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Yes, the state of Sex Ed in India is a joke, says the hilarious parody film by “East India Comedy”. But the women who met on a muggy afternoon at a cafe in the NCR were at the 'right to pleasure’ workshop to talk about the very things they were brought up not to discuss. Sex.
While Smita discovered her big ‘O’ at 34, the story was quite different for Meera, who, when she was thirty three and still a virgin, found that she simply couldn’t go ahead with the act of having penetrative sex.
But Meera’s sex story had a happy ending. After five rough months in bed, she and her husband saw a doctor, who advised her to relax, watch porn with her husband and lose her inhibitions. Finally sex happened and her husband from then on out made sure that she had an orgasm every time they did it. Woo hooo.
Turns out that India is having lots of sex but are Indian women enjoying it? And do Indian men even know what they are doing? “Were it not for porn I would know even less,’’ says one of the few men in the cafe. Sex for men becomes performance pressure and for women it has become pressure to "pleasure’’ the guy, of course. It’s no wonder then, that women have not exactly been feeling very ‘satisfied’ lately.
According to Dr Preeti Singh, middle class Indian women need sex therapists more than ever but simply don’t know where to go looking for one. Being brought up to feel they need to be modest, sit ‘properly’, cover their legs, and being taught that self pleasure is a taboo, women are hardly in touch with their bodies, let alone with what gives them pleasure. If they have not been in touch with their bodies for years, they can’t turn on arousal and sexual exploration overnight.
So what exactly is happening in the bedroom?
Is monogamy a dying model, asks Pallavi Barnwal, emcee and intimacy coach? A fair question, one would think, given all that one has heard about Indian marriages? Turns out however, that monogamy may not be a problem, it is just that polyamory according to some people, could just be a bit better.
Just when you think you have the Indian woman all sorted out in terms of her sexuality, you realise that you have seen and heard nothing yet.
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Published: 18 Sep 2019,12:30 PM IST