t's okay to masturbate -- sex lessons to unlearn | Uma Subramanian | Uma Subramanian | TEDxMACE

So I was on one of these training programs and it was a tea break and I was drinking my tea quietly in the corner of the room and I see this man, a grown man in his late 40s, and he walks up to me. nervous and nervous so he walks towards me and just stands in front of me so I felt like he wanted to say something but I wasn't able to find his voice. I knew he wanted to communicate, so I make him comfortable and begin. I start this conversation and I tell him there is something you would like to talk about then this man very reluctantly with almost a tremor in his voice in a very low tone says to me ma'am I

masturbate

and I am standing here in front of him looking at His face leaves me I gape and tell her it's

okay

and then continue ma'am.

I

masturbate

a lot. Sometimes I do it three or four times a day while looking at this grown man standing in front of me. He knew there was something that was fundamentally troubling Him, it was almost as if he had carried this question on his shoulders his entire life. I could see the length of time he had lived with this question and he really wanted to get an answer and asking me probably wasn't the most appropriate thing for him to do, but it was the closest thing to an appropriate scenario that happened in his life, so he asked me.

I asked if everything else is

okay

in your life and he felt confident and said yes, yes, everything else is okay. I'm married. I have children, I also have a loving family, but I masturbate a lot, is that okay? I looked at him and said yes, okay, okay. He was visibly relieved, he said thank you, returned to his chair and for the rest of my training day I watched him participate with confidence and commitment and this is not an isolated incident because in almost every training program we carry out we have seen adults Adults ask ourselves some of the most fundamental questions about sex and sexuality, is it okay to watch pornography?

I'm a man and I'm attracted to men, okay? And 99 percent of the time all they want to hear is that it's okay, isn't it crazy to think that an entire generation of adults in this country, my parents, your parents, and all the adults we see around us? People around them haven't been told that it's okay to explore your sex and sexuality safely and responsibly, and isn't it scary to think that this generation of adults has potentially lived? in ignorance, confusion, ambiguity, guilt and shame for their entire lives and these are the adults who are supposed to care for our children, who are supposed to raise them, who are supposed to teach them, decide that curriculum, develop policies for all young people, they basically decide the future of our future generations and some of them sit in really powerful chairs, so they sit in these powerful chairs and then they say: don't talk about sex either in the classrooms or in our textbooks neither in our movies nor in our homes nor in public and they say not to talk about sex and sexuality because no one talks to them and this is a strange paradox in a country where the population is 1.3 billion, of course we are having a lot of sex and It is only once we, as a society, talk about sex that horrible episodes of sexual violence against women and children come to light, and while the outrage against sexual violence is extremely pleasurable and a relief for many of us who work On this issue, some of the results we demand as a society are very naive. and medieval castrate the rapist hang them create sixteen year olds as adults if they commit heinous crimes imprison them kill them lock them up all our solutions, suggestions and investments to address the problem of sex, sexuality and sexual violence come from a fear-based approach where everything what we want to do is smear the perpetrator and we also use shame as a very powerful external force to put our young people in their place because we do not have their best interests in mind, we use sexual shame to harm them and unfortunately, as in a country , now we have gone beyond shame and have begun to punish our young people for expressing their sex and sexuality because, like dating 17-year-olds in this country, you cannot kiss, it is illegal and if they get caught, one I could go to prison, so I was recently in Mumbai and attended a conference where a high-ranking women's rights activist, Dr.

Meena Gopal, said something that stuck with me: she said that sex education is going to be the basis of change and when they say sexual education we have to understand that it has to be comprehensive sexual education, it does not mean that we teach young people about men. and women who have sex about how to have sex and what not to do when having sex and when not to have sex. Comprehensive sexuality education actually empowers our young people with the knowledge, skills, and values ​​that they basically need to be able to grow when they are young. and self-confident adults helps them develop emotionally mentally psychologically and basically encompasses all the emotions we go through when we experience relationships because when I say sexuality it goes far beyond sex, it's about what two people go through when they are in a relationship jealousy attraction confusion care concern responsibility all of this covers sexuality and we do not want to talk to our young people about this and we do not educate them even though this is the fundamental thing of who we are generations have passed without talking about this now I was also part of this generation.

I was 22 when the first time I was exposed to sex and sexuality was a full-day workshop taught by India's first female sexuality educator. None of us were even conceived and she started talking about sexual behavior and healthy sexual development among children and young people, so it was a Doin Mom session and we were in college and she pulled me out of one of her sessions and He asked me to sit on a chair, he asked me to close my eyes and told me: think about your wedding night and think about everything you could do, what is going to happen, what are your different thoughts about your wedding night now I was sitting in this chair and my mind was spinning my mind froze I didn't know what to think I didn't know where to stop and the closest I could get was I thought of a bed full of flowers and a heart of roses and probably a scene from the movie border where Sunil Shetty and his wife are having their first night.

