The household’s fascination with new bhabhis is a faint, but vivid memory.

I remember sitting in a line of squirmy pre-teen sisters, huddled on an ornate bed with scratchy sheets, the room smelling of stale jasmine. We were given the responsibility of entertaining bhabhi, since she wasn’t to leave the house for the evening. My brother would swing by just to look at her, offer to buy snacks and ice cream, and sneak her out of the house for a drive, away from the watchful eyes of her in-laws.

These memories, once in exile, became a refuge in adulthood when I traced my romantic affections for women back to my early life. About a month ago, at a table of aspiring filmmakers, someone yelped, “A show I worked on is on XHamster!” The conversation quickly took over the table, and they took out their phone. I was intrigued by the visuals. The bhabhi in question was fair-skinned, with a saree tied well below her waistline and a blouse with a plunging neckline. Another woman in a lehenga, not as ornately dressed, was making out with her, her knee buried between the bhabhi’s legs. Words muttered from her lips gave her gasps and moans a quick break. There was a subplot I was missing, but I was going to find out.

The fascination of the men at the table with bhabhis (never their own) came unraveling over the next few minutes. To trace the origins of this fetish, Tithi, a certified sex educator and academic explains “The bhabhi fetish in India isn’t a fetish at all, but a vessel for male anxieties and fantasies. It’s not desire, but repression.”

Also read: The Orgy

WHO’S YOUR BHABHI NOW?

One must wonder how men’s relationships with their bhabhis are dictated by the quality of the relationships they share with the bhaiya in question. “Even if she is the so-called older woman in the dynamic, she is submissive. She is always accepting the sexual encounter and never initiating it.” The fair-skinned upper caste bored housewife often plays the bhabhi, whose husband can’t satisfy her; enter a younger man with unresolved mommy issues.

So, what about the women who forge relationships with their bhabhis independent of the men in the equation? Was I carrying the same lens, smudged with fractured male social relationships? Looking back, I grew closer to R, my bhabhi through a distant cousin. I looked at my feet, standing in the kitchen for hours while she would make aloo mayo sandwiches for her children. I refused to eat without her. She opened her heart about her regrets on picking an arranged marriage, her days at IIM. All of this was years before I realized the intense care and protectiveness I felt for her was a huge gay crush. For women, bhabhis can be blood relatives, but also a neighbor, a guardian, or an employer. If we place the quality of women’s relationships and heightened emotional ties at the root of sapphic desire, this offers a way to completely decenter men from this dynamic.

Could it radically paint sex as a form of solidarity from the oppression of a domestic life? A respite from patriarchal and cis norms of pleasure? Tithi paused my ruminations and flushed my premise down the drain. “Sapphics don’t submit to fetishes that strip agency from women.”

Falling down the rabbit hole to find the clips, most were crassly titled “Bhabhi Malish,” “Bhabhi ki Leli,” “Desi Lesbo,” and “BHABHI AUR BAI” all of them scoring millions of hits. The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting ordered all content that could be deemed obscene be taken down and banned a number of OTT platforms, but Gandii Baat is alive and thriving on XHamster. It turns out the episode was called “Bai-sexual.” The titles, clips, production quality, and design all reek of the male gaze, even if they were meant to represent queer desire.

Also read: Beyond Balconies – An Erotica

What do Sapphics Jerk off to?

“We have to ask ourselves if we are queering narratives or just slapping on tags and reproducing regressive fantasies and selling them?” Tithi asks.

So can sapphic and queer desires ever be fairly represented if they are not created with inclusivity at the center? And behind the camera? In order for this bhabhi or any fantasy porn to be queer, is it possible for the said bhabhis, saalis, and jethanis to blur or erase the lines of power dynamics, the very titles used to describe them? Is it possible to make porn in which we are not only voyeurs, salivating at the thought of a woman of the family—whom we attach to the collective dignity of the family—being conquered? “To care and not conquer, can porn do that?”

Also read: Feminist Porn

“Fix-it Fiction” is a phenomenon that allows fans to fill in the gaps and patch the holes of unsatisfying trajectories, untimely deaths of characters, or outright male-gaze-y storylines to be reworked by the gays.

If one traces the representation in India, Bollywood offers sleazy scraps like No Men Allowed and 3 Kanya. Hindi cinema films like Unfreedom did not make the cut with the censor board, while films like Mandi offer nods. “Sapphics kissing on Instagram is enough to get shadow-banned or worse. Indian society barely endures heterosexual sex at the moment; it’s far from ready for queer love in the mainstream,” Tithi remarks.

Also read: Queer Eye for the Sapphic Girls

Some ethical alternatives for pornography, like Quinn, offer audio, feature differing POVs, fan fiction, and guided masturbation stories that affirm their largely women and queer audience. K, a marketing intern based in Delhi, said, “It’s amazing to shed the expectations of what people having sex should look like and let the mind run free, because anyone can have sex, right?”

Although both these outlets produce in English and are inspired by Western popular culture, the dearth of accessible, desi mainstream representation staves off both fan fiction and trickle-down for subcultures to follow, and for sapphics to make it their own.

Desi will forever be sexy, but we have a long way to go.