Comment

Here's a true confession: my parents have had sex. At least twice, to account for my sister and myself. Their parents were quite restrained too, progeny-wise: one set did it only once, the other one twice. But my great-grandparents? Now that's another story. Like rabbits, I have to say. Too many offspring each.

A revelation: your parents, especially if you were born before 1975, have had sex too. After that date, there is some chance of your having been a test-tube baby, so your own birth may not have been via sex but somehow I feel certain that the prospective parents must have tried a few times before they realised that it wasn't leading them to procreation.

Don't like it? Too primal? Doesn't make it less true. We're all here because human beings have been having sex since they've been human beings. So what's this obsession with sex that the media has surrounded us by? How many times are Indians doing it? In what positions? With whom? And blah blah.

To read through our urban, English media today, one gets the distinct impression that no one in India had much sex till the mid-1990s. Don't bother asking how we got such a phenomenal population, because clearly those who did it then were minus the specialised knowledge that people have now. Hmmm.

Young people in a Hindi film have to go all the way to Australia to live together (yet I have had friends who lived together - gasp, outside marriage, and that was way after Protima and Kabir Bedi lived together and I'm in my 40s). This apparently proves that young Indians do want to have sex but have to go all the way to Australia to do it. Otherwise, they are chaste and pure when living in India that is Bharat. Yeah right.

The question I'm asking is: what's with the media hysteria about sex? Sure, Indians are still more likely to restrict sex to the bedroom rather than mall escalators. If the media were run by young people asserting their rights, I would say go for it. Let all our print media space be filled with stories about sex, then. But the media is run by old to old-middle-aged men. Is this media obsession then a kind of wish-fulfilment? It's like the media has suddenly decided that India today is like America in the 1960s or some frustrated fool just read Gay Talese's Thy Neighbour's Wife a couple of years ago instead of when they should have.

Is it a class thing? The upper and lower classes, says conventional morality, never really had much to do with morality. The uppers didn't have to and the lowers couldn't afford the luxury. So that leaves the pathetic middle classes, pretending to be chaste. At least the old days, when a bunch of flowers and a bee meant nudge-nudge wink-wink left you amused, more amused than watching one more plastic faced and plastic-filled wannabe starlet doing the bump and grind. Heck I'm female, what would I know. And that brings us to those other wacko females. The ones who started hounding Khushboo for some innocuous remark. Apparently, what the beleaguered Tamil film star did say is that Tamil men should be intelligent enough to realise that their wives need not be virgins. Out jumped the moral police. But I think maybe they were upset that Khushboo implied that men had to be intelligent. Or they thought they'd get it for all the lies they'd told their own husbands when they got married.

Here's a solution: let's get some fresh thinking into this whole sex thing. Let's learn to be adult about it and not fall prey to the fantasies of lecherous old men. I say, let young men and women dictate our sex quotients. And let the rest of us lie back and watch the fun.

The writer is a freelance journalist.