I've never had “the talk” with my parents. You know, the one about birds and bees. My mum passed away just as I hit puberty so I don’t quite know if she would've been the one to make me wiser. I do vaguely recall my older sister taking me to a quiet corner and telling me it’s time I know about the red river and its periodic flow and why it all happens, scientifically speaking. But I don’t think she went on to tell me about the parallel journey of an egg down to the fallopian tube — which may just happen to meet any random bloke of a sperm if I'm not too cautious. She merely gave me a hazy metaphor to suggest that I'm no longer a little girl and on to becoming a woman. Which to me read as “OH, I get to wear bras, revamp my wardrobe and put on make-up!” The cautionary tales of love and lust reached me in my family circle only in my twenties.
If you’re not from India, you may probably be wondering why. Were my parents negligent or perhaps, was it the idea of a dad talking to his daughter about sex just too awkward and bumbling to approach? I mean yes, we all know how awkward the talk is. Nobody wants to get a sex talk from their parents. We’d rather sit through the torture in school with our friends, mocking and pointing at each other’s ovaries. (Well, I got my first sex ed in a girls’ convent.)
But if you’re from India, you would know that this is absolutely normal. Parents just don’t look at their children as sexual beings and vice versa. So you wouldn't usually find homes where you see your dad briefly stealing a kiss on the lips from your mom. And you wouldn't find daughters or sons inviting their lovers to the dining table and holding hands with them openly. (Of course, that’s not a rule of thumb and things are beginning to change but speaking statistically, such seemingly natural behaviours are reserved for the liberal upper classes only.)
If you grew up in the nineties in an Indian household, you’d remember the family TV time memories where you’d stumble upon a condom commercial. Since you had no idea what that is but it looked interesting, you’d ask the only people whom you consider as encyclopaedic. But when you asked your dad about it, he was just being weird, mumbling words to the effect that it’s for grown-ups. Of course, when you grew up, it was your turn to blush during a condom commercial.
That’s the way it is. When I was growing up, all our sex education came from older kids. But they either glorified sex as something one should experience with someone you really care about or condoned it as forbidden fruit. Nobody gave you any insightful inputs to practical every-day dilemmas such as:
- What do you do when you, as a girl, have all these urges to really go at it with just about anyone and because you've heard about pleasuring being just the terrain of boys, you think you may be a lunatic or a tramp for having such thoughts?
- Should you, as a boy, be staring down directly at a woman’s breasts and drawing all kinds of conclusions about her from the way she’s dressed, whom she’s out with, and where she gets her dinner?
- What do you do when you find yourself in a situation when you're in a relationship and one of you is ready and more than willing to go all the way while the other one is not?
- What do you do when someone touches you in a way that makes everyone think that they’re only being affectionate when, deep down, you know that there was something seedy in that touch?
So in the absence of your parents offering you a practical word on a subject that is as taboo as the Nazi swastika, when you encounter the situations above, there is one dominant feeling, one that precedes over any personal harm that you may be unknowingly causing yourself by keeping mum about it. The feeling that you've let your parents down. That you’re doing something so sinful that if word got to your parents, you’d lose face. So you go on with your life without confiding in your parents as if nothing’s wrong, learning your own value lessons through mistakes and taking advice from your peers.
As a young Indian girl, you must've probably been through this. An intrusive aunt first compliments you on how you’re blooming. And in the next sentence, she asks you if you’re getting some. Well, she doesn't exactly say that but the most popular euphemism used is “Is it love or is it Dove?". Then, she’ll give you “useful advice” on how you should concentrate on your studies now and that love is a waste of time and when the time is right, you’ll find your dream man — the one your parents like. But to your brother, she’ll jokingly say, “Beta, abhi time hai. Jitne maze karne hai kar lo par soch samajh ke.” [uproar of laughter] “Son, have all the fun you want now but be cautious.” Of course, there are many ways that a statement like that can be interpreted but something in the laugh that follows tells you that it was laced with a hint of coitus.
When I trace all these little casual sexisms that unconsciously set the wide gap between the vague and confusing love/sex lessons offered to girls vs the ones offered to boys by elders, it elucidates an important dichotomy. My parents may have surely not intended to raise me any differently from my brothers, giving us equal opportunities and undivided attention. However, there was a vital gap in one department that became clear as I was growing up. Sure, the elders were not comfortable with the sexualized nuances in our swiftly-changing personalities. But they could still get used to the idea that my brother was having premarital sex, or having a life that didn't strictly adhere to a traditional moral code as long as he wasn't causing himself or anybody else any harm.
But for me, as a girl, that was a total abomination. And not just to my parents. To everybody who knew me. Even when my dad didn't strictly define different social rules for my brother and me, the neighbours did. Or the extended family offered advice on how I should not be frequenting places where they serve alcohol or smoke or dance for they’re no place for a girl from a good family to be in. Or someone anonymous suggested to my dad that if he let me come home late at night after partying with friends, he wouldn't find me a good suitor for marriage and that I would be a “lost cause.”
I think of all the times I was told by even the most random of people how to dress, how to talk, and how to sit in a lady-like manner. I think of the times when I was coming home late, alone on my bike, and the entire journey, I kept thinking, “You know this wouldn't have been half as terrifying if I were in my brother’s shoes right now.” I think of all the cautionary tales that came with a moral that girls should never make the first move and girls should never give themselves away freely.
And no matter how progressive a nation we are in the path to become, no matter how much we laud our girls for doing us proud, no matter how much we march on the streets with anti-rape culture slogans, it is this very absence of sexual freedom that’ll continue to be a contributor to sexual frustration, sex crimes and a deep misogynistic culture in India.
Until we develop a sex-positive atmosphere in our homes, talk to our sons and daughters openly about their sexuality, they will continue to phase out important themes such as rights to their body, consent and personal responsibility. In the absence of sex-positivity, the boys of the family, who subconsciously grew up with women-morality themes will butcher a girl’s character by the way she dresses, where they meet her or how open she is with them. They will draw the line between the girl they take home to meet their parents and the girl whom they openly flirt with, stare lewdly at, stalk, harass, abuse…cos, well in her case, she was asking for it. And the girls of the family will have two options. They’ll have to put up a fight against all that to be labelled as feminazis or “lost causes”. Or they’ll lead a dual life, develop self-esteem issues, use sex as a weapon, trivialize the right to their own body and complain about falling for assholes, well, if they’re lucky enough not to get physically and emotionally scarred for life.
I recently watched a movie called Pink that’s got everyone take to the social media to rave about it. As a film, it brought forth the sharp divide between the way the society looks at a rape victim and the accused perpetrator of the crime. It shone a torch on the questions that run through the mind of most men and women alike when they hear of another sexual crime. “When and where did it happen?” “If in a hotel room or an isolated place in the middle of the night, what was a girl from a good family doing there?” “In whose company was she?” “Was she under the influence of alcohol?” “What! She lived independently. OK, so we don’t really what goes on in her life. Maybe she’s a prostitute.” Pink is an important movie because it has started a dialogue about the divide between the way girls and boys are raised in India. I watched the movie with my mother-in-law and we discussed about everything that was wrong with our society. We talked about sex of all things! For me, that was a novelty, even though I'm a grown woman now with a sex life of my own.
While in rural places or very conservative families, a dialogue around sex may not even be an option, it helps to see that in urban India, families are opening up to the possibility that girls and boys in their adolescence are most likely going to enter into relationships and explore their bodies. It helps, if you, as parents, talk to them about the roadblocks they will encounter and the tough or tricky choices, especially around consent, they’ll have to make, no matter what the situation.
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