Sex and Sanskar is a weekly column about the industry, experience and sociology of sex in India written by Ancilla L of Ancillary Kink Support. Ancilla is a sex-and-kink educator, erotic author, former sex-worker and columnist dedicated to exploring the politics and nuances of sexuality.
We were easing into it, his hands were around my throat and I was gazing into his eyes, when a loud, persistent banging on the door distracted us. The intruder was pounding so hard at the wood, it’s hard to imagine they weren’t hurting themselves.
“Tell the guy to leave,” he shouted, gritting his teeth, “I told you that you couldn’t have any men over.”
The aggrieved party was not my landlord as you may think, it wasn’t the warden of a hostel into which I had snuck a sexual partner, it was the boyfriend of my (college) roommate (who did not live there) and it’s true, when I had moved in, he had told me that I couldn’t have sex with people in that house, but I don’t exactly let random men tell me what to do in my house (unless, ironically, I’m having sex with them). I rented that place from the landlord, not from the boyfriend, I signed a lease, I paid a deposit, I kept up on maintenance, but a week later, when I moved out (of my eighth apartment in two years), it was because of the same reason as all the others: Someone had a problem that I had sex with people in my house and they were mad enough about it that they were willing to threaten, attack and evict me.
Welcome to India. This is a place where anyone—the people who raised you, the people who employ you, the people who educate you, the people who rent to you—can tell you whether you can or cannot fuck. Amongst the other issues faced by the youth of the country is also this one and the politics of privacy are complex. If you can even afford privacy (or your family could when you were growing up), privacy is still not merely a function of space, it’s either dispensed as a privilege or viewed as suspicious to even desire, because privacy only means one thing. It’s only used for one thing. When (and if) you leave your family home to move away (to study or work), the primary concern for lodging (particularly for women) is that they not be allowed out too late and men not be allowed in and a lot of the rental industry (not just hostels) is happy to accommodate this, to the point where it has become normal in our country to tell the people who live in your space, how they should live their lives. When you sign a lease, you get a list of rules, not to protect the property, but to protect whatever morsel of society’s dignity that has been entrusted to you, and I’m not sure how much that is changing.
Recently, I was speaking with a young girl who is currently applying to college and has just turned eighteen, all year she has been, excitedly, telling me about all the places she wants to go and the new things she wants to do, but now that we are here, at this moment, her parents no longer want her to go.
“They want I should go and live with my grandparents and go to college there,” she says to me, “Aunty, you know how it is right, until now they wanted me to study, get good marks, but now they see that this studying means living alone, having freedom and..private, relations, so they can’t take it and it’s a safer idea to make me live with my grandparents.”
I’m not sure how much is changing.
On the face of it, of course there is change, right? Yesterday, I interviewed a man who has set up (arguably) India’s first rent-a-dungeon, it’s called Nothingness. He’s leased two properties, stocked them up with kink-equipment (like a St. Andrews Cross, restraints hanging from the ceiling, a wall of impact implements) and is renting them out through the same channels as any other hotel/rental space and he tells me that in the six-months that he has been in business, the rooms have scarcely been empty. That’s awesome but that’s one of those stories, you know?
Goa Opens its First Sex-Toy store!
Foot Fetish Cruise Embarks on Its Maiden Journey in India!
Rent a Dungeon in New Delhi!
It’s fun, quirky, very-Vice and as is the case with all of the coverage of sex, it encourages the reader to “other” the subject of the story immediately by painting the entire thing as salacious. You may enjoy the story, but may be less amenable to your neighbour telling you they were at that cruise.
The owner of Nothingness, Arsalan Chisti (27), told me a less salacious aspect of the story.
“This guy just came out of nowhere while I sitting outside with some friends, he slapped me and told me next time he would kill me (for doing the work I do),” Arsalan explained to me, “The next day he came back with four guys to scare me, because I’m ruining the image of the neighbourhood.”
For me, the story of sex in India lies in the backlash, not the shiny windows up front. I don’t mean to discount any progress, it’s easier than ever for unmarried people to access rooms to rent for declaratively sexual reasons, OYO Rooms has attempted to make them more accessible by listing lower-priced spaces, and fast-growing organisations like Stay Uncle even represent their message of sex-positivity out loud and I appreciate and acknowledge that, but I also think it’s worth discussing that my 23-year old sister still cannot fuck her boyfriend at either of their (rented) homes, they still have to book a hotel in the city because of the landlord, neighbours and morally-motivated roommates. There may be more places than ever to safely-sex, but your home still isn’t one of them.
