৮ comments

1. 

   bloodycivillian - ৩১ ডিসেম্বর ২০০৯ (১:১৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

   এধরনের শ্রেণিবিভাগের ভিত্তি কি? সমর্থন কোন সমাজতাত্ত্বিকের বা ভাষাবিদের? নাকি আপনার একান্ত ব্যক্তিগত মত?

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2. 

   বিপ্লব রহমান - ২ জানুয়ারি ২০১০ (৭:৫৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

   লেখাটি খুব ভালো। এটি সত্যিই ভেবে দেখার বিষয়। আপনাকে সাধুবাদ জানাই গুরুতর এ বিষয়ে লিখে, ভাবনাটিকে উস্কে দেয়ার জন্য।

   তাহলে অপযৌনতা অবযৌনতার হাত থেকেই বা আমরা কিভাবে সুস্থ যৌনতার কথা বলে বাঁচব? মনে হয় দুক্ষেত্রেই এই কাঁচাপয়সার ভয়ংকর বলয়ের বিরুদ্ধে শক্ত অবস্থান নিতে ব্যর্থ জাতীয় ও আন্তর্জাতিক প্রশাসনই এর জন্য দায়ী। জানি না এ দুষ্টচক্র থেকে ভাগ্যাহত অগণিত মানুষ, বিশেষত নারী ও শিশুরা কখনো রেহাই পাবে কিনা।

   ঠিক। পুঁজির রাহুগ্রাস থেকে বুঝি অসহায় মানুষের কোনো মুক্তি নেই। আর বিজ্ঞাপনেও যৌনতার কী রমরমা ব্যবসা! কয়েক বছর আগেও ‘ভার্জিন’ নামে একটি কোমল পানীয় বাংলাদেশের বাজারে এক চেটিয়া চলেছে; পত্রিকার প্রথম পাতায় স্কুল বালিকার উত্তেজক ছবি দিয়ে তারা ছেপেছে পানীয়টির বিজ্ঞাপন। আর এখন টিভি খুললেই ব্রিটল বিস্কুট বা বাংলা লিংক মোবাইল কোম্পানীর বিজ্ঞাপনে যে যৌন উত্তেজক নাচ দেখা যায়, তা ‘চোলি ক্যা পিছে ক্যা হ্যায়’র কাট-পিস বলে ভুল হতেই পারে!

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3. 

   তানবীরা - ৪ জানুয়ারি ২০১০ (১:২৯ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   জানি না এ দুষ্টচক্র থেকে ভাগ্যাহত অগণিত মানুষ, বিশেষত নারী ও শিশুরা কখনো রেহাই পাবে কিনা।
   এই লাইনটি ছুঁয়ে গেলো।

   ভালো লাগলো লেখাটি।

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4. 

   বিনয়ভূষণ ধর - ৬ জানুয়ারি ২০১০ (৬:৩২ অপরাহ্ণ)

   মাসুদ ভাই!!! প্রথমে আপনাকে ধন্যবাদ জানাই এধরনের একটি বিষয় নিয়ে বিশ্লেষনধর্মী লেখা লেখার জন্যে…আপনি, আমি এবং আমরা সবাই একটি বিষয়ের সাথে আশা করি পুরোপুরি একমত যে নিষিদ্ধ কোনকিছুর প্রতি আমাদের পৃথিবীর সব মানুষের একধরনের সহজাত আগ্রহ কাজ করে…সেখানে যৌনতা, মাদকদ্রব্য নিয়ে তো পৃথিবী সৃষ্টির পর থেকে মানুষের সীমাহীন আগ্রহ কাজ করে আসছে…আর এটার পুরো ফায়দা নিচ্ছে তথাকথিত বেনিয়ার জাত…আমার মনে হয় এই বিষয়গুলো এতো সহজে পৃথিবী থেকে দূর হবেনা…
   জানি না এ দুষ্টচক্র থেকে ভাগ্যাহত অগণিত মানুষ, বিশেষত নারী ও শিশুরা কখনো রেহাই পাবে কিনা।
   —আপনার এই শেষ লাইনটি আসলেই একেবারে হৃদয় ছুঁয়ে গেছে…

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5. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ সেপ্টেম্বর ২০১৪ (৫:৫২ অপরাহ্ণ)

   কমিউনিস্টদের সমস্যা বহুবিধ – যৌনতা নিয়েও এরা বকবকায়িত

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) September 25, 2014

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6. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১১:৪৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   Li Yinhe 李银河

   Often described as ‘China’s first sexologist’, Li Yinhe 李银河 is a sociologist who is widely admired as a pioneer of Gender Studies in mainland China. She is also a public intellectual well known for defending the rights of women, gays, lesbians and transgendered people.

   As an undergraduate, Li Yinhe studied history at Shanxi University from 1974 to 1977. After a brief stint as an editor at Guangming Daily, she was assigned to a research position in the newly-founded Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), where she pursued research on marriage and the family. It was during this time that she began to learn about sociology, which was excluded from Chinese universities in 1953 and was not restored as an academic discipline until the late 1970s. From 1982 to 1988, Li lived in the US where she studied at the University of Pittsburgh. Her husband Wang Xiaobo 王小波 (later a noted writer in his own right), whom she married in 1980, joined her in 1984 on a scholarship in East Asian Studies. When she returned to China, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow under the acclaimed sociologist Fei Xiaotong 费孝通.

