The Sex Story
Dr Saili P. Mahadik
“Mumma, I was playing with Rina a while ago, and I saw that her wee-wee was not there. Was it cut off, mumma? What happened to it?”
This is kind of how our story begins. The difference between a boy and a girl becomes evident right when they discover that they have two different organs down there, and those differences start escalating once they hit puberty. Ah, sweet, sweet puberty. When the reins of your brain go right into the hands of your hormones, and when boys aren’t ‘annoying’ anymore, and girls aren’t ‘stupid’ anymore. (Spoiler alert: they still are. It’ll all come back to you soon. Don’t worry.)
When puberty hits, adventures begin. Dating begins. Hand-holding starts. Handssliding-into-places-that-strange-hands-usually-don’t-go-to begins. And then, people end up doing the ‘unthinkable’; they have sex. I just stated the nightmare of all the aunties around us, in plain language. The language isn’t usually appreciated. Euphemisms like ‘hooking up’, ‘hitting the home run’, and ‘doing it’ are commonplace, which seem unnecessary because literally everyone knows what these people are talking about, and yet we use them. Why? Because uttering the word ‘sex’ in Indian society is nothing short of saying Lord Voldemort out loud in the Harry Potter universe. It is The Act that Must Not Be Named.
Which leads to the question: why is the word ‘sex’ taken in such a negative manner? I mean, in a country like India, where the outcome of the act is seen running around in every other social event (ruining their clothes, spilling food all over the place, and looking cute while doing that) in hordes, why do we shy away from using the actual word and owning up to it? We, the people of the country which has the origins of the Kama Sutra, are reluctant to come out and talk about it.
The reason for this is mostly indoctrinated in us since the time we realize that our bodies are capable of these desires, by telling us that having these desires is wrong, and somehow, immoral; that our bodies really aren’t ours. That having any sort of physical craving is wrong, and that a person would be branded as ‘impure’ if s/he has any of these desires. These are usually applicable more to females than males because the evidence of a woman’s purity and the pride of her family reside in her hymen. Its integrity usually decides her character. No wonder, pre-marital sex is condemned in our society. I mean, it isn’t even surprising.
In a place where even hugging in public is considered to be strange, sex before marriage is close to forbidden. It does not mean that people don’t actually indulge in the act. Of course, they do. The young heart wants what it wants. The problem here is that the young genitals don’t really know what the hell is going on. In places like the US, parents give their children The Talk about the ‘birds and bees’, their education system has something known as ‘Sex Education’. In India, sex education comes from watching pornography or discussing these things with our peers, who are as ignorant as we are, if not more. There are so many misconceptions that kids have. These days, there’s Google to kind of help them out, but for the ones not privileged enough/smart enough, it is a nightmare. It does not mean that the people who have the privilege of an internet connection have the brains to actually use it. There are still innumerable men on Twitter who think that urine and menstrual blood come out of the vagina and that if you want, you can control menstrual bleeding and just evacuate it in the bathroom, like urine/feces. In this environment, clueless young people are stumbling around in the dark, literally, trying to get some action. There have been sexual mishaps of the degree that once, I’d read that a guy had actually penetrated (and eventually ruptured) the urethra of his partner. Safe sex is next to a myth in this environment.
Guess what happens next. The poor young girl ends up missing her period, gets morning sickness, and then realizes that she’s pregnant. The shame and the fear that she faces is completely justified, considering how her family and society treat her. Ostracized, and helpless, the girl resorts to dangerous means to abort the child, leading to an unsafe abortion, which might just lead to septicemia and the death of the girl. In milder cases, both partners might just get injured, or get infected.
There is this brilliant notion that women are supposed to be completely devoid of any desire, easily bending to the whims and fancies of their husbands and in-laws. Oh yes, it continues post-marriage. There are so many weird virginity ‘tests’ that I’ve heard of. White sheets are laid down, and if there are no blood stains on the night that the marriage is consummated, it is presumed that the woman is of a ‘bad character’. Yep. These things happen in 2017. In a world where people can travel across continents in a matter of a few hours, we are just traveling back in time.
The simplest solution to this is, well, education. It should ideally start with parents, but it is next to impossible in a place like India. Siblings, if comfortable with these topics, should discuss them and help each other out. I remember, back in my school, when boys were given a free period one day and girls were taught everything about menstruation and female genitals, which is so wrong. Schools and colleges need to have open discussions about sex and maybe have something like a group discussion every now and then with counselors wherein such things can be discussed out loud, without the fear of being judged. Media, an extremely powerful tool at our disposal, needs to be used in the right way to dispel information that is helpful and relevant. Counseling needs to be done on a regular basis.
More than anything, we need to stop judging people. Honestly, a population of 1.2 billion just doesn’t come out of nowhere. The fact remains that society, as a whole, needs to start looking out for each other and helping each other out. One can only hope that aunties get less judgmental, peers get more knowledgeable and we finally decide to grow up and look at sex as a natural act, and not something that evokes shame.
