The 'right' woman

Netflix and ALT Balaji would like us to believe that every bra or banyan-wearing Indian is burning up with lust. Both streaming platforms are in news these days with rivalling shows that discuss sexual desire in an urban and rural setting respectively. And it has got all of us talking about sex. While the former has recently released Lust Stories, the latter's more cheekily titled Gandii Baat is a season old.

Lust, the more flamboyant cousin of the oh-so-predictable love, is rarely the subject of mainstream discourse. It is relegated to temple walls and ancient scriptures, to pictures of men and women in copulatory positions that seem improbable. Even painful to some. The more adventurous ones will write to sex columnists, talking about their secret fantasies and fears.

But when some of Bollywood's finest filmmakers and the queen of sensationalism explore the contours of sexual desire, to uncover it for an entirely new generation, the result is rather interesting. Because other than Zoya Akhtar, whose film in Lust Stories is a tender exploration of sexual desire circumscribed by class politics, all other films are made by men, who attempt to create narratives about women's sexuality from the male perspective. The worst offenders are Anurag Kashyap and Karan Johar, whose sexually liberated women look like laughable caricatures at the end of the day. A sexy librarian who uses a sex toy in the school library to pleasure herself? Please! Women have better taste than that.

Ekta Kapoor's streaming platform fares worse with her team mistaking erotica for sleaze. The purported rural setting is a convenient trope to mix the macabre with the garish, where realism is a plus-sized woman desperately trying to pleasure her husband like the young blonde women in porn videos.

The truth is perhaps somewhere in between.

We are a country that loves to watch porn videos of firangs making out on kitchen counters and breakfast tables. On plush sofas and deserted beaches. Imagine what would happen if we were to replicate the same in our one BHKs or Girgaum Chowpatty?

We have definitely come a long way since our films used stock images of kissing sunflowers and cooing pigeons when the lead couple got amorous. When lust was Helen in a shimmering gown with a dangerous slit and an equally dangerous pout. They were the vamps, the seductresses, the Menaka-Urvashis of this world, out to distract virtuous men.

But women who openly acknowledge their sexual desires, whether it is someone in a hinterland village who says she has been ravaged by a snake, or a married woman who has an affair with her student, are still off kilter. Because a part of you will still be judging the women, laughing at their silliness or wondering when they will fall flat on their boobs.

Now that streaming platforms have given us some kind of a tabula rasa, high time we got our women right, isn't it?

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