What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about love
Transcript of Paromita Vohra’s keynote speech at Governing Intimacies Research Meeting (India International Centre, Sept 2019)
“Thank you for that nice introduction. So I’m going to talk a little bit about this as a kind of a work in progress because I’m going to talk a bit about things that I’m learning while working on Agents of Ishq. Because the site in some senses is a co-created kind of space. It was not imagined in that way, I thought it will be a project that we could do for a while and it would end but it has grown. And it keeps changing depending on how people respond to it and how people contribute to it. But I think it also changes the way I think about politics and conversations and aesthetics. So it is a discussion about love and the idea of love and what it can possibly tell us about thinking politically and maybe even responding to some of the questions about politics and violence that we continuously discuss. So, some of you know Agents of Ishq. I’m going to slightly bore you for five minutes to explain what it is to people who don’t know about it.
Agents of Ishq is a website that we started in 2015. And the impetus for starting it was really that there was a lot of discussion about sex, sexual violence, etc, after the gang rape in Delhi, and we felt that all of that conversation was actually kind of negative in that it made sex a space of anxiety because we always discussed it in conjunction with violence. And it was kind of creating this terror in young women about the public space. And we wanted to.. it was also a parallel by-discussion that was happening because the government had banned sex education in many states. But even that conversation we felt was actually creating a lot of marginalization of class and caste in the way that there was kind of a woke male figure being created, who didn’t have these retrograde ideas.We saw like a lot of comedy sketches on YouTube channels like All India Bakchod, which made fun of this provincial male who taught in these ways. And so this provincial male or a male of another caste was often the threat to womanhood, in a sense. And you also saw many, many young women internalizing this story and discussion and seeing it as a way of being liberated in the conversation about sex.
And so we thought that.. I mean, of course, I write two columns, so I could’ve spent many columns complaining about this, which I did. But I thought that maybe it’s always nicer to try and create an optional way of talking about this in an optional space. And so Agents of Ishq was created as a kind of a sex education project which would put out information and create honest conversations about sex, but keep them in an Indian space in an Indian context and also be inclusive as much as possible. So it wasn’t intended as a kind of we will only talk about sex and love in certain kinds of framework. Like you have to be queer or you have to be polyamorous. Not to set up those hierarchies, but to try to make it as inclusive a space as possible. And while discussing how it would be framed and what the aesthetics would be and what the language would be, we had this kind of idea that we wouldn’t use the language of war, which was always about polarities and binaries; what we would use is the language of love (please don’t laugh) which would be about pleasure and possibility and curiosity and seduction, and that would be the sort of essence of how everything on Agents of Ishq was going to be, to make it very friendly and to invite co-creation. And also because we did feel that this sense of possibility and fertility and this idea of reframing things comes from a “loving conversation” about sex. Nowadays, I don’t allow anybody in my vicinity to use the word “loving conversation” because it has begun to irritate me although I used to use it all the time before.
But anyway, so that’s how Agents of Ishq was created. And it has podcasts, videos, writing, infographics, everything. And over time, many people began to contribute their own narratives, so it actually began to grow in different ways. I think like a big shift came in some conversations when we decided to do a piece about dating as a trans person. And the person we asked to do the piece kept turning in pieces which I would reject, and the difficulty of that piece was, really, how would you talk about this experience as a human experience though you happen to be trans and not make it into a kind of category, like all trans people experience dating in this fashion, and it was a struggle, it was a struggle for the writer. And perhaps for us, too, we didn’t have a form for it.And I think it was a very instructive struggle, because in working on that piece, and finally, like, I think it took six months to write it, and to do interviews and then draw from those interviews a kind of universal human experience of love, anxiety, uncertainty, optimism, whatever people felt, to intertwine it with the experience of being trans or to the position of being trans rather, and, but say that it is part of love. I mean, like people experience love, somehow commonly, but also differently and to create art along with it to be very beautiful. But boiling it down to these kinds of ideas, right. Love is supposed to be the simplest thing, but it isn’t.
And subsequently, when we began to do pieces, which were, you know, like, what does the aging body feel. This problem of categories where you didn’t want to represent people in a fixed way actually really start opening up the conversation, like how do you create drawings of older bodies, which are not just this is an old person’s body, it took us a very long time. And this is my favorite drawing on Agents of Ishq because to me, it’s always the image of a woman lost in thought, not only the image of an older woman.Maybe about a year and a half or two down the line, we did a feedback survey. We had various kinds of responses but there was an overwhelming kind of response where people liked talking about love. I mean, they liked the fact that we were talking about sex and it was open.
