 "The fuzzy picture: India Today's great Indian sex survey")
‘Tis the season for the headless women again aka the India Today exclusive sex survey issue .
The magazine is tom-tomming 10 years of its sex survey as the decade of desire where it has mapped “India’s journey from reticence to exuberance".
Obviously sex sells. That’s why every year the magazines dip a thermometer into our privates to figure out the slightest fluctuations in our sexual temperature. But as the images make clear, the needle has hardly moved in how the magazines themselves think about sex. Sex is still tee-hee, giggle-giggle, peekaboo and soft-focus, all grainy images and shocking red bindi. And it never has faces, because despite the alleged sexual revolution that’s heating up India, sex is still regarded as something dirty and secretive. Chhii, chhii, no faces please, we are Indian.
The 2012 India Today survey has gone into the secret world of love and lust in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns or as it puts it “Bharat surprises India with its sexy secrets”. But India Today surprises no one with its choice of visuals. Small town India might be getting jiggy but our magazines are still stuck with the stock images of sex - saris without blouses, clutched hands, scattered rose petals, a touch of lace, red high heels, an anklet, something gauzy slipping off a bare shoulder. And hardly any female faces clearly in sight. If it is there, it’s usually artfully out-of-focus in fifty shades of grey. (Actually the clearest female faces anywhere in the sex issue belong to the model in the Skore condom ads alongside the survey results.)
And they are surprised that 58% of respondents in Kota detach emotions from sex! It’s hard to have emotions when your image of sex never involves a face.
But really, just because it’s printed on paper do we need to believe that the town of Asansol, a few hours outside Kolkata, is THE place to go if you want to get into a bit of wife-swapping? Or that Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh (as opposed to anywhere else in the country) is obsessed about watching partners undress? Or that Salem is the place where partners fake headaches the most to put off sex?
Do the numbers even make any sense once you’ve whittled your way down to the actual sample size in Asansol? Exactly how many people are we talking about when the magazine tells us that 9% of the respondents in Kottayam have used sex enhancers during intercourse? Many of the people interviewed in the small town profiles of our hinterland in heat shrug off the survey. “We have customers for Ayurvedic aphrodisiacs just as in any town,” a pharmacist in Kottayam tells the magazine. “Some use even refined coconut oil as a lubricant for sexual purposes. But it’s hardly anything special here.”
Pawan Sharma, editor of a Hindi newspaper, trashes Ratlam’s reputation as swinger central where 11% of its respondents have done threesomes and 14% are okay with homosexuality even if it involves one’s spouse. “Such activities are limited to the highway stretch near Neemuch, 35 km from the city, where sex workers line up on the road,” he says.
But never mind. The magazine has no problem calling Ratlam the “city of sleaze” or Guntur as the capital of one-night stands.
The truth, as always, is far fuzzier. People are people everywhere. They access porn online, they want more sex than they can get, and are better at ogling women than actually talking to them. The survey talks about the guards at Chambal Gardens in Kota indulgently looking the other way while young lovers make out in the greenery. Today’s Pune Mirror talks about policemen in Cubbon Park in Bangalore running around with cameras to curb “immorality” in the bushes. Which one is more reflective of our attitude towards sex? That does not mean I would recommend all the frustrated couples in Bangalore should book rail tickets to Kota at once.
In fact, we don’t talk about sex in the place where it matters the most – at home. I never got any birds and bees talk from my family. And for all the sexual revolution sweeping the country according to these polls that has not changed. Ratan Laskar, general secretary of the Secondary Teachers and Employees Association proudly told TOI that his organization would launch an agitation if the Bengal government dared to introduce sex education in schools.
“The Bengal government tried to introduce sex education in 2003. We are proud that our member teachers managed to convince the board that it couldn’t be introduced because of practical problems. How can you accept young girls sketching nude girls in the classroom?” TOI reports that a survey by a magazine in 2011 suggested that 78 percent of Indian parents do not discuss sex openly with their children.
And somehow I believe that number a lot more than the 22% in Kota who are having ‘consensual affairs’.
These “winds of change” that our surveyors sell us are, frankly, a lot of hot air.
And dear India Today, for the next survey, can we have some faces please? Now that would be real change we could see.
