At the break of dawn, Paro carefully rolls out a mattress in the middle of a field in Punjab. Amidst the tall crops, she waits in quivering anticipation of a wild sexual adventure with her childhood sweetheart, Dev, and makes no attempt at cloaking her pronounced desire. And when she is spurned by the overtly chauvinistic hero, she simply dumps him and moves on with her life. Starkly different from the visible sexual repression in the opulent and high-octane Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, its modern avatar, Dev D, has been lauded by critics for its bold portrayal of women as sexual beings, who recognise that they can have the big O if they want to, and not just as suppressed souls who are, at the very most, allowed to sigh into their pillows.

The Indian woman today compares notes on bedroom moves. She hugs her male friend thank-you after he gifts her a sex toy he’s bought for her from Amsterdam. She openly reads the sex and intimacy pages of women’s magazines while waiting for her ride home, no, not under the blanket. She discusses with her friends, his ‘thing’, the G-string and everything in between. She couriers a pink underwear to a middle-aged, balding man to scream out loud that ‘her body is her own business’. And about the time when women said yes to sex because their partners wanted it? Forget it. Not happening.

When she reads a chapter titled ‘Just do it’ asking her, in a way, to play along with her partner even if she doesn’t want to, she is outraged and furiously types out a stinker to the author of the book, The Sex Diaries: Why women go off sex and other bedroom battles.

A sex survery conducted in 2008 by a national magazine found that Bangalore women topped the list of those who used sex toys regularly for sexual gratification. Thirty percent of women approved of kinky sex and 13% approved of it all the time.

This comes at a time when popular culture is still in the grips of the virgin/whore binary. Walking this thin line between of sexual decency and immodesty, women are pushing the envelope, blurring the lines of promiscuous behaviour. It’s all too overwhelming, says Sarojini Sahoo, a feminist and Oriya writer. “If female sexuality is to be recognised by our patriarchal society, then the fundamental moral social values would obliterate.

We are not ready for that yet. Our society thrives on a ‘false’ phobia created by the man, of course. The result is that even women are conditioned to adore the idea of the ‘ideal woman’ while nobody is asking what the ‘ideal man’ should be like. The woman is expected to be the ‘goddess of sacrifice’. Have you ever heard of a ‘god of sacrifice’?” asks Sahoo. Only male sexual feelings are given great significance, she says.
She furthers that burgeoning expression of female sexuality is threatening a breakdown of traditional patriarchal society.

But this is only natural, says Ramdev Ratnam, an alternative therapist, who deals with human energies. He explains that the world has utilised the left brain functions to the maximum, giving us technology and all the comforts of modern living. In pursuit of luxury, over many centuries, we ignored our right brain functions like feelings, creativity and instinct. Men are conventionally known to be strong, left-brained beings, while women have dominant right brain functions. The time has now come to rest the saturated left brain and to allow the right brain to lead us. “A result of this is that sexual instincts are now getting a new outlet for expression,” he says.

Ratnam adds that women have certain masculine qualities, which is manifested in power and anger drives. “Look around and you’ll see more women expressing uninhibited anger, and more women in positions of power. Also, where the sex drive is unfulfilled, it is converted into the power drive. In the near future, you can expect not just cracks, but many big holes in the glass ceiling,” he says. On the other hand, men are also discovering their feminine sides, metrosexuality being just the beginning.

India has always revered the Goddess of sexuality. But the average woman is told that there is dignity in veiling her sexual desires. This came about only when patriarchy became the unquestioned system to be followed. Before that, suppression of the female was unthinkable, because the Goddess cult ruled everyday life. Ishtar and Innana were representative Goddesses in Babylonian civilisation. In India, it was Goddess Durga. Then came the Hammurabi code, which swung the wheel of power and placed the crown on the man’s head. The patriarchal system introduced rules which were not conducive for the woman to fully express her sexuality.

Return of the Black Madonna
In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness of female sexual energies. Fusing the Eastern and Western understanding of the female sexual, Rev Dr Mathew Fox, in his 2006 work titled The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of our Times, talks of how the Black Madonna is shaking us up for the twenty-first century. A Black Madonna or Black Virgin is a statue or painting of Mary in which she is depicted with dark or black skin. There have been several theories about the Black Madonna, one of them being that she is another avatar of the Indian Kali Goddess, the black womb from which all life appears.

The last time the Black Madonna played a major role in western culture and psyche was the twelfth century renaissance. In recent years, the Black Madonna has been referred to in the context of female sexuality because she represents the bounty of the harvest, nature and sexuality. Fox writes: “The Black Madonna calls us down to honour our lower chakras. One of the most dangerous aspects of western culture is its constant flight upwards, its race to the upper chakras and its flight from the lower chakras. The Black Madonna takes us down, down to the first chakras including our relationship to the whole (first chakra is about picking up the vibrations for sounds from the whole cosmos), our sexuality (second chakra) and our anger and moral outrage (third chakra).”Sahoo says: “It’s important to understand that when women freely express their sexual desires, society will only rise, not fall.”