“I love reading about Indian people being sexual. My parents raised me conservatively, they taught me that sex is okay but only in the context of heterosexual marriage. Now I’m an adult who is unmarried, but with a partner, I love sex, especially with my partner. But in general, I am sex positive. And I love reading about Indians who do not fit the narrow standard that I thought I had to conform to based on my upbringing, thank you AOI (Agents of Ishq).”
Another person: “AOI always makes me feel part of something bigger than myself but it also loops you back into your context.”
“I especially like the commitment to beauty and romance, unabashed and without pretense of sophistication. The most important thing in AOI for me, there’s a lot of conditioning around how we talk about our crushes, the shame we should feel. And this conditioning is something that we can all relate to.I feel comfortable being open here and sharing my experience. I think a place like Agents of Ishq makes possible the diversity of love and its performances, different kinds of romantic expressions and practices which might otherwise seem either taboo or exotic in a place like AOI carry an easy-going, charming etc…”
I mean, I think what was interesting is that people were talking about how it’s the place where you could talk about love, whereas the common understanding is that we can easily talk about love but we cannot talk about sex everywhere. And I think there’s something that we did begin to take note of as more and more people to try to understand what it is that people were saying.
So before I tell you how we changed things, I’m going to tell you that horrible thing — “a personal anecdote” about a friend who scolded me. So, you know, I’m prone to a magnificent tactic, which is another way of saying that I can really irritate my friends by crying for many, many, many months after being heartbroken. And, you know, so on one such occasion, my friend who had been sympathetically listening to me over time, finally started to scold me and said: Now you’ve got to stop it. You’re continuously fixating on x thing and y thing and, you know, you do it at work as well. And I’m telling you, it’s your pattern. You’re right, you’re right. And I was like, I was like that character in When Harry Met Sallywho could never stop being involved with married men and kept saying “I’m gonna leave him, I’m going to leave him.” So I said, “yes, yes, it is my pattern. I’m gonna stop the pattern. And I completely agreed with my friend, let me say. But at the same time, I found myself very disturbed by the conversation, like the only word I can use what I was feeling was ‘disturbed’. And, you know, I wasn’t 22, so I shouldn’t have felt disturbed. I’d spent a lot of money and time in therapy already so I already knew my patterns. But the thing is that.. so then I did the other thing that people do, like you know..all these emotional practices we cultivate, so I was like I’ll reflect on this for two days and see if I’m still disturbed. But after two days, I was even more disturbed. So then I then I called another friend, as it goes, and I discussed it with her and she listened and she said, “well, I think what you’re really saying is that you don’t want the story to be only a story about power, you want it also to be a story about love, and you’re somehow trying to reclaim the love from the heartbreak. And as soon as she said it, I felt my disturbance fall away. And in essence, what she was saying I think is really that we all want to tell the story of our lives not as victims but as people who went through a journey, and somehow these narratives about patterns and overcoming them, and they seem very productivity-oriented, right, that there is a way in which I can, there’s a solution as soon as I identify the pattern, as soon as I find the glitch in the algorithm I can fix. It’s like a bug. But actually, you know, where else we find patterns is in aesthetics. So what if we thought of our patterns also as our aesthetics as who we are, in some ways, and learn something from them? What would then happen? What would that really tell us about the world, right? And so, I began to think about this a lot. Also, in terms of what we do on Agents of Ishq.
So you know, I think this conversation about patterns and self-improvement is something that we find in the public discussion about love and sex and violence all the time, that we are supposed to somehow remake ourselves as these liberated men and women who have consensual relationships of a certain kind. And I am going to..because I didn’t know this was going to be a public talk, I am going to say all these things which I wouldn’t normally say in public, but I do think it’s the kind of a sanitizing discourse that we need to be very watchful of. Because it seems to be too reasonable, too rational, too technological almost, and its underpinnings of productivity always worry me.. that somehow we have to deploy all human emotion in service of a certain woke politics and maybe that somehow diminishes the possibilities of our lives. Um, so during the discussion about rejection that I was part of, a conversation came up in which somebody said, you know, it wasn’t a real relationship that they were having. I mean, he responded angrily to her when they were just talking on WhatsApp.And that sort of kept revolving in my mind is what does it really mean? a real relationship? What does that mean? Is it marriage that’s a real relationship? Is it one of those like filmy declarations “I love you, I love you forever. Will you be my boyfriend/ my girlfriend/ my part-time lover?” Is it phone sex? Is it friends with benefits? Is it a one nightstand? Are these things real relationships or not real relationships? And so I think we all know that what I’m saying is that when we talk about real relationships, we’re not talking about reality. We’re talking about hierarchy, right? And there’s a hierarchy in which some relationships are worth validating and others are not. Some relationships can be pushed into invisibility, and therefore they do not need to be treated with love, or seen as love. So I think there’s something really great about the fact that this conference is about intimacy because it offers us a new way of talking about relationships, as love, not “loving”, which was my previous usage. But I think, really, like thinking about the emotions and thinking about what these different feelings are that we have with many different people.
