Are Indian Women Racy in Sex?

In its current issue, ‘India Today’ has published a survey report as usual on male-female sexuality in urban places of India. Some of my  friends messaged me to know my response. Here, it is:

In comparison to Sex Survey by “India Today” in 2003, this survey results of 2013 seem to indicate Indian women seem to be more in controlled and expressing their needs in their sex lives.  But are the numbers really accurate?

Let’s look at the results:

  If these results were true, it would be good enough to think that women’s body has been reached under women’s right. But does the ground reality show such conclusion?

This survey seems to be based on totally prejudiced sexist bias ideas inspired with the sex surveys of   some survey agencies earlier in the West.  Women have barely figured in it, the survey might be done with urban ladies who performed roles generally reserved for men. In India, still arranged marriages have a preferred social recognition.  Marital rapes in such arranged marriages are very common phenomena.  Ironically, the survey remained silent about the marital rapes occurred in India. They did not include any question on such rapes in their survey. The survey did not open how many of its married respondents are coming with love marriage or arranged marriage.

What is the motto of such surveys? I think, the underlying motive is only to help the patriarchal conspiracy to subjugate women. These are all money matters. Not ‘men’ but the ‘economy’ and ‘industries’ are now finding a new market among women to perceive their sexual desire.  The ‘consciousness about women’s sexual desire’ began when Procter & Gamble tried to win FDA approval for its female testosterone patch, which the company claimed could help women boost their sexual desire. Ironically, it has been proven by scientists that no single measurement of androgen hormones, like testosterone, can predict low desire. Some women with low testosterone levels did not have low desire, while some women with normal levels did.

Even the media are used by the commercial houses to subjugate women to make them pornified so that they could be utilised for income. Channel 4, one of UK’s popular TV broadcaster, in its programme “Embarrassing Bodies,” encourages the female viewers to soothe insecurity about common bodily issues, refers a woman to a cosmetic surgeon to have her perfectly healthy labia sliced off. Commercial cosmetics business houses try to propagate that such cosmetic FGM is safe reporting 71 percent of women having the procedures report an ‘improved sex life’ and 23 percent report they could reach orgasm more easily after obtaining such operations. But these claims are possibly advertising/marketing-based and cannot always be substantiated. Thus BJOG, an international journal of obstetrics and gynecology has denied these claims in a report published in its 1st issue of Volume 117. Experts (L. M. Liao, L. Michala, and S.M. Creighton) write:

“This review has identified almost 1,000 published cases of cosmetic labial surgery. Because the majority of such procedures are performed in the private sector, here audit and publication are not required, and because advertisement, especially via the Internet, is widespread, these figures are likely to represent the tip of the iceberg. No prospective studies were found. Follow-up was not carried out for most studies and, where available, it was of short duration with unspecified or suspect methodology. There was no attempt to compare preoperative morphological measurements with published criteria to assess the need for intervention. Surgery appeared to have been offered on demand, justified by verbal reports of physical and psychological difficulties.”

Sexual problems of women have not received adequate attention from the researchers. Worldwide, female sexual dysfunction (FSD) is a highly prevalent problem for 38%-63% of women.  Very few researches have been made clinically on sexual frigidity of women in India. And yet, according to a recent study by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, nearly half of all women who participated in the studies suffer from some sexual problem; many suffered from more than one. And it has now been proven that orgasm is not experienced by most women either in the West or in the East. Curiously, very few activists have come forward to proclaim that right for women. And it appears most medical researchers and funders of this research are also not in the mood to spend too much money trying to figure out why some women are sexually unhappy. But the surveys by India Today shows only 2.3 % of female respondents admit about their sexual unhappy lives. What a silly nonsense result!

I believe women are still living in denial of their sexual desire. Most women seldom discuss sex with their doctors. They even think not being able to experience orgasm during sexual intimacy is a normal occurrence. Indian society still has not been removed its taboo on sex and most of the women  are totally molded by patriarchal conspiracy where male sexuality is termed as ‘active’ while female sexuality is ‘passive.’ Here, I don’t think the situation in the West differs much from that of the East. It seems throughout the world, the sexual instinct of females is routinely suppressed. Those who find so much sexual positivism among Indian women might have selected a fixed specialized domain and this domain can’t be termed to represent Indian women any more.

Source: India Today December 2013 Issue.