The circle of solutions

My favourite things about marketing folks is how they genuinely believe they are saving the world, one slogan at a time

My favourite things about marketing folks is how they genuinely believe they are saving the world, one slogan at a time.

So it is that there has come along from Argentina a new condom called the 'consent' condom. How does it work? It requires four hands to open and then, too, only if all four corners are pressed down at the same time. Now, it's a little circular — the idea, not the condom I mean. If your co-ordination is that fluid and effortless or your engagement that convivial, chances are that your sexual relationship is already full of consent, mutual pleasure, self-respect and all those other yummy things. When con-sensuality, or co-sensuality, as I prefer to think of it, are so present in relationships, there is no need to have a four-cornered condom pack really, except as a sex toy [in fact, the manufacturers of the condom are a sex toy company]. In other words, it is consent that makes the condom work, not the other way round.

But the company is promoting the condom as something that will end sexual assault. We can put it down to human hopefulness, or human denial, depending upon your kind gaze, that we constantly believe that complex issues such as violent injustice and social inequality can be solved with some kind of bright-eyed, clickable technology. This solutionism locates the problem outside us and allows us to think we can get some nice karmic brownie points without changing ourselves, our attitudes, our privileges and our general bad behaviour. The phrase 'no means no' has become something of an accessory to this crime. You pin it on to signal that you care about consent and choice, without really changing the dense tangle of behaviour, in which you are somehow oblivious to consent. A lot of this conversation about consent has circled around the question of sexual assault.

But, the fact remains that consent and its link to pleasure are rooted in the idea of mutuality — and the low percentage of condom use [14 per cent in Argentina, less than 6 per cent in India] is a great indicator of how far we are from mutuality, whether it is of pleasure, safety or reproductive choice. Because one reason given by men for not using condoms is reduced pleasure, and the centralising of masculine pleasure somehow makes it alright to put the onus of contraception on women's bodies, via indiscriminate use of emergency contraceptives. An optional slogan might suggest foreplay more than four hands is the need of the hour.

The US media has periodically been writing about the question of how fewer people are having sex — partly in response to the declarations of the incel (or involuntary celibacy) movement, in which conservative men feel feminism has deprived them of automatic access to sex through women's dependence. In India, dating apps struggle to get women to sign up. Sexual shame and social hesitations around dating, (irrespective of gender) aside, some part of this reflects how women, more aware of their own desires and needs, would rather go without relationships than be stuck in the doublespeak of design solutions.

Outwardly, dating apps may seem to acknowledge choice for both people, but in the end, interactions are human and it will take more than four hands to end this gender deadlock.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com

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