The thing is that when we invisibilize all of these different kinds of huge spectrum of emotional intimacies that we have with people, emotional and sexual intimacies, we create these binaries, of yes and no, of important and not important, and that also starts to plague our discussion about consent. So consent becomes like enthusiastic consent, it’s either yes or no. So then the entire range of sexual encounters and ways in which people interact with each other also becomes not only indiscipline, but stigmatized. And actually I think that the really difficult thing about it is that it brings in a lot of shame and hesitation in people. So one of the questions we asked on Instagram on Agents of Ishq was this question “what makes you hesitate to ask for love?” and the responses were very interesting.
“At this age, everyone around me wants easy sex, it is difficult to say that I want something beyond. Being independent despite being a student intimidates guys. The thought that it means that you aren’t independent enough..it makes me feel desperate and clingy and all the things that self-confident persons should be the lack of understanding in others that love may or may not be sex, that affection can be sexual, etc.”
But I mean.. there were many, there were dozens of responses of this type. But really what we began to see was that there was a kind of shame about the emotions. There was a difficulty in finding respect for the different emotional experiences that people were having, that somehow we felt we needed to bring back. So you know, I’m going to skip forward.. to the idea that we began to look on Agents of Ishq and maybe put out questions and invite a kind of engagement, which looks at this notion of the “personal” differently.We find ourselves frequently discussing this binary of public and private, but I’m suggesting that we think of the personal as a place where the public and private are continuously intermixing to produce new narratives for ourselves the thing that we call patterns, but which is actually our aesthetic or poetic selves. It’s never fixed, it’s always changing. And, you know, I won’t go into a long discussion, but again, this idea that public space is the space in which our liberation will take place, that the politics of visibility will actually give us liberation is something that I also want to question. I wanted to quote from this essay: “If a science of subjectivity is possible, then such a science might help us to live. Like psychoanalysis, the humanities and especially literature privilege the richness of the individual life and regard reality as populated by subjects rather than objects. Like psychoanalysis, the humanities are often framed as in decline, dwarfed by the technocratic bloodlessness of a scientistic age. There is a parallel pursuit for the two projects, both are driven by the same instinct that the stories we tell ourselves will affect how we live with ourselves (And I would argue with other people).
So I’d like to read excerpts from two pieces on Agents of Ishq, which I think really show us the way in which this other discussion is very important, this discussion about love and feelings. To be truly sex positive, I think we need to step back from sexis an article by Ishan on Agents of Ishq. “I’ve been told that I’m probably an asexual. At one point, I tried making a profile on a dating app for ace folks and was bombarded with a bunch of options to identify against, 12 and all, everything from aromantic to asexual to litho-romantic to asexual. I thanked heavens for option 13- confused, and moved on.”
This is a piece by somebody called Debasmita Das: “I guess more than anything else I was struggling with being sexual, not homosexual.”She talks about how she never had any issues coming out, but rather difficulties in the political discourse with actually expressing herself as a person. “My personal would always be political, so I could I took advantage of it and made a portfolio out of it. I was building a reputation as that queerperson as that queerartist among my friends, as that relentlessly different In truth, just as a person, I had no clue how to navigate my love and sex life. I had placed all my value in making my identity useful in changing the world, in articulating a politics, and I always prioritize it over or perhaps even interchanged it with my actual personal life. I was out and proud. But inside I found myself unexpectedly stumbling upon shame more and more. That shame, though was not about being queer. Even the most work of people around me would never be caught dead admitting to actively looking for intimacy, to admit to being lonely was to let down the course.”I think we can all accept that the term “woke” and the behavior woke should now be put to sleep. Right? So that we can all have more dreams.
