THE FORCE IS WITH HIM
The Great Indian Male, with his prejudices and biases intact, revels in his normalcy. Indeed, he’s a statue in his fixity as the winds of change blow helplessly around him
Surveys, no matter how impersonal, become rituals over time, creating a cascade of gossip and initiating little dramas of anticipation. The india today Sex Survey is 15 years old and has become a part of media folklore. As one recollects little nuggets from the surveys over the years and, like a social science squirrel, puts them together, one senses that many of these shine as discrete facts but as one searches for patterns of change, one is disappointed. Standing at the centre of the survey is that unique species, The Great Indian Male, who, unlike the Great Indian Bustard, refuses to go extinct. As a patriarchal figure almost indifferent to change, he
displays the mentality of a khap panchayat, turning the findings of the sex survey into a dismal science. The excitement, the slivers of change, lie in the footnotes where women attempt the possibilities of a different world.
There is something almost immutable about the male as one harvests the statistical nuggets about him over the years. He is a contented soul as far as sex goes, clear about his perspectives and preferences. As the survey puts it, 55 per cent of the men between 18-55 are very happy with their sex life. Like Alice, sex becomes what the male says it is. It is a ritual to be performed without condoms as using condoms seems to mitigate his pursuit of pleasure. The male has clear expectations about purity, especially virginity; 56 per cent are clear that they would not marry a woman who has had premarital sex. The men, at least 76 per cent of them, are categorical that it is marriage that gives them the right to sex. Women almost become a piece of property and forced sex is the order of the day. Strangely, or not so strangely, sex for the Indian male seems to be an individualistic act—one is not quite sure whether he is a pump or a person as he reviews his performance. The question of unwanted pregnancy hardly bothers him. Of late, he tends to be a bit more careful, seeking safe sex to protect his person. The male loves pornography, seeing it as almost an educational device to increase pleasure, working out possibilities he might have seen in some smutty movie. Following the pleasure first principle, he enjoys occasional one-night stands, and 37 per cent report some homosexual experience. Open to new experience, the male realises the workplace is the new playing field—16 per cent admit to have asked women for sexual
favours in return for job promotion.
The overall sociological picture is not a presentable one. Men seem to resist change, while women creep into every crevice of change looking for little modules of freedom, intimacy and dignity. Love does not matter in such a situation as pleasure and intimacy even for a day is welcomed by them. In fact, 33 per cent of women prefer security over pleasure, seeking financial security over the sexual and the emotional. The odd contrast, one senses, is that the moralistic, patriarchal, hypocritical man somehow reduces a woman to a less than moralistic creature looking for freedom.
The situation shows little possibility for change with parents as averse to sex education as men are to condoms. The possibilities of small-town freedom and change hangs tantalisingly but one needs to wait before the Indian small town threatens to be a new
Peyton Place. Reading the survey, one senses that sex is hardly a relationship, a conversation, a pursuit of the erotic but more a biological act, a release surrounded by puritanical feelings about the behaviour of women. Women might think of other possibilities, but the man, with an arranged marriage, thinks of a woman as only an agent servicing his sexual entitlements. The recent changes in the perception of the body, the quiet liberation of the small town at least as a back stage, the availability of condoms adds little to his sense of history or change. The male exists in his eyes as that immaculate conception who looks at the mirror with approval and contentment. The sexual revolution or even the information revolution are distant possibilities for his unchanging self.
Given this dismal background, one combed the 2017 survey for a rumour of change. In a technological sense, the use of condoms or morning-after pills is still distant and the search for occasional casual sex is showing a slight increase. Twitter and the camera add a sense of delight as at least 10 per cent seems to share videos and photographs in a semi-naked position. Twitter seems more enticing than the condom. Condoms are literally unpoetic, while the video seems to speed up the temptation or at least gossip around it. Between video swaps and pornography, gradually a new world of the social is being born. Experimentation is opening out, with internet sex and phone sex setting a 20 per cent happy. Happiness with one’s sex life seems inordinately high, moving across towns between roughly 80 and 90 per cent.
Yet when asked what parts of a partner one would ‘fancify’, the suggestions appear comically like a minor shopping list. With virginity still a requirement of 70 per cent of the respondents and heterosexuality the standard, all one can hope for is that the 30 per cent who are different may bring about a change that goes beyond deviancy to a different sense of freedom. About the only hope one can see is a softening of the puritanical in terms of sex creating a different world from marriage. Marriage remains duty but sex, as the one-night stand and premarital percentages show, offers some sense of pleasure. Sex might now seem more an act of plumbing, habit, rights than a search for a pleasure or the erotic. The Great Indian Male revels in his normalcy, a statue in his fixity as the winds of change blow helplessly around him.