How role-playing outside the bedroom helped me overcome my fear of intimacy

As far as I can remember, I was in class nine when I first pleasured myself. The technique was slightly unconventional. Unlike regular masturbatory practices, my disgust with my own body ran so deep, I couldn’t bring myself to touch myself. And hence, I relied on ‘syntribation’—a term I accidentally discovered on YouTube—where one presses their thigh muscles together tightly to generate an orgasm. But...have I completed an orgasm in its truest sense? The jury is still out on that one.

Despite having studied in a women’s college, known for pioneering South Asian feminist theory, my internal battles with intimacy continued. It came easily to my friends, those who had been dating young. They had held hands with boys at 13 and kissed at 14. Whereas, I was a college grad at 21, unkissed and un-held. My friend had once jokingly set my contact name in her phone as ‘extra virgin olive oil’.

With that wealth of dating experience, I entered my post-graduate university space. It was the first time that I was living away from home, and I was hell-bent on getting rid of my fear of intimacy. Every night for the first month, my roommate and I discussed boys. We analysed behaviours and reported back to each other: Who likes whom, who’s more likely to be with whom, and if there was anyone on the horizon for either of us. It was high school all over again, except this time, without the watchful eyes of our parents and the added liberty of cross-gender access in hostels. I could be in a boy’s room all day and no one would bat an eyelid.

To put it crassly, when the opportunity to mate is endless, primal ideas gnaw at you—the prettiest, thinnest, fairest (all the superlatives) girls are supposed to get all the guys, right? Where would that leave me? The misogyny of class eight returned to me at 23, in classrooms where we dissected intersectional theories. And I soon realised, beauty (or the popular idea of it) was inherited; sex could be learnt. I couldn’t help the former, but I could acquire the latter. What followed was an almost twisted social experiment. For a short filmmaking assignment, I decided to create a deliciously heinous, sexually charged movie called Hunger. Shot from the female gaze, it brought together the desires of a heterosexual woman: The hunger for food, and the hunger for a man’s body. At the centre of the film was my character, a cannibal-esque vamp who lured men to her chamber, got herself ‘eaten’ by them, and then in turn, ate them.

The classroom’s reaction was expected: An eruption of laughter, whistles, gasps, shrieks, horror, all at once. And so, I had gone from the nerd-ish, modestly dressed girl in class to one resembling a dominatrix who makes out with a man and then proceeds to simulate a climactic orgasm on screen—all within the span of 10 minutes.

But most importantly, I had now deemed myself a performative if not an active “slut” in my own eyes (reclamation of the word and whatnot). I was dedicated to the role: I stopped wearing anything that didn’t display my concavely-curved cleavage. Plunging necklines paired with goth lipsticks, a pixie-esque haircut, and long trench coats with six-inch heels. Coupled with the 10 kgs I lost in the university gym in a span of three months, I had given myself the confidence, and more importantly, the license to finally be with a man. Just a day after that film screened, I had my first kiss—a passionate make out session outside the very gymnasium on a fog-riddled night.

This piece is published under a pen name at the author’s request.

Image: Getty Images 

This article first appeared in the January-February 2026 print issue of Cosmopolitan India.

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