I couldn't think and I could hear Miss Pam Turkey's voice in the background where she encourages me to explore my sexuality and think deeply about what the possibilities are and then I hear my classmates laughing in the background and I knew this was going to be a disaster After a few minutes she asked me to open my eyes and then she said, okay, could you tell us what you saw and I was turning again, what should I say to her, of course not. I was going to tell her about the heart of roses because I knew I was going to be interrupted for the rest of my time in college, so I told her I saw a bed full of flowers and then she demonstrated more and then I told her I saw my husband and To me she said, "Okay, what were you doing?" I was completely baffled by God.

I wasn't ready for this so I said we were talking, then she said what were you talking about and I sheepishly, innocently and stupidly told her. I asked her what her hobbies were and the reaction was like this, my whole class started laughing and, frankly, I don't remember what happened after that. Now the reality is that, as a 22-year-old young man, I knew what I had to say, I knew I had to say something about sex and sexuality I knew I had to talk about my intimate sexual experience with my husband but I didn't know how to see it I didn't know how To say it, I didn't know how to visualize it because I had no reference points and I imagine that most of us, most of our young people and children, feel the same, we have very weak reference points and, as a girl who was born and raised in a small suburb of Mumbai in a South Indian orthodox family, I was not even allowed to think about these things let alone do or experience it.

I remember the first time the movie "Murder" appeared on cable television. My sister and I literally watched it at my friend's house only to realize the cable guy had cut the guy off. love making scene in the movie, so we didn't have access to education, we didn't have access to resources and that's what our youth and children face even today, so what are we doing to our youth and children? our children? This over and over again in our training programs where we do this very interesting exercise where we take adults out of the audience and I tell them very simply you have to come and just name the parts of your body from head to toe, just name all the parts. parts. parts of your body in every training program we carry out adults will name everything, sometimes they name their intestines and their appendix, but they will never name their penis, their vagina, their buttocks, their anus and then you ask them why and you get everything kind of reasons about this body. the parts are private, these body parts are sexual organs and they are not supposed to be talked about out loud, we can't talk about it and then I asked them a simple question, so if my penis, my vagina, my breasts and my butters are private, does that mean the rest of my body is public and if these are the only organs that are sexual, that means I don't use the rest of my body for sex.

So what are we doing by sexualizing these body parts and confusing our children and young people and this? That's how we started to literally perpetrate the culture of silence and shame and the vicious cycle continues, so if we really have to change some of these things fundamentally, it's important that we start talking to adults about sex and sexuality first and let's start to address some of these issues that we have faced as children and young people because we are the ones who tell our children break the silence be confident tell us if you need something tell us if someone is abusing you and what we do when they break the silence we don't know how respond because imagine a police officer sitting in front of a rape victim and the victim says he inserted a rod in my vagina and this police officer shudders, who needs to be taught about sexuality and who needs to be sensitized, so it's about time For adults to take responsibility and start looking at this, then it's time for the same patriarchal mentalities that have ruled us and ruined us to take some responsibility and it's time for men and boys to start this change because if men don't start this change now, the notion of masculinity is poisoning the wealth that our men and boys drink from has become a toxic pool that actually affects our men and boys as much as our women and girls because we have forgotten to talk to our men and boys about consent, about limits, about relationships, but also about the possibility of abuse, in our experience we have seen that when men are victims of sexual violence, the guilt, the shame, the trauma are overwhelming because in somewhere masculinity tells you that you are powerful and that you can never be abused, and if you are abused, you can never seek help and this is problematic and of course there is a complete lack of representation of people who do not fall into this heteronormative framework because We, as a society, do not identify anything that is beyond a man and a woman and a husband and wife. relationship, anything external is deviant and problematic, we must also begin to treat our children and young people as sexual beings because they have sexual feelings and they experience sexuality and express it, it is normal and it is healthy, so it is time for us, as adults, parents as peers talk to them about healthy sexual behavior and we talk to them we don't ask schools to do it we don't ask NGOs to do it we talk there is no right time there is no right age it is when the child or a young person is ready now I want everyone to imagine a young girl from my marginalized community, a minority religion, a backward region of the country, she is disabled and she is a lesbian, ask yourself: can this young girl fall freely through life like Would you and I do it?

Can she express herself, be confident in her sexuality and still be accepted in this society? If the answer is yes, that will be the day when we can truly say that India is a developed nation, thank you.