I want to say that, you know, I mean, a lot of this discussion..what would this kind of a framework allow us to do? I want to talk a little bit about how we talk about violence for example, today on Agents of Ishq, we asked the question When was the first time you took an emergency contraceptive and why?The answers were shocking because the amount of non-consensual activity was truly terrifying. Young woman after young woman was basically saying something like this — the guy refused to wear a condom and he stealthed me. He penetrated me without asking me. He told me you can just take a pill afterwards. It was troubling, tt was really troubling. But I feel all of these were not uniform responses. Somebody then sent us a message on Instagram saying, “should we intervene?” This is very troubling. Now I feel it is troubling but should we intervene? Because I think actually the people who were responding were not all feeling awful. I mean, they were feeling awful about the incident, but they were not still feelingawful. There are, in fact..some of their emojis were like eyeroll or like I know better now the stupidest thing I ever did, I don’t know why I agreed. And I want to ask, can we allow people to decide their narrative and their relationship to a violent moment themselves? But is it necessary for us to enjoin the meaning of their experience upon them, so that they may never move forward from it but always be condemned to be in that moment of hurt. Whereas actually the poetic conversation about one’s own journeys, I mean, just as much as my desire to acknowledge the experience of love, even when there had been an experience of loss of power was really the same desire, wasn’t it? It was to say that I’m not nothing just because somebody didn’t love me anymore. And I think that’s an important thing for us to intertwine somewhere. Another thing that I think it would help us to do is to stop using the fucking phrase “toxic masculinity” forever and ever because I really don’t think that that phrase helps us anymore. I mean, obviously, it has a theoretical meaning. obviously it was useful at a certain time, but it has now become a kind of shorthand for condemnation. And it has also begun to equate all masculinity with toxic masculinity and I think we saw this very interestingly, I’m sorry that everybody will not know this reference fully, but in the discussion around a film called Kabir Singhis a massive hit. Like it’s one of the biggest hits in recent times, I had absolutely no intention of going to see it because I thought it would be full of toxic masculinity until I saw until I saw a review saying horrible and it is so “problematic”, another favorite word of people, and it is full of toxic masculinity. And I’m like, oh my god, I better go and see this film. And when I went to see the film, I have to say that you know, I mean, of course I will get killed for this. I actually thought it was a good film. And I thought it was a good film not because it was devoid of sexism or patriarchy or even some misogyny, but because it was actually a film completely about the experience of love. It was a text about obsessive love. And you could read it a number of ways. And as a person given to magnificent heartbreak, I actually deeply identified with the main character rights because identity with characters is.. there’s no rule that says as a woman I can’t identify with Devdas just because my name is Paro, I can identify with whoever I want to.So, I think that, you know, I think that in some sense when I see what a massive hit something like that is, it actually speaks to the idea that we don’t have a space to discuss. These disallowed emotions of obsession. Is obsession of violent emotion? It is. So, even the discussion on violence conflates all violence as one. And there is no understand that there could be a mutual roughness and anyway Jaya will talk about this much better than me tomorrow. But you know, the ways in which people engage with each other or feel violence and the fact that maybe all intimacy brings a little bit of violence with it, and we all process that knowledge and experience very, very differently.. I think is something that can only be understood with humanity and a different approach than the political frameworks that we are currently bringing to these experiences. Everybody hates me, right, already? That is why I have a music video to show you. So you won’t hate me fully right? Filmmakers are very clever. But there’s another thing that happens, I feel there’s another thing that happens when we, because we are talking about sex, I think more, and in the conversation about sex, we’re trying to expand the meanings of sex, which is great. But we never just have this parallel discussion about love to expand meanings of love, we all assume that everybody means the same thing.
So, I think that that the idea that so you know.. recently I was on a panel with somebody from Tinder and she said that in one of the studies that Tinder has done, 79% men said that they want love — or romance — I forget. And I said, what does that mean? What do they mean when they’re saying love? But there was actually no answer to that. So the study had just assumed that everybody means the same thing when they’re saying love. And I think the interesting thing that happens when you do that, when you don’t talk about different loves, is one of course you invisibilize all those other relationships that we were speaking about, but you also make a quick connection between love and marriage. And I think you’ll see this most interestingly in the debate around queer rights, that first we start with a slogan love is love. And next thing we talk about marriage rights, which is alright, but actually, it’s like a lost opportunity for questioning why marriage should be the only ratification method or for that matter law should be the only method to ratify relationships, right? I mean, that queerness of how we look at life is..it’s a potent moment for discussing that, and we may lose it if we make these continuous connections between love and marriage. So in fact, I think it’s terrible that we keep having the conversation about how we want to separate love and sex. Because whether you separate love and sex or sex and love, you’re actually not. You’re doing the same thing, right. In the end, you talk more about sex and about love or more about love and about sex. Instead of talking about both in different ways. You really need to talk about separating love and sex from marriage, but we never really get to do that enough. So I think another thing I mean this business of thinking about different forms of relationship.. we (Agents of Ishq) did a film we made a music video drawn from or responding to the research that a feminist organization called Nirantar had done on gender-based violence, where they had found that sexuality was not a form of violence, it was often a cause of violence. But the interesting conversation in the research was that very often some people perceived a violence where a violence was not intended. What should one do, for example, was my husband asked me for a blow job? Does he think I’m that kind of woman? How could he be so disgusting or violent? So now, this was a clear difference in perspectives, which was experienced as violence, therefore, is it violent or is it not violent becomes a complicated thing, right?And then in other conversations we had alongside what we found was that people who had been in relationships that were violent, and I’m going back to my pathetic anecdote here, felt even more ashamed of themselves because of the discourse we are bringing to violence and intimacy and felt that they had been bad to be allowed themselves to be in a violent relationship. And as if there had been nothing but shame and violence in that. So actually the question before us became, how should we talk about people who have experienced violence in an intimate relationship without stripping them off every sense of agency as a human being, right? So, I want to show you this video also to make you like me again.
