Sex toys to sex tourists: The eternal randiness of the Indian male

Sex crimes, as we all know, are a huge problem in India. The Delhi police are also keenly aware of it. That must be the reason why they are leading raids in New Delhi’s Palika Bazar against dildos, inflatable dolls and edible lingerie. A team led by Connaught Place station house officer Mukesh Walia recovered as many as fourteen sex toys from shop number 32 after getting a tip-off reports the Times of India. Who knew that the police needed a “tip-off” to know that sex toys are sold in Palika Bazar? Police also “suspect such articles are being sold at other markets in the city as well.” No shit, Sherlock. The sale of sex toys is banned by Section 292(1) of the Indian Penal Code which provides for punishment for distributing any object deemed as obscene because “it is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest.” Punishment is two years for first offence, five years for repeat offenders. Buyers can also be prosecuted. The whole operation is a textbook case study of our national hypocrisy around all matters sexual. Our politicians watch porn in parliament on their mobile phones, an octogenarian governor cavorts with young women in Raj Bhavan, but the police are busy cracking down on sex toys. The ban on sex toys is just one of these archaic senseless exercises in legislating morality or at least the appearance of morality. A vibrating dildo is not even porn. It’s a toy for someone’s personal solo pleasure, or use in consensual sex, in one’s bedroom in sharp contrast to that perfectly legal iron rod used to brutalize that young woman in the Delhi bus last December. Just because it is about pleasure does it ipso facto become “prurient” and “lascivious”? The dictionary defines prurient as “Unusually or morbidly interested in sexual thoughts or practices”. But if we are to go by the dictionary definition of prurient, most of our male population should be behind bars. This is not to imply women are not interested in sex but at least we have not heard (yet) of planeloads of Indian women flying off to Uzbekistan to “enjoy.” An excerpt in Open magazine from Srinath Perur’s upcoming book If It’s Monday It Must be Madurai: A Conducted Tour of India describes in vivid detail the adventures of an all-male tour group of Homo Erectus (of the Indian variety) in Tashkent which has apparently become the new Bangkok. Indian men like to travel in packs, it seems, whether it’s to gangrape at home or buy sex abroad. Almost everyone in that group is with a friend or a relative. (Read the entire excerpt here.) [caption id=“attachment_1175477” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Photo of a sex toy shop. Image used for representational purposes only. Reuters[/caption] Even before the airplane takes off, one sex tourist tells the tour guide “Dekho, hum poora enjoy karne aaye hai.” (Look, we have come to enjoy fully.) And being Indians, they make sure they bargain fiercely for the most bang for their buck. The group which ranges in age from the 70-plus Kakaji to twenty-somethings are single-minded in their pot-bellied pursuit of girlie bars, massages with happy endings, “boom-boom” and “raat ka program”, historical sightseeing in Samarkand and Tashkent be damned. “Yeh history-wistory koi kaam ki cheez nahin hai,” one says. “I believe in only two things – sex and money.” The leering, the chortling, the endless teenaged dirty jokes, the drunken back-slapping and braggadocio all add up to a most depressing portrait of Indian masculinity – both lustful and sex-starved at the same time. “It’s enough to make you never want to have sex with an Indian man again,” says a female friend. If Officer Mukesh Walia is hunting for “prurient” and “lascivious” he does not have to raid Palika Bazar. He could just pick up a copy of Open. Yet that unceasing randiness does not prevent a couple of men in that same party from keeping the rest of the group waiting for hours in Samarkand while they insist on doing namaaz, suddenly stricken with piety on Friday after the excesses of the previous days. Others rail about the corruption of the government which Perur comments “is a bit rich coming from a group composed in large measure of adulterers and tax-evaders.” For this group, sexual pleasure has become not a consensual act of enjoyment but some kind of consumer right, bought with money. A self-righteous Paras boasts at the breakfast table about how he stood up for his rights when a woman he had hired for a “two-shot” session balked after round one. He threatened to call the night manager whereupon she acquiesced. The loud Indian sex-tourists in Uzbekistan and the arrest of the sex-toy sellers of Palika Bazar are two pieces of the same problem – our inability to understand sex as an act of pleasure. Sex, especially non-procreative sex, remains inherently dirty and sleazy, something to be done covertly. The sex tourists seem very overt and up-front but the whole exercise is nudge-nudge wink-wink right from its secretive booking. And the Palika Bazar shopkeeper tells TOI “We generally do not entertain unknown customers. We take referrals and recommendations from known customers and keep in touch through messages.” Our opening markets have allowed us to afford more sex in a way we weren’t used to – whether it’s sex toys imported from China or sex getaways to Tashkent and Patpong – but it has not taught us to enjoy sex any better. The toys might be adult and those tours adults-only but in matters of sex we are not grown-up at all.