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It's something of a truism that in India, or rather, in a painfully conservative middle class India, sex is still a rather uncomfortable subject for discussion. There are exceptions, of course, but in very general brushstrokes, sex still remains a topic people shy away from.
On the precious few occassions I've got my taciturn mum to talk about sex, it's invariably about how 'there's nothing in sex for women'. My grandmother, who's miles more forthcoming than my mum, too holds the same opinion - that sex is something of a chore that needs to be partaken in as an act of 'tolerance' or a means to have babies đ˛, and if the husband is crap in bed, one just has to tolerate and hope the darned thing would get over soon. I don't know how veracious these opinions are, or even whether they're only exclusively indigenous to my uber orthodox South Indian Brahmin family, but mostly you don't have women claiming that they had a bloody good shag.
The point of this discussion is not about the specific example of my mum or my grandmum, but about how introverted we are about sex. Even the urban, well-educated, upper middle class families like mine are painfully narrow-minded and judgmental. Sex education, which is said to be ever so essential, is glossed over. There are those that blog, smart-alecs that write books pretending to represent 'modern India' and those that show up on NDTV debates, the feminists etcetera but when we're talking about your average young adult Indian woman, sex is a subject which isn't very openly discussed. In uni, most of the girls are single, and talk about everything under the sun including their wedding plans and the kind of husband they'd want to get married to; why, even the boys seem to eschew using the term 'sex' ; when the movie Avatar was being rampantly gushed about, I heard the guys talk about Jake and the Na'vi girl 'doing it', rather than spelling it out.
Victorian morality hasn't died out; it's just set camp in the subcontinent. Indians are, in general, very prudish, self-righteous and darned proud of it (including yours truly). Generally speaking, sex is seen as something that's dirty and vulgar, premarital sex is considered sin, one is taught to repress one's primordial and primitive sexual needs in the name of moral values and rectitude, sex isn't seen for what it is: pleasure in itself because the concept of sex as pleasure is considered something that's morally odious, teenagers are dissuaded from being in relationships, it's not very common to see even educated, employed adults in live-in relationships, kissing in public or even the slightest degree of PDA is condemned, Valentine's Day is something that's frowned upon... These are restrictions imposed upon us by culture, and so ingrained is this culture that we've come to accept it as the ideal.
Yes there are exceptions, and we're slowly but surely inching forward, and I'm not suggesting that we ape the West which is overexposed to sex, but we're still very reticent and uncommunicative about sex and there's still a very wide chasm between what we are and what is ideal (or rather, what's more conducive) that seems well nigh impossible to be bridged. Ironic, given India's population.
Do we need a sexual revolution of our own?
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