Dr. Pragati Singh is building a community where it's OK to say no to sex. As she set out to discover why she had difficulty feeling sexual attraction, Delhi-based Dr. Pragati Singh chanced upon the term “asexuality.” The online research answered most questions about her own identity, but it also told her that India did not have a community for asexuals — despite strong discourse around gender and other sexual identities. So Singh created a Facebook page, Indian Aces, in 2014 and a flood of messages soon arrived. “I particularly remember a woman in her mid-20s who was on the verge of suicide,” recalls Singh, 32. “It was a classic Indian scenario: Her family was forcing her to get married. She, meanwhile, was traumatized by the idea of any kind of intercourse or intimacy. There was nowhere she could go, nobody she could talk to.” |