Navami K week 4

Week 4 – Reading - Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality by Gayle S. Rubin

All throughout my life, the topic of sexuality has never been discussed with me or introduced to me formally until I entered high school. In high school, there were friends, at the end of the day who introduced this topic to me, I had no idea it existed up until then. This is what Gayle Rubin tries to talk about in her article. She says that sexuality as a topic is considered very unimportant when placed next to topics like war, disease, poverty, racism, famine, etc. She also says that Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the religious disputes of earlier centuries. There is a lot of weight placed on such a phenomenon. 

The author further points out that the realm of sexuality has its own politics, what she means by this is that there is a lot of factors that affect sexuality like inequalities, mode of oppression etc that are seen with a political context. There are even periods in history where sex was politicized to a large extent. 

There are a lot of things that we aren’t told as children, especially pertaining to the Indian context, e have never formally received sex education. Even so, the idea of masturbation is clearly considered an unhealthy practice and historically, any premature thought on sex was considered to impair the child – termed as sexual precocity.

In the 1950s things took a different turn, where people started to focus on the concept of ‘sex offender’ rather than masturbation or prostitution. This ‘sex offender’ was demonized and rightfully so, but things went downhill when there was a lot of hype on this particular term. 

It then moved down to the realm of homosexuals and homophobics. The idea of sexual liberty was not present and is still not present in most countries today. Even grown-ups are told to be heterosexuals to protect their identity in society. There was a lot of right-wing opposition to sex education, homosexuality, pornography, abortion and pre-marital, but the thing is, these things did not really matter to anyone else other than the individual, this is why sexuality is politicized.