This script of sexuality demands radical edits

‘Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away,’ Catherine MacKinnon, feminist legal scholar, laid it bare.

- Nishtha Gautam

The task before us is not to repress sexuality but to disentangle it from domination.

(HT ARCHIVE)

Yet, the idea that sexual relations often reproduce structural inequality seems too theoretical, too radical to many. We still do not want to talk about this. Unless it's in a flippant, titillating manner. Or performed for views and likes on social media. Can we, however, spare a thought for the utter breakdown of equality in desire, often leading to its absence?

And while we are at it, we can collectively thank pornography for the same. Contemporary pornography is pedagogical. It teaches, supplies choreography, tone, and hierarchy. It sets the “mood”. The sexual encounter becomes everything other than communion. Ina media biome brimming with pornography, many young (and not so young) men have learnt to associate arousal not with reciprocity but with dominance, spectacle, and humiliation. This is nothing new though.