Why Do Indian Women Deny Themselves the Right to Pleasure?

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu wonders why a girl must be shamed when she’s caught exploring her sexuality.

I was about 13 when I was caught by my mother, touching myself, in our study that housed a huge private collection of books. One of them happened to be a porn novel, that I stumbled upon rather accidentally – proceeding to flip through the pages, before coming again and again to words like ‘dick,’ ‘pussy,’ ‘vagina,’ ‘cunt’ and ‘balls.’ Things that weren’t part of our adolescent vocabulary. (I wasn’t allowed to watch Blue Lagoon for crying out loud, till I caught it on television in my late 20’s – by which time I had bitten the proverbial forbidden fruit.)

Growing up with grandparents in a middle class Bengali household meant a lot of warmth, but rarely any physical intimacy of the sexual variant. And Ma was a single parent, till she remarried later, so I hardly ever saw a man in the house. Except, Bapi, my maternal grandfather.

Ours was a typical household where touch is never taught. Where pleasure is perverse and must be dictated by age, and moral values passed down. Where sex isn’t education.

My First Surrender to My Own Sex...

I had no idea I was experiencing the first rush of womanhood, no real inkling why my fingers brushed past my inner thighs fearlessly, throbbing with an urgent desperation. Why I parted my lips and closed my eyes, a soft, slow shudder running down my spine. My first surrender to my own sex – a delicious intimacy that only happens in a sacred sort of aloneness. When no one is looking and when you are past caring. It’s a coming of age that men can never be a part of.

One of my young readers (in the twelfth standard) wrote this to me:

My mother called me a slut. She was hysterical with anger when one day she walked into my room. I had forgotten to lock the door. She now monitors my calls, and tells me I am mixing with bad boys. Am I to become a nun? Do my parents never have sex? Has my mother never masturbated? Is sex dirty?

When Will We Stop Viewing Female Pleasure as Sin?

Why must female pleasure always be viewed as shameful – a sin, a cultural anomaly? One of the most famous treatises advertised on every touristy brochure – the Kama Sutra, composed between the 4th to 6th centuries AD elucidates in ample detail the best technique to self pleasure; “Churn your instrument with a lion’s pounce: sit with legs stretched out at right angles to one another, propping yourself up with two hands planted on the ground between in them, and it between your arms (siṃhākāranta).”

But this again is from the man’s perspective. A woman’s sexuality is considered an act of duty – her body to be lusted after and conquered by men, in a contest where she is a trophy. She can be wooed and won, but never become the temptress. A woman is meant to essentially procreate. Her womb, sealing her fate.

It’s the same with porn viewership, look how jittery we got with Savitha Bhabi, an Internet toon, just because it explored the sexual needs of a housewife! I once went to buy a dildo at Pallika Bazaar with my partner and the shop-keeper kept asking me where my husband was. When I pointed at my girlfriend, he looked like my father when I had broken the news that I was living in with a woman. It’s ironical how sex is always seen through the narrow prism of gender. A woman on top, a woman viewing porn or indulging in BDSM, a woman with a same sex lover are viewed as taboo, while item girls dancing to raunchy lyrics in 100 crore budget films are formulaic for a sex starved, desi audience
– Jyoti Singhal (name changed on request), 35-year-old lawyer

Is it any wonder that the e-commerce boom in India has led to a veritable jump in the sex toys’ market? Currently estimated between Rs 1,200 crore to Rs 1,500 crore, the market is expected to scale Rs 2,450 crore by 2016! It could even touch a high of Rs 8,700 crore by 2020 – industry watchers predict.

Are our bodies cages? Are marriage and motherhood to remain the outer limits of our freedom? Or is there more…

(The writer is an ex lifestyle editor and PR vice president, and now a full-time novelist and columnist on sexuality and gender, based in Delhi. She is the author of ‘Faraway Music’ and ‘Sita’s Curse’. Her third book ‘You’ve Got The Wrong Girl’ is out next.)