   Li and Wang co-authored Their World: a Study of Homosexuality in China 他们的世界——中国男同性恋群落透视 (Hong Kong: Cosmos Press 1992 and Shanxi People’s Publishing House 1993). The book was widely praised as a ground-breaking study of a marginalized subculture in China. During the 1990s, Li continued her research into Chinese sexuality in the context of family and institutional norms. Her two best known publications of this period are Love and Sex for Chinese Women 中国女性的感情与性 and The Sub-Culture of Homosexuality 同性恋亚文化, both of which were published in 1998 by China Today Press 今日中国出版社 in Beijing. Li has expressed frustration over the difficulty of pursuing her research. In the preface to her 1997 book, The Subculture of Sadomasochism 虐恋亚文化, a survey of Western scholarship on sadomasochistic practices and their literary representation, she lamented:

   Our level of understanding of sex is equivalent to that of the Western world before the 1960s… . To a majority of Chinese, Western academic discourse [on this topic] must seem completely alien, something hailing from a different planet.

   Li was an avid reader of the writings of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In 2001, she published Foucault and Sex 福柯与性, a study of the institutionalisation of sex and the development of sexual politics, based largely on the first volume of Foucault’s three-volume study of the history of sexuality in the West. It brought her many new fans among graduate students in China interested in postmodern theory.

   Li has also been a vocal advocate for minority sexual practices, calling for their protection under Chinese law as an integral part of citizens’ rights. The causes she has supported range from the rights of homosexuals in the 1990s to the decriminalisation of pornography and ‘group licentiousness’ 聚众淫乱 in the 2000s. She has made annual proposals to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) urging for the legalisation of gay marriage.

   Her activism and commentary did not always sit well with her employer, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). In a 2007 blog post, Li wrote that the CASS leadership was:

   put under pressure by ‘people who are not ordinary’ and has asked me to shut up. In fact, the bosses do not regard what I talk about as politically sensitive, and the pressure was not of a political nature… . Yet they seem unable to withstand social disapproval for remarks I made in a setting that is not politically sensitive… . So I’ve decided for the time being (perhaps forever) that I will:

   1. accept as few media interviews as possible; and,
   2. publish as few sex-related articles as possible.

   Three years later she broke her silence. When, in 2010, Ma Yaohai 马尧海, formerly an assistant professor at the Nanjing Institute of Technology, stood trial on charges of having engaged in ‘group licentiousness’ by hosting an online swingers group and was sentenced to three and a half years, Li publicised his plight and argued in his defense. Similarly, in 2011, when Cheng Jianjun 成建军, a government official in Kunming, was sentenced to three and a-half years for the same offense, Li was a vocal critic of the verdict, arguing in several online commentaries that the law against ‘group licentiousness’ was obsolete and unconstitutional and should be abolished. She compared it to the law against ‘hooliganism’ 流氓罪, which encompassed offences from disruption of public order to showing disrespect for women, making the definition of a criminal act highly vulnerable to interpretation. The law against hooliganism was amended in 1997.

   Li has advanced a similar argument against the criminalisation of pornography. In 2006, when Chen Hui 陈辉, a webmaster for three porn websites, was convicted of ‘disseminating obscene materials’ and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment, Li criticised the court ruling and called for abolition of the crime. She argued that when compared to the law in other countries and considering the guarantees in China’s own constitution, the selective prosecution of the law in China reflected a country that ‘still has not emerged from the Middle Ages’.

   In 2012, Li retired from CASS. She published her last research monograph in 2009. Titled The Women of Houcun 后村的女人们, it was a field study of gender inequality in a southern town. She maintains a visible public presence on her blog and microblog. She also devotes much of her time to educating her adopted son and describes her present lifestyle as ‘Thoreau + microblogging’ 梭罗加微博. She has recently started writing fiction about transgressive sexual practices, including a blog-published SM-themed short story, but has rejected comparisons to her late husband’s famous writings.

   Additional links

   Li Yinhe’s microblog and blog

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7. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৩:৩০ অপরাহ্ণ)

   Sexual performance: Theatre works tackle internet porn

   How is the wide availability of internet pornography changing society? Several new stage works in the UK and US are exploring this question – and the results are thought-provoking, writes Holly Williams.

   For theatre to be relevant, it can’t ignore technological developments and their impact on our lives. Yet staging technology is famously hard to do well – people staring at computer screens is theatrically inert, but go too hard on the techno-wizardry and you risk no longer feeling theatrical at all.

   The problem, you might imagine, would only be compounded when dealing with one of the most vexed aspects of online culture: internet porn. And yet this hot topic for media debate is also finding its way onto theatre stages – not literally, I hasten to add. Playwrights are finding dramatically inventive ways to ask questions about how easily accessible hard-core pornography might be influencing our society.

