What do you long for in life?
I’ve always been a ‘lover girl’, a term that is used to refer to a hopeless romantic. Looking back on my first crush, I can remember the feeling so vividly. It was like seeing the world anew. I was about seven, and before then, I had never felt such strong feelings towards anything or anyone. It wasn’t one of those love-at-first-sight type situations, but more a case of missing what was right in front of my eyes. The object of my affection was simply reading out loud during French class, and suddenly, their voice was all I could hear. Everything went quiet for a moment, from the snickering of classmates at the back of the class to the teacher’s interjections. My universe was at a standstill, marvelling at someone I had known for three years, yet now it felt like I was seeing them for the first time. I wanted to shout that something was happening, and didn’t know what it was. But from that moment on, my interactions with this person were moments that stayed frozen in time. Nothing came out of the crush. I eventually moved schools and forgot all about the seven- or eight-year-old who once made my heart skip a beat. What remained, though, was the memory of that feeling I had.
“You are just infatuated, and these feelings you are having are going to waste your time and destroy your lives if you give in,” a teacher once said during class while addressing a love note that had found its way to her.
Her words were not foreign to me. They resonated with what I had heard from home and even in church. It echoed the lyrics from the iconic song by Taylor Swift, ‘Cardigan ’- "when you are young, they assume you know nothing". The belief that children and young people do not have a clear understanding of their emotions, and therefore their feelings are not considered valid. Infatuation is often treated as a weakness to be conquered, and from an early age, we are taught by adults not to trust our feelings because they are not considered real. Yet despite these teachings, I couldn't shake the feelings I had. They often came over me in ways that made it hard for me to deny their existence. Perhaps my feelings were not complex or well-thought-out, but they were genuine and deserved to be treated as such.
Conversations about feelings were often intertwined with those on desire. Desire was considered a dirty word, along with everything that came with it, such as pleasure. We were prescribed what we were allowed to want, from friendships to careers and clothing. Society, through adults, dictated everything that was expected to matter to us. Failure to adhere to these terms would result in being some form of outcast and on a path to failure. I learnt early that the things we yearn for need to be validated by extrinsic sources for them to be acceptable. You don't just go with what you feel, and you certainly are not allowed to want things outside the perimeter of what you have been socialised to think are acceptable. I started to question whether I wanted things because I thought that was what I was expected to want.
How do you know who you are when the world is constantly telling you who you should be?
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Desire is a beautiful force, yet it can also be confusing and destabilising. What we want tells us a lot about who we are, but, ironically, oftentimes our needs are skewed by external factors. Through the anchors of religion, respectability, and patriarchy, among others. Desire is filtered to determine who is allowed to want and who gets to be denied that wanting. This results in a profound double standard that results in some people's desires being invalidated or considered deviant.
Queerness and pleasure are a lens through which we can see the double standards of desire and desirability. Mainly based on societal anchors like patriarchy, we can see how desire is not as objective as it's made to sound. These anchors create rules and hierarchies of who gets to experience pleasure and who gets to desire or be desirable. The result of this is male-centred heteronormativity. The needs of heterosexual men are put above all others. They get to have a monopoly on desire and pleasure. They also get to determine who and what is considered desirable. Beauty standards and criteria of what is desirable are made by a fragmented group, and the rest of society is expected to adhere to them.
Understanding the politics around queerness and pleasure shows us how skewed desire is when it is approached through systemic, oppressive lenses. Often, order and morality are used to justify denying certain groups pleasure to maintain power dynamics across the social stratosphere. The reality is that desire and pleasure play a significant role in autonomy. Autonomy is about the power dynamics of the self. Controlling people's access and perspective on desire and pleasure seeps into people's autonomy and whether or not they are worthy of making choices about their bodies freely.
Examining desire from a political perspective, it is not a surprise that heterosexual male-centred desire is deemed the norm. It mirrors societal norms of patriarchy and other oppressive...