and who were raised in India, that that's not
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the preferred model. That, of course I do want acceptance from their family,
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but narrating their sexual lives explicitly wearing liberation and their outfits sometimes works against
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and they prefer not to have some of that friction. They prefer to reserve
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the drama for the insides of their sexual lives rather than wearing it on the
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outside. I was surprised at some of what I found in my research.
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I think I expected to hear more oppression than I experienced. I also learned
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to listen in a very different way. When I first started. What I
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found was that if you get past that, that's some of the kinds of
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sexuality that gets described are so far from vanilla that it's quite striking, and
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that the patriarchal performance on the outside is kind of a foil for something that
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is a degree of freedom that's unattainable for some people who on the outside and
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you know, seem very liberated and put together, sexually confident, etc.
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That's so interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I feel like there's a lot
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of things to think about that. But another of the themes that your work
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brings up is the generational conflict between mothers and daughters in regards to sexual agency.
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Can you tell us about that? So worldwide, it's an empirical finding
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that the mother daughter relationship is one of the factors around which woman's sexuality pivots.
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Now, of course, this gets expressed and worked out in all kinds
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of diverse ways, and I don't mean to say that I've captured even close
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to you know, a tenth of that, probably, But what I did
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notice in the stories that women told me, and just to give you some
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background, I asked the women who I interviewed to speak about their sexuality,
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and that's it. That's really the only question that I asked in the process.
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Many of them. I think all of them spoke about their mothers.
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And what I noticed is that when there's a mother whose sexuality is imagined as
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happy or content, that this frees up daughters in a way. And the
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converse of that is that there's something like a survivor guilt when women feel that
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their mothers have been sexually unhappy. They may go on to have sexually happy
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or unhappy lives themselves, but there's something like a weight that needs to be
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worked through or shaken off that their mothers didn't have that kind of experience.
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Now, how is this affected and what consequence does it have? You know,
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this is one of the questions that I really picked up. I bid
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a lot of attention to how interviews reported their moms getting anxious about their sexual
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excitement, whether it was them being squeally, loud, giggly young girls,
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so not even genital sexuality, but just excitement of any kind. To what
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we hear about more commonly, which is, you know, conflicts over speaking
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to boys or wearing certain clothes. If there was a high degree of distress
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in these conflicts, in these interactions, if the mother seemed to be extremely
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appalled, it said, then then this became something that sometimes got internalized,
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and it added for the young girls going into their womanhood a degree of anxiety
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and danger to their sexuality. That if I'm a sexual being, it could
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really upset mom, it could make her love me less, or it could
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just get her really agitated. I don't even know why these kinds of messages
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and experiences seem to hover in women's imaginations, I think through the course of
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their life. I'm thinking of a woman that I spoke to who's a grandmother,
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and she worried both about her mother and her daughter when she experienced actually
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quite a bit of sexual freedom, but it was accompanied by this intense anxiety.
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And so one of the takeaways I have is that just because it makes
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you anxious doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. And even if it makes you
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guilty and ashamed afterwards, maybe that's a sign that you need more exposure therapy.
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In other words, a certain number of times of doing it might get
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you through some of that intergenerational guilt trauma, heaviness of having your mother and
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grandmother, women of your family having had to bear that load. You also
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speak on sauces of sexual suppression for women and at this talk about the mother
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has made me think of it. You mentioned gossip, reputation, and maternal
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socialization to some extent, perhaps the mother is the first exposure to our maternal
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socialization as potential mothers ourselves. Right, Can you talk those three foss that
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idea comes from? You know meta analysis that these Western psychologists, American psychologists
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Bamaster and French do, and they've come up with these three sources of sexual
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suppression, which is worldwide. I think it functions much more strongly in countries
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that have a strong group affiliation, as India does. When I get on
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interviews about this, people often say that, well, no, many people
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are nuclear families now in India. And it's true, there are many nuclear
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families now in India. But the idea of the group, the fantasy of
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uncles, aunt's extended family jati community is still writ very large in the Indian
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imagination, and those extended communities are a source of gossip and reputation. Now,
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much of this is in the imagination and that's what makes it so tricky.
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It makes the unhappiness around it also tricky because one of the things that
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bothers me is that it's anachronous take to the reality. So in the real
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you might be surrounded by a community that doesn't gossip negatively at least about a
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woman's sexual exploits. I hope for positive gossip about a woman's sexual exploits.
