Mathusha Senthil on CBC’s “Now or Never”
Image: Mathusha Senthil
CBC’s radio show “Now or Never” featured our founder Mathusha Senthil in their episode titled “In The Bedroom.” Link to the full radio show can be found here.
See below for key takeaways from Mathusha’s segment below.
Mathusha on her bedroom and her sex toy inventory:
“I have a lot of the vibrators so these are the toys or the dilator sets and a few of the Dildo products in the back and then going down to the third level I have a lot of cleaners, flavoured lubes that we carry.”
“So it actually is it's a little bit like the birthday closet so I'll have friends come over for some drinks and then we get to chatting and I will discover that a friend has never bought a toy in their life so we always usually come into the bedroom I'll sit right here on the bed and I open this closet and we go through, just to pull out toys and be like this is what this does and that's what this does.”
Mathusha on gaps within the conversations around sex in the Tamil community:
“I wanna say it's kind of rooted in embarrassment maybe it was expected that the outside world would teach you that anyways but it was for sure just not something that we spoke about till this day I don't think I've ever really had the talk with my parents.”
“As I started to go on my own journey and discover more things and have conversations with people in my community, I realized that there were massive gaps, and it was also quite dangerous. So that's kind of how I fell into what I do today.”
“Growing up when I was in university being around other Tamil women there was always this like shame about like telling how many partners they've been with or what they enjoy because they didn't want to come across quote slutty or trashy or there is something wrong with them or that they had to be X Y Z but couldn't be. However they really wanted to be.”
Mathusha on launching Thaen Pot and telling her parents:
“It was a little bit nervous so at the point of launch I still hadn't told my own family about what I was doing so I was a bit nervous in terms of I don't know how they're going to react. I think it doesn't matter how old you are I could be 60 years old and I would still be terrified of my mother but my mother was very supportive and for the first few months my father had no idea what it was about he assumed I was selling makeup.”
“So I think I said that I'm selling toys but they're adults toys and I think I just kind of showed them like a box of stuff that I'm going to be selling on this website. So, I started it off with like more of the non-obvious toys like here is the magic wand and then near the end I'm like oh by the way here is a dildo. There was a little bit awkward and it was a lot of “OK”, “yeah” not many words coming from them after that initial conversation I have talked to my mom a bit more about it in terms of some stories in DM's that I've got in about women who had challenges with their health and have always felt kind of out of the box about it or at like not a part of community but then reading about it on Thaen Pot has allowed them to acknowledge that they were not the only ones going through this and this is also very normal. And my mom was quite receptive to that and she's like yeah it's really important and she even said something about oh that's normal women should women shouldn't feel that way they should talk to their doctor and I was like wow where was where were these two lines you know for 29 years but yeah we definitely had that conversation after”
“As I started to go on my own journey and discover more things and have conversations with people in my community, I realized that there were massive gaps, and it was also quite dangerous. So that’s kind of how I fell into what I do today.”
Mathusha on misogyny and sexism in the Tamil community:
“I think that our communities the South Asian and Tamil community has grown and come so far from you know where we were especially as diaspora but we were still missing this really big element and as a Tamil woman who grew up around people who are also Tamil and I know what that misogyny and patriarchy kind of feels, like I just thought that why not create a space where people would be comfortable with sharing their own experiences or own lessons as well as finding some sort of relatability there so and then the other part of it is just me I've always just been kind of known to be loud and opinionated and just knowing how many women and people I know who've never experienced sex in a way that could be experienced just presented another avenue for me to want to get them to explore.”
