Celebrity Column | Let’s talk about sex, writes Ayushmann Khurrana

For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about political stuff. Treading the thin line of being apolitical and yet putting across a point. For the last two weeks, I haven’t written anything sexual, even though I got the best action of my life in these two weeks. Hope my wife doesn’t read this.

I agree with Mae West when she says, “Sex is emotion in motion.” But my wife cringes away to glory when I express my naughty self in public. She thinks my demeanour is such that I come across as someone who is too pious to pen erotic musings. She also thinks I should curb carnal cravings while writing. Which is as ridiculous as the use of alliteration in the last sentence. This time, I haven’t asked her to proofread my column, which I usually do.

Today is the apt day to talk about sex. On this day, around July 11, 1040, lady Godiva rode naked on horseback through Coventry, to force her husband, the Earl of Mercia to lower taxes. I’m a very visual person and I can imagine a hot lady on horseback galloping with her tresses flying. Sigh. Thank goodness, we have no such rebellion against our home-grown GST, in the absence of a legit First Lady. I’m a very visual person and I don’t even want to go there. Phew.

Today in the year 1884, the first ever cricket test match was supposed to be played, but day one got washed out. What an irony. It meant the ‘players’ couldn’t play because the pitch was too ‘wet’. What an irony again, raised to the power of two. Today in 1919, Dutch first chamber approved woman suffrage. The right to vote. Yes, this thing is just a century old. Men and women have been together since time immemorial, but this thing of equality is just a century old. They got the right to vote. Wow. Do they even get the right to vote if they want to have sex with their partner in India? Have you heard about marital rape? It is believed that a woman in India is 40 per cent more likely to be raped by her husband than by a stranger. Marital rape in India is not defined in the Indian Penal Code and thus not criminalised, and is largely not viewed as rape by Indians because of the ‘sacred’ nature of marriage in our culture.

Yes, I’d said let’s talk about sex. But I’m sure you never thought the screenplay of this article will take such a drastic turn. A lot of women in the rural parts of our country don’t even know what an orgasm is. Men generally ‘cum’ and go. They don’t think about the satisfaction of their partner in the 70 per cent of our nation. Isn’t this astonishing? And I always thought the main part of the act is to make your partner happy. Probably that’s what you and I, the menfolk of urban India, think. Rest of our ilk need ‘Chivalry in Bed’ coaching classes. They need to develop love for foreplay over Coldplay. We live in two different Indias. On the one hand, rural women are getting a raw deal and have no idea about the rules in bed, while on the other, women in urban India are seeking divorce on the grounds of sexual dissatisfaction. This disparity of thought and awareness is flabbergasting and is only found in India.

“I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was, ‘The man goes on top and the woman underneath’. For three years, my husband and I slept in bunk beds.” — Joan Rivers

There is an alarming increase in the number of asexuals in this world, too. Japanese are known as the kinkiest, but also most of the asexuals are arising from this quaint nation. The youth is getting addicted to porn rather than sex. They’re going through a bizarre thing called Celibacy Syndrome. With the dropping birth rate, the country is facing a major issue with the decline in the collective horniness of the nation. And then there’s Haruki Murakami, the best selling author of Japan, who loves portraying women in the most poetic way. He talks about earlobes and fingers of a lady and defines them in the most beautiful prose. Sigh. Sex or no sex. Doesn’t matter.

Love and respect should remain forever. Go for it if she desires. Else there’s a red light for you to gauge.

“We should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so visible.” — Haruki Murakami