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But in the imagination, at the consequence of memory, and a consequence of
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cultural memory, including cultural mythologies, there still hovers this critique, self loathing
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policing of women's sexuality. And I think that women recoup it in very interesting
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ways, the most obvious being that you have the experience of sexual experience,
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and I'm thinking of a specific woman from my book here, you really enjoy
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the experience of a fantastic time, and then afterwards you're kind of reckoning with
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that same body that had such a wonderful time, feeling very hollow and empty.
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In response to an imaginary audience of uncles, aunt's grandparents, figures that
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at a one point, a historical point, stricted sexuality. Now I may
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not even be around in reality, but nevertheless exercises force upon the imagination that
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brings kind of a damper to sexuality. I think that can be worked through,
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and when many people do work it through, for some people it remains
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as some kind of still belonging. There's an unbelonging about freedom, just the
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word itself connotes unbelonging. And not everybody gets a pleasure out of experiencing that.
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It's distressing for some people to experience that, but that distress doesn't mean
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they don't want liberation and sexuality. It just means that they have something else
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with which to wrestle. It made me think of shame as well as a
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consequence of gossip or your reputation being tarnished, or the fear of that.
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Right, there's a sense of shame if people find out or I shouldn't do
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this because it's shameful. And yet shame is also, in a strange sort
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of way, something that eroticizes, right, that which is taboo becomes erotic.
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So we feel ashamed of certain desires we may have and don't want others
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to know. And yet perhaps we have those desires because there's a certain amount
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of forbiddenness to having them. Right. Do you think in the Indian context
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shame is a particularly prominent and perhaps even erotically charged emotion. Yeah, yeah,
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certainly, I'm glad you reminded me about the erotic charge to it.
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So on one hand, yes, shame and the idea of being shame faced.
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Women will come and say that they feel they look different because they're feeling
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such a high degree of embarrassment for pleasure and to look in pleasure in public,
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for example, when talking about sexuality. That's a source of eroticized shame.
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I think it's at once embarrassing and pleasurable because it crosses a tamboo.
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So some of the women that I would sit with from my interviews would say
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this is so embarrassing, but they'd say with a great deal of joy.
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So that's one of the ways in which I think it comes forward. Also,
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as I think what you're alluding to is that early experiences of being shamed
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for sexuality can make those experiences more exciting and can lead us to even seek
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out shame in sexuality in order to get this erotic resoul out of it.
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When that happens, I think I can face the gossip, reputation, maternal
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socialization even more. But worse of all, I think you face health culture.
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So mental health culture says that if you're feeling ashamed, then that's not
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what you want to be feeling. You want to be feeling happy, positive,
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confident, and so that becomes a hurdle that women have to work through.
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So I will meet women in the clinic, for example, to say,
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shouldn't I be feeling better about this? I had so much fun?
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Shouldn't I be feeling better about it? And the answer is not necessarily yeah.
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I mean, I think there's also the tendency to when publicly talking about
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sex, have very sort of need and tidy answers, very palatable answers that
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you know, stay within the I think there's like a moralitis that suffuses discussions
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of sexuality publicly, where there's not enough room for these uncomfortable or slightly less
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easy to categorize experiences, realities of even seeming contradictions. And I'm glad we're
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able to talk about that because I think sex positivity, especially the Western Internet
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version of it, does not really allow for some of these more nuanced and
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less conclusive observations about sexuality. And so I want to hear from you about
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what you see as the gaps in sex positivity and sex positive discust, especially
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with regards to how Indian women can relate to or consume what's often very Western
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in its positioning. Well, one of the gaps is, I think in
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the way we're seeing I really like for us to be able to see the
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more subtle sexual excitements that run through our everyday lives, and run through women's
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everyday life, that somehow don't get counted if we're thinking about explicit sexuality.
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So what's actually happening in women's minds and hearts, which is I think something
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that you attend to a lot in your talks, and that's something also I
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tried to attend to in my books, and looking behind the initial optics,
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looking behind also the distress optics, but also giving room for something that's not
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necessarily healthy, to widen our ambit of the positive, to include what we
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might think of as negative to things like disgust or shame, for those to
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be part of what we consider an erotic experience, and for us to be
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able to actually see them in the many snapshots that they occur to us during
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our lift lives. I think we missed that. I think we're looking too
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much for very explicit genital sexuality, and there's a reason for that. I
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think we haven't had sufficient images of that in our popular culture and in our
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media, in India until after liberalization. Right, So there's a way in
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which we tend to count those more and we certainly need plenty of that,
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but to also count the more subtle experiences. And the reason I would like
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to count that is not only just to be inclusive, but I think there's
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a better chance of us to have a community around sexuality if all kinds of
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experiences are accountable, and that we also don't have to account for ourselves sexually,
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that all kinds of things can be counted and we don't press for that
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you're only liberated if you had X number of genital sexual experiences. There's a
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way in which sex positivity and liberation culture can be very excluding and untruthfully excluding
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of a lot of people. So I'd like to say that shift made.
