But when he explored porn on his own several years later later, it was to get off.
The experience was awkward for everyone, including Avinash, who said it felt ‘very weird’. The first time he watched porn, he was with a group of friends. You know how teenagers are.’īut conversations and jokes about sex made Avinash curious. ‘I would laugh and talk to them as usual. When his classmates talked about sex, Avinash just played it cool. ‘Chasing girls was out of the question,’ he says. He comes from a conservative, religious family, so for the longest time it didn’t strike him at all. Like Naqshpa, Avinash also spent his teen years without having a single crush. For people who’ve felt different, confused, or alone all their lives, it opens a door into a community. For people who identify as asexual, the internet has both answers and the space to ask questions. That’s where access to the internet comes in handy. We’ve been so busy doing our best to control people’s sexual impulses, that we have left no room for people who might not experience sexual attraction at all. Let’s watch a journalist attempt to tear down Sunny Leone instead). Neither are women, at least until they get married, after which they have to start popping out babies (for which they presumably have sex, but shh, let’s not talk about that. People who have disabilities are not supposed to be sexual at all. Sexual violence is dismissed because ‘boys will be boys’.
Queer people are forced into heterosexual marriages. At the same time, others screech about ‘love jihad’, how sex education will lead young people astray, and that nobody can help you if your love crosses caste-lines and you’re killed by your family in the bargain. Most blockbuster films show some variation of girl-meets-boy (which often translates into boy-stalks-girl): they fall in love, they overcome obstacles, they end up together. In India, the crushing weight of sexual love is everywhere - and so are efforts to control it. It had taken her over a decade, but Naqshpa finally discovered what she ‘was’ - and that she wasn’t the only one who felt this way. ‘Asexual: a person who doesn’t experience sexual attraction.’Īnd just like that, she had a word that she could relate to. One search led to another, and soon she was reading about something called asexuality. Seven whole years later, aged 27, Naqshpa read the word ‘bisexuality’ in an article online. She went online to look for information a couple of times, but to no success. It bothered her that romantic relationships were seen as central to people’s lives, and that close friends and even siblings could ‘become secondary, when people started having romantic partners’. The feeling that she was somehow different persisted, and she wanted to figure out what made her so. Sure, she’d thought that some people were good-looking, but her feelings had never gone deeper than that. ‘I also realised then that I had never been attracted to anyone.’ ‘I was immediately shocked and disgusted,’ she recalls. But her friends assumed that she’d catch up to them eventually, and have a crush of her own someday.Īt the age of 16, Naqshpa accidentally read about sex in a children’s encyclopaedia. Meanwhile, they called Naqshpa a ‘kid’ because she didn’t feel that way about anyone. When Naqshpa* was a teenager, her friends swooned over Hrithik Roshan’s toned muscles and papered their walls with posters of Rahul Dravid. This article was originally published on Deep DivesĬover Image: Jasmine Dreyer, 2015.
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