Why does talking about pleasure set off the Darr-E-Disco in everyone’s hearts? As humans, we all want pleasure, don’t we? What’s wrong with that? But pleasure is also shrouded by shame, secrecy, awkwardness and guilt - seen either as frivolous or the opposite of morality! What is the complex history behind our attitudes towards pleasure in India? And what is it about pleasure that makes it so hard to incorporate it into policy/curriculum/law-making and even sex education?
Where does our fear of pleasure come from? What does it prevent us from seeing in our approaches to research, education, activism, data collection, etc? Pleasure ke darr ke aage... kya hai?
Who counts bodies? Not just serial killers! Just kidding. But sacchh kahe toh, the internet, the government, the market, etc are always gathering data on our bodies and minds. Bodies get counted in voter lists, the census, medical research, our Google searches and the list goes on and on.
But what do these ideas of “averages” and “medians” fail to grasp in understanding bodies and society? What counts as data on the body, and what about the data our bodies collect - memories of pleasure and pain and history. And what can we do when handling or collecting big data?
When we look through the chasma/lens of pleasure, what can we see? How would data change, how would politics change, how would movements change? What new truths would it reveal about ourselves and the world? What new choices, directions and interventions would it suggest for happier, healthier lives?
Can taking pleasure into account - make people wear condoms more often? Challenge rigid gender norms? Create safer spaces? Upturn Maslow’s triangle and change the world? At #LSD, we got you evidences and experiences of how pleasure can do all this and more all across the world - be it Kenya, Amreeka or Bundelkhand!
Jisse dhoondta hoon main har kahin
Jo kabhi mili mujhe hai nahin
Woh Data hai kahaaaaan?
Why is there so little information that can help us in our love/sex lives? Or on love and sex at all (kisne kaha your sex-life isn’t a thesis-worthy topic pfft)? Why don’t we have sex-education in schools? Is the information about sex given to young people anywhere close to the questions they actually have in their hearts and what’s going on in their life?
Maybe it’s the lack of useful data, research, information or even charcha that makes us feel that we are the only ones when we struggle with this part of our life. At LSD, we tried to understand what are the questions that get unanswered and the needs that go unmet when we think of young people’s lives without thinking of their pleasures and desires.
When they said atmanirbhar bharat, we didn’t know it meant - you’re on your own, find your own data that’s useful to you! One way communities are marginalised is by not gathering any data on their lives because it’s considered...marginal. How to break this vicious circle? When communities go unheard, even through data, what do they do? They generate their own research, they make their own interventions, they change the world!
When research is designed with the ‘average’ person in mind, which data gets ignored (and who gets ignored in the process)? Where do communities on the edges - queer, trans, bahujan, people with disabilities get data that reflects their life?
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