Let's talk sex: Peeking into the secret life of Indian women

On International Women's Day, instead of outraging at the Indian woman's lot, we shine a light on her sexual life that is at the core of her personal struggle.

In Utopia, everyone has enough to eat and drink, they are gainfully employed, their lives have meaning, and sexual violence is an anomaly. In the Ideal Republic, women don't have to compete murderously with each other and resort to emotional manipulation to outwit men within the family and crack their skulls on an impenetrable glass ceiling at work.



They don't have to use their, ugh, horrible phrase, 'feminine wiles' or pretend to be one of the guys to get ahead, and the likes of AP Singh, defence lawyer of one of the December 16 gang rape accused, who blithely proclaims in Leslee Udwin's India's Daughter that he'd burn his daughter to death if she "engaged in premarital activities", would be such a rarity, he'd be the only specimen in a zoo for fantastic beasts.



In Utopia, there are no boys clubs, feminism is redundant because there are no rights left unwon, and women are free to pursue professional, personal and sexual happiness. The sun shines in a mellow way, the flowers are in perennial bloom, every smile reveals perfect teeth, and life is beautiful. Alas, Utopia doesn't exist.



In our imperfect world, today, March 8, International Women's Day, is a great marketing opportunity, an occassion for the fool and her money to be parted at the celebratory sales, a day to trick us into thinking we've made great strides when we're still hunting for the invisible ladder to success.

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DH Lawrence suggested that the longest ever war is the ongoing one between men and women. It's a particularly enervating one for the heterosexual woman because of the conflicting emotions involved: you want to love but you also want to lash out; you want to be cocooned but you also want to be free; you want to be the perfect daughter, sibling, partner, mother but you don't want to be defined solely by those labels.



You want the men in your life to let you breathe but they, poor sods, are still functioning according to an atavistic code where, let's face it, women are individuals only in relation to the men who 'own' them. This is a cliche but one that bears repetition lest it's forgotten in the excitement over Women's Day Sales and special offers at the mall.



Things are changing. At least they are for a miniscule set of educated urban Indian women determined to lead lives vastly different from those of their mothers and grandmothers sequestered in domesticity, unable or unwilling to exercise choice and always, always afraid of the social backlash, of the 'what will people say?' phenomenon.



The fear of being cast out from 'respectable' society continues to haunt us. It keeps us from being too radical, from going after what we want. "Will I be a bitch, a fallen woman, too sexual, too ambitious, too unfeminine… and what is femininity anyway? And if it's a crime to be any of those things, why do I feel happier when I am all of those?" say the voices in our heads.



Sex - the difference between man and woman and the resultant strictures on life choices for those who do not want to conform, to be 'good' women - lies at the messy core of the Indian woman's personal struggle. A few more are now willing to defy the rules laid down in early childhood; rules so powerful we have internalised them.



A few more are willing to seek fulfillment in the area that the Indian woman has been taught to deny everywhere but within the socially-sanctioned sphere of an 'appropriate' marriage, the area of sexual choice.



The accompanying stories deal with real Indian women: lesbians, bisexuals, straight women, married women, unmarried women, women who buy sex and those who seek out love and sex online.



International porn star Sunny Leone now an unlikely Bollywood heroine - her exotic part-Indian status has perhaps helped her cross a bridge that wouldn't exist at all for a desi porn star - talks about the many possibilities of sexual being, while activist Kavita Krishnan contemplates the ways in which media compells women to conform and to deny the existence of pleasure.



This then is an issue on transgression, on Indian women who seek sexual fulfilment in a society that largely denies them that possibility, one that denies choice to women, and by extension, to men too.



Perhaps the problem can be traced to the pervasive belief that our culture is a superior one where the present is a fall from a Vedic Utopia. Perhaps we need to accept that things were always rotten in Bharat Varsha when it came to the rights of women and that later incursions and colonialism perpetuated and solidified those attitudes.



Perhaps we now need to accept that we aren't people with a golden past but ones who need to seek a progressive future if not just feminism and women's rights are to be achieved, but if humanism - that most difficult of isms - is to flourish in India. Some of these stories - especially the one from the gigolo who provides comfort to lonely women - are full of pathos.



Others highlight the lesbian struggle and the attempt to find sexual happiness within and outside marriage. Still others talk about BDSM, a zone of multiple shades of grey. All these stories, though, are about real Indian women, who are part of a larger culture that denies the existence of their desires.



Today, on Women's Day, instead of outraging at the Indian woman's lot, we choose to shine a light on her secret life. Perhaps Utopia will become reality when fewer women need to have secret lives.

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