Girls Gone Wild

It is a staple on Karan Johar’s chat show aimed at the female celebrities: Have you ever kissed a girl? So far, he has only gone for the evidently outspoken women, whose sexual alignment is cast in stone. At least for their professional resume. But we wonder how a Sapna Bhavnani or a Bani J would have responded to this ‘TRP-generating’ question. If reactions to their kissing Boomerang video is anything to go by, the whole world and its cousin are still ‘hawwww’ – ing over it in public and watching it on a loop in private.

It is every girls’ best-kept secret and every man’s favourite fantasy. Which is perhaps why we never tire of probing every hot, desirable, feisty, sassy woman about it. Unless you are a Mira Rajput, who has not-a-strand-out-of-place on her pious head (you would be forgiven to think we are talking about a Barjatiya heroine here), most women, at the right time and place will tell you: Yes! And that is enough to send the rest of the male universe into a tizzy. The assumption being – Ooh she must be really, really naughty. Adventurous. Bold. Courageous. The truth is, she is all that and nothing.

If you strip the same-sex encounters of its celebrity-fantasy aura, you will see, in most cases, it is perhaps the most natural thing in the world to have happened during adolescence. Especially if you were in a convent, boarding school, or an all-girls academy, where it all began with sex talk, most of which was full of misinformation carefully seeded by our adults. I remember how one of my classmates came up with this gem when all of us started menstruating: “If you even think of a boy during this time, you get pregnant!” It took some of the wiser, older girls, to end our collective innocence. The ‘haw’ soon turned into a ‘hmmm’ and nothing was the same anymore.

And it took a new generation with access to technology to give us the DPS sex clip to remind us of our vintage – I am a 70’s child. The nation woke up to the reality — sex education in school text books had failed to keep pace with the ‘hands-on’ approach of our children.

The wheres and whens of ‘have you ever kissed a girl’ may have changed over time, but for most women, a stray encounter, a spontaneous kiss, a pair of eager hands exploring the contours of an adolescent or mature body, a tender touch even, is still likely to be a one-off. Unless, it un-closets a sexual identity straining at the leashes, girls do know how to have some fun and end it there—sans all the emotional baggage that comes with it.

As I said, all you need to do is ask nicely. Chances are, the woman, the wonderful wife, the girlfriend or the sister making perfect dosas and beautiful rangolis, will have had a more interesting secret life than your #aboutlastnight Insta post.

(Scribbler, scribe, traveller Chandrima Pal takes you through the sexual landscape of today)

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