You know, when I was reading out earlier Debasmita’s piece or Ishan’s piece, I think what those pieces also said to me is that here are people who are searching for a way to talk about their lives that political language is not allowing them to do. And at the same time, it is bringing up the question of who is worth loving, not worth loving. These are questions that continuously plague us. We think about it in terms of queerness but also, of course, in terms of disability and so many other things. And recently, there was a very, very beautiful essay. I’ll read it out to you, it’s by Abhishek Anika called The occasional incompleteness of being is on Medium. And he’s a writer, researcher and also disabled person and he talks about the difficulty of finding a relationship and how he thinks about like, when will I have sex again, like am I gonna tell somebody that I wear a diaper, will she accept that etc. Then he goes on to talk about also yearning for love. And he says, “In my defense, I would like to say I love myself, but probably that is going too far. The first time I proposed to a girl as a 20 year old she told me she liked me, but she didn’t love me. I think I agree with her. I like myself. The thought of not being loved doesn’t haunt me anymore. It bothers my romantic heart sometimes, but there are so many people who can’t find love. So I go out, have fun with friends, read books, write poetry, and enjoy long platonic conversations. It’s just a few minutes every day, probably around midnight when my body hurts, it laments everything that eludes it, every touch every sensation, and only then it is reminded of its incompleteness. Incomplete, yearning, longing. It’s like a melancholic song that never ends.” I posted this essay on Facebook and I just want to read some of the comments that arose because I think they point us to also new ways that we can think of these things.
So Meena Seshu, who is an activist I tremendously admire.. she works with sex workers, said “I always wonder is it me or sex? Or is it a longing that is never actually addressed in our worlds, a longing to belong?” So I said that sense of belonging has longing in it, I feel it’s an important thing. We never talk about it whatever talked about all the things that I talked about here and she said agree this need to feel another is one’s own being shared intimacy and craving. And Nandita C, a child psychologist said with reference..because I said that the Indian term apnapan (oneness)..and this category is important as an idea of what kind of relationships we have with people. And she said with reference to an apnapan and the related word mamata (motherly love), I was intrigued to discover that the etymolgy of the word includes both selfless love and love for the self. I just love the way these concepts I’m playing with in Indian languages built into it is also the hidden lesson that is not just selfish, but also they’re supposed to be selfish, the loved ones have offspring. They feel like these conversations these other categories that already exist in the culture, which seemed to have gotten drowned out by the conversations about gender, about law, about appropriate relationships can actually be rediscovered and redeployed. to mirror our actual experiences. It’s not like these experiences have gone away but somehow we don’t have the languages for them, and are more alone and more violent and more divided and polarized than ever. And I think it tremendously limits our political understanding, actually, in all spheres. And you know, I, again, there is no time to go into it. But there have been so many amazing conversations Also, sometimes I say with Ratnaboli Ray of Anjali (NGO), who works with women with mental illness and when she talks about how the craving for touch or skin hunger..when she just touched a woman to I think to shake her hand, and she said, I felt shurshuri,this word which means like a shivering pleasantness which you feel when somebody caresses you.. that chher charor teasing is not always something seen as negative by somebody because it may be the only time that they’re appreciated. And I just don’t understand how we can negate that understanding. Just because it does not come from our experience of upper-caste women who wish be to be protected from certain harassment, right? I mean, although that’s also valid, our desire to be to be protected from that. But what like yaari, dosti, kaleje ka tukra, premi, pyara, I think already they tell us 100 types of interests that we’re actually not using for our political understandings or to create a different conversation. So yes, if our sound is fixed, I will end with the video..
