The Utterances of a Peculiar Mindset

This might appear hurting or uncomfortable to few people. I oppologise to these people.

Its about time we started talking about sex in India. Honestly, the way people approach the subject of sex in India, even on the blogs which we can safely assume to be a more educated liberated sample, is full with coyness and guilt. It is no secret that to outsiders, especially Westerners, Indians appear sexually repressed. We do not talk about it openly without guilt or shame, and the resulting shyness and misplaced humour that it evokes makes it obvious that we do not accept sex as a normal human need that should be fulfilled irrespective of marital status.

We never get taught sex education in school. I remember one incidence when one of my class mates had asked the teacher how a baby is born. And he had got a heavy punishment. It was just a curiosity question. But looking at that punishment, none of us dared to ask anything to the teacher, later in complete school life.

While Indians may have had a sexually open culture in the times of Khajuraho, it appears to me that the prudishness of Victorian England seems to have given us a splitting colonial hangover. It is almost like we in India think, "Oh my god, Its so uncomfortable to talk with them on these things. What will the society say if they come to know we talk about this?" Well, the harsh truth is, the kids are going to grow up and have sex anyway, and if they have not been taught the importance of contraception they are a less likely to use any, and then they are going to get pregnant. And then, they are going to feel so afraid of society’s reaction that they are going to go to a dingy little abortion clinic and have their reproductive organs messed up beyond repair by some ill-equipped and unsanitary quack.

When it comes to sex, adolescents have always had a lot of questions. And when that happens, parents don't always have the answers.

Until maybe a decade ago, parents almost always relied on their kids finding out about sex either through their peers or by accident. Today, they can count on the Internet as an ally. There are sex education portals, counsellors and help with related issues just a click away. Message boards, chat rooms, youth forums and help lines prove that youth today are discussing everything from pre-marital sex to physical problems. However, people are still not enough open for discussion when it comes to face to face conversation.

These days, leading newspapers like Times Of India are taking lead in awareness towards the issue of sex. However, It’s going to take a lot to change Indian attitudes about sex. America was puritanical, and changed its attitudes only because of the reasearch of people like Masters and Johnson, Kinsey and Nancy Friday. They showed the West that everybody has a sex life (active or otherwise), and that everybody was normal. I look forward to the day that this belief is shared widely in India.