At first sight, it might look as if a woman in India is living her wet dreams. It’s a country where the humungous number of men do not have enough women for themselves. Many lead a life of eternal drought with their fantasies never raining on them.
It might seem that a woman has an upper hand when it comes to finding sex easily. That her sexuality does not have to build up and wait inside her underwear, like it is for the men, only to get wasted in the bathroom. That they definitely must not be desperate just because they do not have to wait 30 years for their desires to erupt, for their bodies to have gentle hands laid on them, for their mouths to be poured love into.
But quite contrary to the anticipation, an Indian woman lives with a hidden pathological desperation inside her. Her heart is a raging volcano of sexual frustration which she cannot vent out because the playboy magazines offer nothing to quench her thirst, nor do the blowjobs and the booby dominated patriarchal porn. She hides her lipstick laden lips under her burqa and goes around the city, the marketplace and the buzzing traffic, relying on only make-up and attire to remind herself that her body is a wonderland despite no one willing to look at it with the passion it deserves.
It is a twisted tale. This desperation, this trembling self-confidence, this eternal wait for something as far-fetched as a female orgasm. It is not the lack of horny men. But the very incompatibility of sexual expectations between the two sexes. In India, the expectations of most men are derived from what they watch in porn. No wonder, their fantasies are mostly self-centered; the striptease, the emptying over the face, the superstition of ‘squirting’ and the seductive curvature of the ass which solely pleasures them and not the female partner. For the woman, the act is a sheer manoeuvre of demonstration, of dispensing of duties, by the end of which she has to lie awake watching the man fall asleep even before she finished.
And it does not stop here. Relationships are so ill-defined in India that it does not even take into consideration the importance of sexual sync between two partners as a big factor that adds up to the love between them. Sex is often a second stage in dating, mostly after the phase of falling in love, as if it is more sacred and deserves more attention than love itself.
Hence, it becomes even tougher to ask a man out for any emotional connection, once the intercourse is over. As if you could either be his muse or his girlfriend. As if he cannot possibly give you his heart if you have already given him your body. Inexperienced as men are in India, it would be an avalanche of self-esteem on the part of the woman herself, to be asking for being considered to be a part of the romantic space in his life after having filled the sticky sexual lacunae in it. If you are a sexual woman who also is looking for love, you are damned, as you can either be considered as a person or a ‘pussy’.
It came as a horrifying shock to me when I entered college and realised that female masturbation was rare. That women were so afraid to explore their own body, that they did not take the risk of even discovering their own spots, let alone having someone else discover those for them. They were scared to wear the kind of clothes that would bring out their curviest parts because ‘slutty’ was a word already coined and used infamously. This self-reproach, this feeling of guilt, which was a result of always having been told that dignity was inversely proportional to desires, had made women lonelier than ever, surrounded by men who would love to touch them but had never cared to touch them in a way they felt loved.
Even for the men, it is nothing but the circumstances that have adulterated their way of seeing a female body. They look at it as a piece of wondrous artwork and not another half of them. The intimacy and lovemaking are often overpowered by the aggressiveness which comes out not by choice but by the hush-hush they had to deal with all their lives, being told that women are a mysterious ‘thing’ they should not socialise with, or adopt any kind of habits from. They too have been subjected to the brouhaha that surrounds paid sex, the unmet needs of sex education in school, the propagated myth of manhood being measured by the ‘size’ and especially, the taboo of homosexual attraction.
There was this beautiful movie called “Masaan” which had a famous dialogue that compared life to a condom. Our lives could not have been described more accurately; than a temporary affair that lasts only in pursuit of that one moment of overwhelming happiness. And till then, we as women would sadly keep being dutiful, always pouring our energies into others without asking for acknowledgement. Someone said, “For most of history, anonymous was a woman.” Women are always making art without asking for recognition. Always thinking that since it is about them, it must obviously come second.