Sexuality...Sensitivity...

CPI leader Atul Kumar Anjan's comment on Sunny Leone's condom ad interestingly juxtaposes sexuality and sensitivity!

I would like to know how a condom ad 'develops' sexuality in our underdeveloped country and how that 'developed' Miss sexuality then kills Mr. sensitivity.

Is sexuality inherently obscene for a discourse of social moralism? As Alenka Zupancic will say, obscenity is tied up with comedy as a discursive effect and the speech by comrade Anjan is comedy incarnate!

Kavita Krishnan writes:

"The Left needs to reconnect with its own emancipatory legacy, which pioneered a critique of the institution of family and sought to look at human sexual and relationships without the lens of bourgeois patriarchal moralism and double standards. Engels, who tore apart the hypocritical facade of ‘family values’ and exposed the subordination of women that hid behind such ‘values’, would turn in his grave to hear this pompous phrase invoked by his followers, two centuries after his death!

In my own experience as a Left activist over the past couple of decades, I have witnessed the evolution and maturing of the Indian political Left’s understanding and articulation on gender and sexuality: including a shift in its position on the death penalty and LGBT rights and its analysis and critique of gendered restrictions and regulations for women in the family in terms of forms of social reproduction in globalised India.

In recent times, Left student and women’s groups have given slogans of women’s freedom a mass social dimension (in the movement following the December 16th gangrape, for instance) and protested powerfully against moral policing. But, in my observation, there are still considerable sections of Left ranks, cadres and even leaders, who embrace the Left theoretical critique of patriarchy merely superficially, and continue to hold on to the ‘apasanskriti’ paradigm, expressed in terms of moral disgust at sexual permissiveness and women’s sexuality."