   And if you’re thinking this is a niche concern for late-night feminist fringe shows – well, you’d only be partly correct. There have been breakout hits from Edinburgh in recent years on online sex and sexualisation: consider Bryony Kimmings’ Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, her quest to change the world after being horrified by what her nine-year-old niece could see on the internet, or Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, about a young woman whose porn habit helps ruin her relationship.

   This week the topic arrives at no lesser institution than London’s National Theatre where physical-theatre company Rash Dash, in collaboration with acclaimed young playwright Alice Birch, present We Want You to Watch. This energetic blast of a show sees two young women – Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen– take on internet porn. They interrogate a young man who watches violent videos, try to get the Queen to ban it and even enlist a mega-hacker to turn off the internet. It’s a provocation, not an actual suggestion, in a ballsy, funny, angry show that places the debate itself centre stage. They are not, they yell, anti-sex – they just think porn could be better than the degrading, misogynistic stuff that is currently a mere mouse-click away.

   “We did a [work-in-progress] version about two years ago that was much more domestic, more about the impact of porn on relationships, but that didn’t feel quite right,” explains Birch. “We knew we wanted to make something political, and it felt positive to find a form that owned that and was very unapologetic. So the idea of two women taking on the world of porn felt interesting – and ridiculous!”

   ‘Relentless and overwhelming’

   Their aim is to start the debate, to disrupt the idea that watching violent sexual acts is just a standard entertainment in 2015. Even that is “a lot to ask people – to think and to challenge their own opinion,” says Birch pragmatically.

   The audience sees no actual pornography, but We Want You to Watch does include graphic descriptions. The performers at one point try to express in dance what it feels like to watch porn – a dead-eyed pneumatic thrusting and banging ensues. They wanted the show to be “relentless and overwhelming, a bit of a bombardment”, says Birch – because that was what researching and watching porn felt like to them. We Want You To Watch certainly uses the uniquely live and in-yer-face potential of theatre to make an audience sit up and listen to its arguments.

   The power of the human body onstage is, of course, something that separates theatre from TV, film, photography – and online porn. It’s comparatively easy to distance yourself from a small image on a smartphone screen; harder not to be unsettled by a person in front of you. This queasy power is harnessed in Jennifer Haley’s hit play The Nether, which opened in LA in 2013, before enjoying runs in London’s West End and off-Broadway in New York this spring. West Coasters can catch it early next year when it’s staged at the San Francisco Playhouse.

   A chilling tale, the play is set in the near-future where the internet has become a total virtual reality. Plug in and visit The Hideaway, a pseudo-Victorian mansion where visitors have sex with, then violently murder, little girls, all without consequence. The Nether asks difficult questions about the degree of responsibility we must take for our online actions – but it also puts the audience in an uncomfortable position of spectatorship: they may be playing digital creations, but the little actors are flesh-and-blood. Audiences can’t help but be steered to ask: if it looks real, and feels real, maybe the moral responsibility is real?

   Using technology onstage isn’t just about peering into a grim future – it can also update classics to our present moment. So it was for Anya Reiss’ take on Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening last year: when re-writing his play about sexually confused and suicidal teenagers (which was accused of being pornographic even in 1891), she couldn’t exactly ignore the internet. The production used Skype, Facebook and YouTube, with troubled teens swapping videos of S&M porn.

   Speaking to Reiss as the show opened, the 22-year-old told me that she had never actually watched porn before she embarked on this project. As research goes, it was pretty eye-opening: “It was not what I thought! .” She says she was terrified by it, “never mind if I was 14.”

   Not suitable for children

   Adults being taken aback by what youngsters are watching is a common theme, and another new play tackling online porn actually has its basis in real life. Lizi Patch found herself caught up in an international media storm two years ago, after she wrote on her blog about her 11-year-old son’s traumatic experience of being shown hard-core pornography on a phone by kids at school.

   Her play about the issue, Punching the Sky, received public funding in the UK for development; she’s hoping another round will see it touring 10 regional theatres across the country. It uses animation to create the character of the young boy, while the mother is played by an actor – as is the character of the internet. This allowed Patch – like Rash Dash – to take the internet on, and to give voice to the debates she’s been having about online porn and how we protect children from it.

   “As a writer and director, I’m anti-censorship. My son, he said himself if I hadn’t watched it at home I would have gone to my friend’s house and watched it,” Patch acknowledges. There are no easy solutions, but she hopes that a play will encourage discussion. “It’s about keeping that conversation going. The bottom line for me is education: I know it’s difficult to talk about pornography in a school environment… but there will have to be seismic shift.”

   And theatre might just help provide it. “Young people who’ve seen Punching the Sky have been able to talk about the issues through the characters in the play, rather than as themselves. It means those conversations can be a bit more far-reaching.” These theatre makers want you to watch – but they also want you to think.

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8. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ মে ২০১৮ (৬:১৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

   অখিলকাম অখিলকামী

   pansexual* pansexuality এর বাংলা কেউ করেছে কিনা জানা নেই, আমি করছি ।।অখিলকামী।। ও ।।অখিলকাম।। | * of, relating to, or characterized by sexual desire or attraction that is not limited to people of a particular gender identity or sexual orientation

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) May 23, 2018

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