What's your visual vocabulary for intimacy?
The content of this letter can test the boundaries of propriety for some readers as it talks about sex, porn, and other threads that twist with these ancient preoccupations. So, please consider yourself forewarned.
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“What do you want to watch?” I asked my mother, scrolling over different boxes.
“Woh waala,” she said, choosing ‘Mayanagari: City of Dreams’ a series by Nagesh Kukunoor.
“Is mein na…” she started, and I stopped her by shouting loudly and holding my hands over my ears.
My mom has this habit of telling you what will happen in the story - either she watches trailers or is informed by her friendly neighbourhood spoiler club - I still haven’t figured out the source. And she will say things like, arre is mein her husband only murders her, as if the main plot reveal is the first thing you need to know before watching a thriller.
And so, we started to watch Mayanagari. It was her first OTT series. She was appalled at the number of graphic sex scenes being shown, and at one point said, “You see, mujhe kaam hai,” which is code for, this is totally not suited to my sensibility. She did this at a point when a woman strips to her bra and chaddi in front of a man, who is equally gobsmacked at the turn of events.
Let me rewind a bit. There’s a Man. He has a job. He has a conscience. He has a wife and an ailing father. He cannot muster the courage to ask for a raise. He wears dull creme shirts and fading brown pants, has combed hair, and is one of those characters who seems deceptively nondescript, soon to be revealed that he is either a serial killer or moves to Lakshadweep, paints, and participates in the local revolt against the governor.
Now, what happens in Mayanagari (yes, spoiler ahead) is that he goes to see a soft porn movie in the afternoon, and spies a woman, by herself watching the movie. She is wrapped in a saree, and is eating popcorn, enjoying the show. Later, she confronts him and says that she spotted him ogling at her, and he asks, how did she know. And she says women have a radar to survive in this misogynist world.
Who is she? Where does she come from? Does she have a job where she works with Tally and worries about Quickbooks? Did she worry about chemistry tests in school? Does she like sarees that drape easily or prefer the challenge of starchy cotton ones? Does she hum while boiling eggs? What song she hums to know she has washed her hands for a minute?
No one knows. More importantly, nor does the Man, who you know has a wife and an ailing father. He cannot muster the courage to ask for a raise. He wears dull creme shirts and fading brown pants, combover, and works in an office in the docks and has a co-worker who likes telling him lewd anecdotes.
She is the ‘Mystery Woman’, not what I call her, but what the subtitles helpfully did. Mystery woman: Find a place and call me.
Man: Gobsmacked.
Man then promptly goes and uses money meant for father’s ilaaj and gets a tiny kholi. He sweeps, swabs, dusts out a mattress, and lights up agarbattis to inaugurate his sex nest. He waits. She turns up. He is gobsmacked.
She strips to her bra and chaddis, this lacy affair. He is gobsmacked.
Then they do it, and he is gobsmacked. He says ‘If this is sex, what have I been doing with my wife?’
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I realised watching this scene play out that it takes its visual and narrative cues from mainstream porn. Strangers meet, and there’s sex. Who is she, this ‘mystery woman’ and why is the Indian Man not interested in finding out more — that is not relevant, as the focus is squarely on the act.
I also realised that the reason why so much of OTT content has explicit sexual content in it because they are competing not only with other OTT content, but also porn. Or to add a more fine point to it, they are competing for the visual attention of viewers, whose visual vocabulary on intimacy is drawn from porn. And I realised this reading Amiya Srinivasan’s book, ‘Right to Sex’.
One of the earlier essays in the book (disclosure: I am halfway through the book, so I can only talk of those early essays now) ‘Talking to my students about porn’ tells you what young male students in the UK aged between fourteen and eighteen said about porn:
You learn how to have sex, you’re learning new moves.
You get to see the way it’s done.
…. you pick up different things, things you don’t really know about
She says how porn is not being used to get off, but more like an instruction manual. And the current generation is one whose first experience of the sexual act invariably is mediated by a screen, and one of the mainstream porn sites. In the absence of meaningful sex education, what we have is porn as the substitute teacher, who is pumping billions of dollars to spread a visual vocabulary that governs one of our most intimate acts. And so, I was thinking about this question — what’s your visual vocabulary for intimacy?
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There was an Indian show called ‘Lust stories’, and once you title it that way, you have to then think about a visual vocabulary for it too. The short answer — they didn’t come up with one. Paromita Vohra wrote about it with usual tongue firmly in a cheek daubed with rose and rouge - “Art, like lust, asks you to risk yourself to be a little, if not completely, naked. Lust Stories refuses to play with any confidence, joy or even cerebral thrill and so never creates a filmic rendition of the lustful, desirous or desirable’.
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/paromita-vohra/lust-to-dust/articleshow/64688760.cms
Incidentally, a conference called ‘Love, sex, and data' is going on organised by Agents of Ishq -
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In Mayanagari, over the course of many meetings (we assume, for we don’t see any of it), the Mystery Woman instructs the Indian Man to slow down, bring play to the fore. And then one day, there comes a point when she says, ‘Wow, I actually orgasmed.’ Think of that moment in Kill Bill when Kiddo breaks the wall and Pai Mei swishes his beard in approval. It felt like subversion — a discovery of pleasure and new paths to intimacy. Unfortunately, you don’t dwell on that; that point almost disappears with her disbelieving laugh.
Yes, there is feminist porn, and as Amiya Srinivasan says in her book, it is all behind a paywall (for obvious reasons — ethical work means fair wages too). And so, what’s available easily is what speaks to a different vocabulary of intimacy. There’s Cindy Gallop who started ‘Make love not porn’ as a response to ubiquitous availability of hardcore porn. And yet, these are but pebbles skittering across an endless stream of mainstream content — a small eddy here and there, but the flow seems unchallenged.