Comment

In Europe, fertility is low, so they need sex education. Here, we have complaints of sexual harassment daily. What will this sex education lead to among our youngsters?”

That’s Nawab Malik, NCP MLA from Kurla, speaking in the Assembly debate on sex education in schools. Malik’s views don’t come from individual ignorance; they represent the majority opinion amongst politicians and possibly even society.

Analyse them and they say: In Europe, boys and girls don’t know how to have sex, so they need sex education to make more babies. In India, we already know about sex and therefore indulge in sexual harassment. Give sex education and the harassment will get worse.

People in the West worry that their children are sexually precocious; in contrast, our young are abysmally ignorant about sexual matters. This lack of awareness and society’s conspiracy of silence on the subject has made sex a dirty word.

Commonsense suggests that sexual harassment is a direct result of this combination of ignorance and attitude.

Another direct result is trauma. A doctor was telling me of a girl who was convinced she was pregnant, even though tests had turned out negative. Why? Because she had been kissed by a boy.

Pregnancy to her was inevitable. She was 19! Other doctors will tell you of young couples in arranged marriages starting a family immediately after marriage, because nobody told them about contraception.

(Statistics from the Family Planning Association of India say that 60 per cent of girls married at 15 to 19 years have unwanted pregnancies). It’s worse when lack of sex education results in unwanted pregnancies before marriage.

Why do our politicians believe that ignorance is bliss? Why do they ignore the fact that raging hormones are a necessary condition of youth, and making the young aware of it and giving them ways to cope with it is to help them, not corrupt them? Why can’t they see that sex education will teach the young about inappropriate behaviour? The government’s National Study on Child Abuse gives these alarming figures: 48 per cent of school boys and 39 per cent of school girls face some form of sexual abuse and the age of maximum abuse is between the age of nine and 12.

I have a fairly simple solution to this problem. Let the government conduct a sex education course for our legislators. Let them see exactly what the children would learn if taught the course. And, oh yes, don’t call it ‘Sex Education’. Call it ‘Biological Awareness’.

Biological Awareness of another kind is now rampant in our land. The day Navi Mumbai Police Commissioner Ramrao Wagh growled his objection to IPL cheerleaders, most newspapers carried full-page ads to announce the new film Tashan.

The visual was striking: it showed Kareena Kapoor, the film’s heroine, in clothes that made the cheerleaders’ outfits look dowdy. And this wasn’t even the itsy, bitsy, teenie weenie lemon green bikini she is said to wear in the movie.

I have often wondered at the double standard we apply to what is permissible in our movies, and what is permissible outside them. Wagh roared, “There will be families in the stadium and we don’t want them to be embarrassed. The cheerleaders’ clothes should be decent and their movements should not be vulgar.”

Does Wagh never take his wife and cubs to see a Hindi movie? Does he think the pelvic thrusts of barely-clad item number girls okay? Do the West Bengal ministers (who are in charge of sports and water resources) think these acceptable, unlike the cheerleaders’ ‘wild dancing’ which ‘goes against the grain of our tradition and culture’?

Thank goodness chief minister Buddadeb Bhattarcharjee said, “I don’t keep myself abreast of such matters and have no wish to do so either.” His choice of words may have been unfortunate given the context, but at least he put his men in their place. Wish our CM had done the same.

The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist