Divya Dureja, an LGBT activist, who was recently accused of raping another woman, had in a 2018 Ted Talk claimed that she is incapable of having penetrative sex.
At the TEDx event at Kamala Nehru College, Delhi, Divya Dureja in 2018 had claimed that she is 25 and had never had sex, but she did feel the intimacy. She speaks about her physical intimacy she had with other women and men. “But penetration hurts. What you call making love leads to tears and cuts, agony and pain that make me afraid of finding myself in the touch of another, in the words of lyrics, in the jokes of comedian, in the narrative of a romcom,” she says in a dramatic poetry recital.
She goes on to claim that she has a medical condition called ‘vaginismus’ which makes her having penetrative sex very painful. As per WebMD, “Vaginismus is when the muscles of a woman’s vagina squeeze or spasm when something is entering it, like a tampon or a penis. It can range from mildly uncomfortable to quite painful.”
“I am 25 and I will never have sex. I will never understand what it feels to be consumed in the flesh of another. But we can make our own interactive map. I can let you know how I experience love and I will do my best to please you such. This love, they call universal, has its own regional dialects, its tweaks and tests, not all fit in, in the category of passing this litmus test,” she says.
She claims that ‘almost sex’ is her ‘complete sex’. “I am 25 and I will never understand the written in books or in the context of a smile by a flirtatious babe asking me what I enjoy about sex. How did this three-letter word become to laden with intent that when someone says fear of missing out under an event I hear my insides rumble and rise it is seen for popular culture and I crumble inside just a little. Dent by dent,” she says as she is enveloped by another woman draped in red piece of cloth with the red cloth she has draped herself with.
Rising from inside the red drape, Dureja claims that there will not be any ultimate act. “There can’t be if you decide to be with me. I can kiss you till my lips begin to fade into your skin. I can hold you till my hand prints itself onto your carbon skins. I can give you all I have but I can’t give you that ultimate act, they call sex,” she claimed.
Dureja wrote the above poem as an ode to a condition Vaginismus she claims to have. She explains she discovered her condition when she had begun to explore her body and sexuality in her college when she had sex with her partner. She claimed that when she confided that she found penetrative sex painful, she was told how this was normal and hence she did not know of her condition all the way till 2016.
She claims she has been performing her ‘poem’ on Vaginismus on various platforms.
Divya Dureja accused of raping a woman who claimed she wanted to ‘plant a tree’
Earlier this week, a yoga trainer took to Instagram to accuse Dureja of raping her under pretext of performing Shamanic rituals. “Divya asked me to come to her room to help her with her hair. Under the false pretext of helping me with my chronicle back pain, she drugged me and locked me in her room for 6 hours, where she forcefully performed a so-called shamanic ritual, claiming we were meant since our past lives to be reunited, and that this ritual was what we needed to be together forever,” the victim narrated.
“She, then forcefully introduced her hand in my vagina, for long minutes, getting deeper and deeper, regardless of the physical pain she was inflicting me, claiming she was planting a tree,” the victim recounted.
Dureja was arrested on February 24 and released on bail later this week. She is currently admitted to a psychiatric facility in Delhi. Police say she is not ‘mentally stable’ to speak much. According to reports, a psychiatrist claims she is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or she might have been drugged as she reportedly could not identify her mother either.