“This hole is for after marriage,” a participant was told about the vagina in a sex-education class. What followed was a synchronized harrowing gasp, uttered by at least 20 other girls in a quaint city café in Lokhandwala. Kriti Kulshrestha says that this is one of many bizarre stories she has heard at the meet-ups for her project Oh My Hrithik (OMH).
Kriti co-founded OMH along with five other third-year-mass-communication-students, namely Vaishali Manek, Kevika Singla, Suparna Dutta and Mansi Jain. The initiative is an attempt to dissipate taboos and stigma associated with female self-pleasure and masturbation. In addition to curating user-generated-content on their Instagram page, they hold sessions where participants are encouraged to share their experiences, stories, and fantasies, thus creating an open non-judgemental space for women.
Talking about OMH, Kriti says, “We are not well equipped to give lectures or have workshops; neither are we experts in the subject. This is just a step that we have taken to clear our doubts, share our stories, and know how many girls are going through the same things.” The project caters primarily to girls between the ages of 16 to 25, and taps into the anxieties, confusion, and doubts that women often have at the age when sexual desires begin to take full bloom. It can perhaps be best highlighted when a participant at the same session shared, “I was so afraid of kissing because till ninth grade; I thought women get pregnant by kissing.”
To connect with a larger audience, Kriti and the others have had to add quirks to their project. The biggest one lies in their name — Oh My Hrithik. “When you are masturbating and having an orgasm, you say ‘Oh My God’, but we could not use God for the obvious reasons. So we went for Hrithik Roshan because he is actually considered as a Greek God, and he is very hot,” quips Kriti. The project, which has been active since March with sessions held in Miranda House, Delhi University, Jaipur, and Mumbai, has even got the support of Bollywood actress Radhika Apte. The actress shared a video talking about her first fantasy on their Instagram profile.
In a country like India, the actualisation of female desires takes a step back under the pressures of patriarchy and society’s obsession with morality. Questioning one’s character and the self-infliction of guilt becomes common. “Masturbation is an act which is a very relaxing thing, and it’s not supposed to give you guilt. But there is research that shows that girls, after indulging in the act, go through anxiety. They judge themselves, they find that they are immoral, and they do that to themselves. Other people are also there to bash them, and this is not right. An act which actually relaxes you and makes you anxiety free and stress-free, should not come back to anxiety and guilt,” says Kriti before adding that one of OMH’s main goals is to dispel this feeling of shame.
