When consumerism meets sexual pleasure
Mridula Sharma
Last year, I participated in an annual tradition of Secret Santa. The gift exchange group of which I was a part hosted a WhatsApp group chat. A link to an Excel spreadsheet allowed us to enter our interests and gift preferences. We used the group to share updates, pictures, and our reactions to our presents. My Secret Santa sent me a book, a novelty cat-shaped ring, and most notably, a sex toy.
I received my sex toy on December 16th, a date that residents in urban India are unlikely to forget anytime soon, owing to the gang-rape and torture of a young woman on the same date in 2012 by five adult men and a juvenile on a moving bus in Delhi - the city in which I was born, brought up, and presented with my Secret Santa sex toy present.
The gang-rape triggered nationwide protests in 2012, shortly making the outrage international. A serious dialogue on sexual violence and women’s safety developed in response, though its efficacy over the years has dissipated.
To receive a present celebrating my ownership of my body and my orgasms on the very same date on which another woman’s body was violated was, at best, morally awkward. I reflected on the origins of my unease, wondering if I was genuinely perplexed owing to my moral reservations, or if the political incorrectness of receiving such a present had offended my neoliberal sensitivities.
Orgasms are important, especially when they are claimed by women. This is not only because women’s sexual pleasure has historically been ignored, but also because ownership of an orgasm gives women the very sexual independence they have lacked, owing to the stigma associated with masturbation.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that masturbation is by default a radical praxis. But masturbation does help individuals claim their own pleasure without depending on anyone else. It allows women to explore their own sexuality outside the parameters of normative cultures of heteronormative peno-vaginal intercourse and gain a sense of bodily autonomy. In a world where emergent dialogues normalising intercourse have made ‘virginity’ a taboo, masturbation is a pathway to pleasure, a pathway unaffected by obsolete markers of body count.
But an overemphasis on individual liberation can lead to disregard of the collective. A vocabulary of ‘individual freedom’ ignores the many ways in which freedom is a compromise for survival for the majority of people.
In occupied Kashmir, for instance, many are coerced to conform and compromise on their demands for liberation simply to avoid getting targeted and killed; workers labouring for fourteen hours a day are similarly obliged to sacrifice their personal freedom to continue earning their livelihood. An investigation into the lived realities of people making everyday negotiations to survive renders individual freedom a meaningless concept, but there are some advantages to its categorisation, limited though they may be.
Masturbation may not materialise social liberation from pervasive gender inequality and violence, but it can enable women to seek pleasure without needing the intervention of a sexual partner. That’s why I still endorse masturbation, for I believe in the legitimacy of its emancipatory potential. This acknowledgement doesn't mean that our claim to private pleasure can ignore the realities of sexual violence that people belonging to marginalised social groups face in both private and public spheres.
Receiving my Secret Santa present on December 16th was an uneasy actuality I couldn’t change. The discomfort I experienced is precisely what I want to explore, at least partially. Unfortunately, the gang-rape on the 16th of December was not an isolated incident that transformed the social landscape in India and across the world. The pervasiveness of sexual violence is, more often than not, unacknowledged. In fact, cases of sexual violence perpetrated against women from marginalised social backgrounds have historically been neglected.
Art courtesy of Ella Byworth | @ellabyworth | ellabyworth.com
The mass rape of women in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora by the Indian military in 1991 didn’t provoke national outrage or motivate timely legal intervention owing to the impunity granted by the Indian state to its military forces. The rape of hundreds of indigenous women, carried out in the name of Salwa Judum’s efforts to ‘neutralise’ Naxalism between 2005 and 2011 similarly confirms how sexual violence is dismissed when the survivors are women who are perceived as being ‘socially disposable,’ due to their caste identity.
Whose experiences do we discard when we choose to remember select instances of sexual violation? Which date can we preserve in our memory when a young girl is raped by over sixty men for four months or when elderly women are made the targets of sexual abuse?
My unease at receiving a sex toy for Christmas stemmed from a position of urban privilege, where I could acknowledge and be disgusted by the landscape of sexual violence in Delhi, but simultaneously remain ignorant of the people whose realities hadn’t been recognised or represented in mainstream discourse.
Additionally, the sex toy I received was delivered by Amazon, a company that refuses to be anything but apathetic to its workers despite the scores of profit it makes. After all, Jeff Bezos is still among the richest men on Earth, next only to Elon Musk.
Shortly after the WhatsApp group had been formed, I had sent a message encouraging everyone to avoid purchasing gifts on Amazon. The response to my suggestion was positive, and alternative options were discussed. When I then received all three of my presents wrapped in the blood of Amazon’s plastic wrap, I was admittedly frustrated. Not only had I received a sex toy on the 16th of December in Delhi, it was delivered by Amazon, a platform that was supposed to be mutually avoided in gift exchange.
It’s worth noting that gift exchange is common in festivals such as Diwali, but the overwhelming popularity of Secret Santa in the West has conveniently made the tradition popular among millennials and postmillennials across cultures.
In effect, Indians such as myself have joined digital spaces, connected with acquaintances or strangers, purchased commodities from Amazon, and exchanged presents wrapped in plastic. This ‘counterculture’ of young folks who look down on gift-giving in Diwali but participate in the Secret Santa tradition in Christmas has confused the transactional exchange of commodities across borders with ‘pleasure.’
And yet, a simple boycott of Amazon, which is what I had enthusiastically suggested, is not always feasible. I found my experience of locating alternatives to Amazon to send a present to someone in Nagpur surprisingly hard. I was supposed to send pre-loved books, which turned out to be exceptionally difficult to arrange in the absence of platforms such as Amazon. Seeking alternatives to dominant modes of transaction and exchange at an individual capacity is not easy, if at all possible.
I later learned that my Secret Santa was a graduate student facing personal issues whilst pursuing doctoral research. Is it practically reasonable to expect people around us, with personal lives and problems, to boycott monopolistic platforms like Amazon instead of demanding structural changes in the existing economic order?
Such boycott attempts, despite their potential for change, can immediately exclude individuals who can barely afford these commodities, let alone traverse the complex web of the Internet to locate alternatives. To what extent does individual effort count? And, if it doesn’t, can we escape all responsibility whatsoever as we choose to wait for collective action to change the world?
If claiming my sexual autonomy on the 16th of December with a toy wrapped in Amazon packaging and sent by a person I met only because of my access to a classist social capital can ignite such unease, our everyday thoughts and actions are equally reflective of wider cultural malaise.
Our lives are, then, microcosmic comments on the systems of inequality that surround us and exert uneven influence on grounds of social markers of our identity, such as gender, class, caste, race, and citizenship. More importantly, spaces of leisure and pleasure, which are frequently viewed as apolitical, are more politicised than we think they are.