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I think the effect of such a shift it's not just to have a more
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cohesive community, but also to prevent enactments of women who think they have more
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liberation or less libation upon other women. The very notion of liberation, I
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think is very problematic. I think it will be much more useful for us
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to think about those who are getting their desires met and those who are not,
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and to have some compassion for those who are not, but not pity.
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Maybe not pity because maybe they're getting other needs met as well, and
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because nobody really wants pity when it comes to their sexual life, unless they
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get pleasure out of pity, which is yet another possibility. Let's talk about
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pleasure as we wrap up this conversation. You've written a collection of erotic short
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stories titled A Pleasant Kind of Heavy, And I remember, in reading about
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the context for that book, you spoke of how so much of what we
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hear about Indian women's sexuality is either reports of violence or sex and the context
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of marriage and reproduction. We never really hear about women enjoying and experiencing pleasure,
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you know, with agency and autonomy and ofity. And so I think
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that you had to publish that under a pseudonym. It's a transgressive thing to
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do, right, to talk about women's pleasure unabashedly. Can you tell us
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a little bit about what you wanted to achieve with that book. I think
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it was a transgissive thing to do at that time. Perhaps it's less so
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now. This was a little more than ten years ago, and it was
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my first work in this arena of women's sexuality what I wanted to do with
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it. Of course, I think, like many women of my generation,
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I was raised on this diet of women's stories of pleasure narrated primarily by men,
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and that too white men. So one of the things I wanted to
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do is to have a collection of pleasure stories written by a woman of color,
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written Inian women. And my hope was really that this would invite other
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people's stories, fictional or real, forward as well. And my fantasy,
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if you will, at that time, was to have lots and lots of
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a collective and archive, if you will, of women's stories of sexual pleasure,
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Indian women's stories is sexual pleasure, so that the brown bodies that were
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not represented, the names, the geographies, in the settings, that to
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give them some representation. That was one of my wishes. I think I
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also had maybe a more youthful fantasy that if we have enough images of positive
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sexuality, that this could be my book. Was I thought one of them
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that this would be a foil to patriarchal culture, this would push up against
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it in a very important way, and that lots of these accounts could push
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up against it. I still feel that that's true, but I feel that
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we're women are so much in small pockets and silos doing that kind of work
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sharing their sexual stories. Really, even the women I interviewed for the book.
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For this most recent book, I think socioeconomic barriers, language difference,
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various forms of cultural difference within India keep women from sharing with each other.
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Their stories are sexual pleasure. And I think writing a pleasant kind of heavy
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was my way of saying, like, you know, here's some of what
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I have, what are some of what you have? Thanks so much for
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sharing that, Amretha. I really hope that women can perhaps gossip positively about
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us, say things like Lisa and Amatha seem like women having great sex.
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I love that you talked about positive gossip, and I'm going to definitely be
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gossiping positively about this conversation. Well, you know, Lisa, the fact
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that you exist and that you're talking about sexuality running this podcast in the way
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that you are was unimaginable twenty years ago. Was definitely unimaginable when I was
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a teenager, and that makes me really hopeful. And I'd like for us
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to imagine more widely, imagine impossible things, because I think it has an
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effect and kind of transcend that all of this heaviness of patriarchy. I think
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that having pleasant fantasies, positive gossip about the pleasure of widely experienced, diversely
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experience sexuality for women is really really exciting and hopeful possibility for our future.
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Thanks so much, I'm so glad we could speak to their and thank you
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so much for tuning in to Love Matters. I hope that you enjoyed this
27:12
episode, and we'd love it if you shared it, readed it wherever you're
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listening, and left us at comment. If you'd like to email us,
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you can do so at Lovematters at DW dot com. Lovematters is produced by
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The Indian Express and DW Germany's international broadcaster. And this is me Liza Amongolas
27:30
signing off. I believe Love Matters