Bulbul Isabella (ATHIYA)
patreon
Q&A MORE ABOUT ME ..
🕑 Added 2025-04-15 11:45:01 +0000 UTCQ:
1.What inspired you to do erotic artwork? Especially when we come from a society where speaking about sex is considered taboo?
2.I'm a man, and it's really hard for me to express myself publicly like you do.
honestly you've inspired me so much to love myself more and to feel okay expressing my body. Especially knowing you come from such a strict background… how did you find the courage to get to this point? Was there a moment that really pushed you to start showing your body and doing erotic art so freely?
A:
These are very important questions. ❤️🔥✨
I was born and raised in a Muslim community. As long as I was in my village, I never experienced sex naturally or freely, without guilt or shame.
First, we need to understand something fundamental:
In a patriarchal society with rigid cultural norms (especially one with a restrictive culture like the one I was born into), a woman’s introduction to sex often comes through the violation of her body by men.
But that is not a woman’s experience of sex; it is sexual abuse or harassment.
I mean, we don’t get introduced to sex through love, intimacy, or curiosity.
No. For many of us, sex first came as fear. As violation. As confusion.
My first encounter with a male body wasn’t natural. It was through violation that I was introduced to sex.
So, for me, sex became synonymous with fear.
From that moment on, sex was tied to fear and anxiety.
Fear and anxiety have always haunted me , always challenged me.
But I’ve always wanted to overcome them.
If you truly fear something, you need to understand the fear.
Play with it.
Learn to control it.
Men, especially in these kinds of societies, grow up with a strange kind of access to sex.
They fantasize about women, they masturbate, they look at porn; they feel like they know sex.
But for us (for women like me) we didn’t even get to know our bodies.
We were often abused before we even understood what our body was.
So how could we grow up not being afraid?
We weren’t given permission to explore, to feel desire, or even to look at our bodies in the mirror.
We were told not to talk about sex.
Not to act like we knew it.
Not to show it.
Because if we did, we’d be labeled bad. Immoral. A shame to the family. A disgrace to society.
I grew up thinking my body was haram.
I never even saw myself naked in the mirror for years.
I didn’t know what masturbation was.
I didn’t know that pleasure could belong to me.
My body wasn’t mine; it was a secret. A danger. A burden.
It took me many years to unlearn that attitude.
To understand myself. To understand the world around me.
To know what natural love is. To feel natural lust.
To see the human body, 'my body' as something I could love.
Only from the moment I began to see my body in this way was I able to build a deep relationship and harmony with myself.
And I understood something else clearly:
Our patriarchal, capitalist society is against self-love.
It is against celebrating our bodies in ways we choose.
It is against making our bodies our own.
They create a narrative against us,
against our sense of self.
Our bodies become our own enemies.
We’re taught to police ourselves, to shrink ourselves, to doubt our desires.
How many rules were created just to keep women small. To control us. To scare us away from our own power.
Patriarchy doesn’t want women to love themselves.
It doesn’t want us to own our bodies.
It doesn’t want us to feel free in our skin.
Women are expected to live as if we don’t exist anymore… invisible.
When I was pushed to the point of hating myself, to the edge of wanting to end my life,
I turned to art as a way out;
a way to express myself more authentically,
to reveal everything they told me to hide.
This society needs healing.
But instead, they label women who express themselves authentically as freaks.
“She must be mentally ill,” they say.
When I started posting pictures of my body on social media, people literally asked me,
“Are you okay?”
“You need therapy.”
And I would say…
This is therapy.
This is healing from a sick society.
Art is therapy.
Healing.
Self-expression is therapy.
Body expression is healing.
Self-love is healing.
Comments
Esakiyarajan Shanmugam
Art is Therapy 🌻❤️ Glad you overcome everything you fear 🫂
Coolio
Interesting... I never thought about it from this perspective.. Sex starts as fear and harrasment for women... Wow...
