Why We Nurse a Perverse Moral Fetish For Younger Women

Men over centuries have preferred betrothing younger women – perhaps a functionality of how sexes are pre-conditioned

Like any single, 37-year-old – where marriages are arranged meticulously for couples to lose their well-preserved and bursting at the crotches virginity – I’ve been on countless matrimonial sites, thanks to my 66-year-old mother and my 70 plus uncle in Kolkata.

Being an only child pretty much also nails my case!

School and college topper, media person with over a decade of experience, published author and columnist should do wonders for my matrimonial CV – except it doesn’t. My age is a major deterrent; I’m told, by grim-faced shaadi managers (yes, there is such a nomenclature), with most mothers of 40-plus men (now my karmic playgroup) worried I may not be fertile enough to produce bonny grand-sons, or that their corporate honcho ladlas will have to spend on IVF/surrogacy, instead of planning their tirth yatras.

Let’s face it, marriage, by its very definition is equivalent to procreation – the highest bodily and spiritual function of a blushing bride. I mean not just Shahid Kapur, but men over centuries have preferred betrothing younger women – perhaps a functionality of how the sexes are pre-conditioned. Dr Samuli Helle, the scientist known for his research on the same subject, who studied the nomadic Sami, or ‘reindeer people’ of Finland discovered that men who married women 15 years younger bore the highest number of children making it to adulthood.

Closer home, we like our bahus and dulhans to be nayi naveli. We want our daughters growing up pati vrata. We aspire to become like our sati savitri sasu-ma’s. We crack umpteen Internet jokes and speculate endlessly on whether SRK will actually romance Alia Bhatt in the soon-to-go-on-floors Gauri Shinde film. Without raising the same disturbing dialogue when a scary news item flashes before our eyes on the same day – Tamil Nadu tops the number of cases registered under Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006, with 41 cases being registered till June 2105. According to National Crime Records Bureau, the state has recorded 56 cases as against a total of 222 cases registered under the Act across the country in 2013.

Do we secretly sexually fantasise about virginal, nubile brides?

Think about the phrase nath utharna (deflowering), a popular axiom, with the fact that nearly 80% of all worldwide trafficking is for sexual exploitation. An estimated 1.2 million children are bought and sold into sexual slavery annually. India is the thriving hub of Asia, and the world, in trafficking with our commercial sex industry, as elucidated by government sources, swarming with 3 million prostitutes, of which 40 % are children below 18.

Sexual exploitation via sex tourism, child sex tourism, paedophilia and prostitution in places of religious pilgrimage, and other tourist destinations flourish. The 2013 Global Slavery Index, published by Australia-based Walk Free Foundation, an organisation that works to end modern slavery, found almost half of the 30 million “modern slaves” in the world are from here.

A BBC interview from 2013 of a Kolkata-based trafficker quoted him as, “I traffic 150 to 200 girls a year, [and demand is rising] starting from age 10, 11 and older, up to 16, 17.” The man got paid around $1,000 per child with agents working in the source areas who promise parents that the girls will find work in Delhi, before selling them to ‘placement agencies’. Local politicians and police “are well aware of what we do. I have to tell police when I am transporting a girl and I bribe police in every state – in Calcutta, in Delhi, in Haryana,” he added.

My maternal great grandmother bore 11 children, expiring during childbirth before 25. My childhood nanny, Shanti maasi, also widowed in her early 20s in a quaint village in West Bengal was untouched all her adult life, married to a man at six, he then in his late 30s, suffering from tuberculosis.

Every weeknight, my mother watches Gangaa. Set in Varanasi, the soap’s about a child widow put through all sorts of emotional and physical torture by an older widow in the same family. Ballika Vadhu, another hit primetime serial that made Anandi a household name, also scored highly on TRPs.

Despite the 2006 Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, making it illegal for girls under 18 and boys under 21 to marry, those convicted of involvement facing up to two years in jail and fines of up to Rs.200,000 (about £2,100) – at 71 million, we have the highest number of unregistered children below five and the second-highest number of child marriages, according to an UN report. 46% of South Asian girls marry by the age of 18. One in five girls is wedded before they turn 15. The highest rates globally.

Are our bodies a free desi Viagra for an ancient, oversexed male libido that can’t even download porn freely? Is pushing out children the highest justification of our vagina? The reason we allow it to be commoditised during our nuptials? Why aren’t invasive questions asked of Bollywood or TV serials when ageing heroes, waxed and six-packed on steroids, canoodle women young enough to be their daughters? How long will we exist in continual, convenient denial of our child bride and child trafficking statistics?

Pretending SRK and Alia is just the tip of our deep-seated, moral perversion…

(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.)