This entry is to talk about the background and provide a personal lens into my experiences and why I feel so strongly about this topic.
I am a bicurious, Indian, kink-identifying woman, and this is probably my postionality and lens through which I see the world, and it is obviously different for everyone and we all try to make it better from our own perspectives and in our own methods.
In my life as a teen and a tween and through my journey of self-exploration I have faced many instances where I have been shamed for having different interests in almost different realms, come to think of it now it was not very evident to me, but I did know something was wrong and in my own capacity I have fought against it, which gives me a personal connection to this project.
As a teen, I always felt my desires in BDSM were sinful and wrong and that exploring my desires was going against everything my family (and I ) believed in, but I took it one step at a time, I tried to understand what do these desires mean? Is it something considered “normal”? At this point I was in high school and was introduced to fifty shades of grey, which seemed like a good starting point to understand my desires and preferences, and at this point I felt it was a normal thing to do, but what I did not foresee entering this realm is that I would feel “different” from my peers who are not into this realm, or be shamed by the ones in the community that I’m doing it wrong or that I am mentally unstable to have such preferences at a young age, this might have been done subtlely or very directly in-person and online, which prevented me from exploring these preferences until I had a partner at 18 who was open to similar explorations, and this empowered me and made me feel seen and confident, and most importantly that it is safe and okay to have preferences and that age is just a number.
At this point in my life, I was also pursuing my undergraduate studies in leather goods design, and it was the time of lockdown so I had quite some time for experimentation on my hands, and I tried to put in my creativity and skill in developing products for myself and I found immense joy and power in doing this, and with due research realised it is a fast-growing space and field and thus I remember trying to convince my professors to let me take fetish and sexuality related themes in my projects, and with every project I understood the need to be more inclusive and also due to the constant pushing and nagging of my professors, I felt like I was trying to push the boundaries not just for me, but also for the students to study thereon, but I also thought it was not right to try and control the themes and areas I wanted to work in, and thought that pursuing studies abroad would give me much more freedom, flexibility and exposure, but I was proven wrong and rejected from so many schools, simply because of what I assume was bias and unwillingness to let one student pursue a particular target market, is this shaming in the education sector? Do we have to let our students keep their preferences to their private life, if their creativity and skill can enable others to explore their sexuality and be more confident and unapologetic?