One of the aspects of that we fail to consider is that when you always have to do that much work and/or spend extra money to have sex, it turns sex into an incident. When you are unable to integrate sexuality and its expression into the normalcy of your every day life, sex becomes an event, always a big deal, and while that may sound benign, it means that you cannot recover from a frenzied relationship with gratification until you’re in a socially-sanctioned cohabitation and that stunts the sexual development of many people.
Particularly people who are queer or prone to fetishism, because even though, as the years have gone by it has become somewhat easier to access spaces to fuck for heterosexual couples, I am still terrified to take my girlfriend to those places because of the uncomfortable incidents that I, and other queer people have endured. I will always splurge on a more expensive space, in a fancy hotel, and only in big cities, when I am with my girlfriend, and that’s not really progress, you know? The truth is that access to sexual spaces is a lot easier for me now, but the thing that changed is not society, it’s that I got older and started to make more money. It happened in two steps, first I started being able to afford living in certain parts of big cities where you are truly allowed to be mostly invisible (and/or your neighbours are also “working professionals,” which is city-code for morally-loose, like you are) and then I started being able to afford to rent adequate space in those areas. Big cities sometimes convince you that there is no world outside of that and if there is, it’s exactly where you are, even though you moved there to get away from its oppression in the first place.
The bubble of privilege sometimes convinces you that there is more progress around you than is real, if I were to assess my life alone to tell if things have changed, I would say they have changed so much but what changed after I left college was that I got a well-paying job which came with the ability to rent privacy, it costs more than just renting space, but you can have it. However, freedom is not freedom if only those with enough money can buy it, and this kind of freedom, which really only enables you to hide your sexuality better, doesn’t even serve you the way you think.
The problem still resides in the fact that we wish to hide these things. Personally, I do all of my kink at home, and while I am not very loud as a sexual-individual, one of the primary aspects of BDSM is that it can get loud, and in the rental industry, that still remains the biggest issue.
“There are some kinds of play that we just don’t allow at our properties,” the founder of the Nothingness Dungeons, Arsalan, told me, “It cannot get loud, basically, sound should not leave this space and get to other people.”
To some degree, as civil respect goes, I understand, I certainly don’t want to be or want my neighbours to be so disruptive I cannot live my life, but a degree of noise from our surroundings is acceptable, especially in India, we are such a loud country. For instance, I know everything about the interpersonal issues of my neighbours and I wasn’t exactly trying to find out, but noise is such a big issue when it comes to sex and play in India. When I was younger and dating within the kink community, the primary factor that went into searching for makeshift dungeons was mitigating noise, and as a result, we often ended up in shady, back-alley resorts and condemned properties rented by thugs that were so far removed from civilisation, there would be no way to call for help even if you needed it. The need to not be “noisy” during sexual engagement is so pervasively enforced, I realised that while speaking with a former student about her life.
“My partner used to be so worried about me making noise when we were in hotels, they would hold my mouth closed with their hand,” she told me, “It’s so funny because now I have a fetish for that.”
I see how that could happen, but I’m not sure I see what is so funny about it. We’re a nation that is restricting natural sounds during sexual engagement to the point where the term for it is noise and fetishes have developed around it, where even if you go to a “couple-friendly,” sex-positive establishment to get laid, you cannot leave any evidence of what you have done. Within the kink-scene, this issue is even more prevalent.
“Spaces are okay to find these days,” Priyank (name changed on request), a top-identified man with multiple partners told me, “You can find lots of places that won’t question you or even ask for the girl’s ID, but you have to be really careful with noise. It’s not just (that) they will ask you to leave, but later the staff may make lewd comments. The company can say whatever they want on their Instagram but the people who run the space are still members of Indian society.”
And that’s it.
That’s the heart of the issue, isn’t it? Sexually liberated spaces tend still to be a sequestering, and if you go out into the “normal” world as a sexual creature, the boyfriend of your roommate can still tell you that you’re not allowed to fuck the people you want to fuck in your home. If you want to have sex freely, regularly and safely, you still have to be rich, married (probably both) and quiet. Or, you have to view attack, backlash and ridicule as part of the price, because it is.
Ancillary Kink Support 
Leave a comment