Very rarely have I come across someone who could openly accept their being sexually active without being ashamed of this ‘morally degrading’ act. Sex for the wide variety of Indians either means to bang someone or something to be done only after marriage to have kids. While it is safe to assume that there is a crowd who do understand sex for what it is – a healthy expression of mutual love/mutual attraction or even an expression of just Sex. This is the crowd which has been lucky with an open minded biology teacher, or open minded parents, or even better – an open mind.
Sex for the land of Kama-sutra is now a means of pro-creation and nothing more. The Indian middle-class worships a chaste daughter/daughter-in-law; this notion is nothing but the dreadful fear of losing face in the ‘society’.
India wasn’t a sexually repressed society always. We became one under the influence of Buddhism and Jainism and later Islam and Christianity. Says Dr Shanshank Samak, an Indian sexologist: “Indians were the most sexually active people in the world. The Kamasutra was astonishingly liberal and men and women were equal participants in the sexual act. Sex was very creative, not only from the procreation point of view but recreation as well. It was not something to be done away with but an event to be celebrated, a road which led to ecstasy and finally nirvana for both the participants.
I believe Indians are still the most sexually active people, but we refuse to acknowledge the existence and importance of sex as a part of life itself. We can see the rise in the number of rapists and as much we would want to blame the songs, politicians, illiteracy, late night outs, etc., we are to blame our mentality and ourselves for letting a society prosper at all, which is so suicidal about sex, a society which cannot talk about sex and any form of sexuality. We believe that not talking about Sex would actually affirm our moral values. It would have been easy to label something like this as culture, but behind closed doors we are all either watching it, doing it, reading it, or wanting it. Let’s just accept that we all have a libido, we all have hormones and we are all sexual beings.
Also, let’s accept one very important fact that we are all hypocrites. We would want to be open to the idea of love, but the touch of love is extremely offensive to us. No doubt that men who force sex upon their partners are equally wrong and so are the women who in spite of wanting sex, later burn in guilt of ‘doing it for him’ and grieve about ‘how the man manipulated her into doing it.’
For one thing we are brought up to consider that touching oneself/masturbating is something sinful (if you are caught doing it) or you never come across the term unless you actually make an effort to understand your sex drive. There is no sex education that is meted out for us and there is no effort to make us understand the mental, hormonal or physical changes one can go through if one is not ready for it. Sex is over-rated, there is no sin in having sex and there is nothing cool about having sex. Sex is the need and desire of the body, it is the craving of another someone who might or might not be your lover, it is not a barbaric or an indecent act, it is not always about love, sometimes it is only about lust and something that we all need to understand is that it is okay not just to do it but it’s okay to talk about it and discuss it with your friends, family, lover, or with your own self to get a perspective on it.
It is important not just to understand one self but to understand your body as well. It is important for you to understand that an orgasm is the most exotic and an out of the body experience, it is important to understand your sexuality, to understand your own biology and psychology pertaining to your sex and sexual drives. If you are gay, bi or straight and if you want to have sex at a certain age because you are physically or mentally not ready, want to do it only with someone you can date because you have trust issues or want to wait until marriage because you are not emotionally strong enough to be able to move on (if it does not work after having sex with your lover) – are some points which are not only a matter of choice but also something you must talk about with someone you are comfortable with. Sex is not just an activity, if you are not ready and are doing it to under the pressure of a relationship or just because everyone around you has done it, you are gambling yourself for much more than you could bare the crash of.
Those who watch porn or masturbate should not feel guilty of it because the society condemns it. Watching porn and touching oneself is a healthy sexual expression, especially when you do not have a partner. It is okay to be sexual, it is not okay to be a pervert and grope. It is okay to understand that your partner might have more sexual drive than you do but it is not okay if your partner is forcing it on you. For a society which looks at you with an expression of horror if you are hugging or holding hands in a public place it is hard to imagine that this is where foundations of Kama-sutra were laid.
We need to step out of the closed doors, embrace the facts, understand, accept and create a space for sex as a part of life. Let’s be open to the idea of physical satisfaction, to the idea that it is okay for a guy as much as for a girl to want or not want to have sex and let’s say No to a life in denial of existence of Sex.
Let’s not pretend to be something we are not and let’s not judge ourselves. Cause we were born this way, baby.
