I still remember the first person I gave advice to online. She was a young girl on Twitter, who messaged me to ask if she should lose her virginity to her older boyfriend.
I had never planned on giving advice to perfect strangers, to be honest. After all, I’m not a licensed therapist or mental health counsellor. I’m not even a certified relationship counsellor. At the time, I was just a girl who had built up a small Twitter following: I generally tweeted jokes about men and dating, with the occasional serious feminist thread. As a young single woman, it never occurred to me that I might know enough to advise someone else on their love life.
Your body, your choice
I considered her question seriously before I wrote back. “No,” I said. “Have sex if you want to have sex. Don’t lose your virginity just because someone else wants you to. It’s your body; your choice. And if he has a problem with that, dump your boyfriend.”
Though I didn’t know it, she was the first of many young women (and men) who would approach me over the years for help.
Here’s the problem with Indian culture. We don’t have enough guidance.
Sure, we are guided by parents, uncles, aunts, teachers, and so on. There is never any shortage of people telling us what to do, and how to do it (study harder beta , get into IIT, marry a nice girl). But how many of these people are judgement-free? Could we talk to them about sex, for instance?
In the American sitcoms I watched growing up, there was always The Talk between parents and children. It was a nice idea; it reminded me of slender Judy Blume novels. The parent would explain the facts of life to the child, the importance of consent, and of safe sex.
Burning queries
How many Indian children get that talk? How many are encouraged to develop healthy attitudes to sex — rather than being told that sex is terrible and shameful? If we’re lucky, we might get a passing nod to the reproductive system in biology class (which doesn’t do much to explain sexual urges at all). It’s no wonder we grow up relying on Quora or the venerable sexpert Dr. Mahinder Watsa to answer our burning queries.
Here’s a sample of the kind of question posed to Dr. Watsa:
“I am a 20-year-old woman. Is there a chance of becoming pregnant after watching porn videos?”
Sigh. But the problem is larger than sex education — the problem is that we aren’t given space to be human , to be messy, to be young and experiment (which is the natural order of things). There’s no kindly older person to explain things like:
- Falling in love with the wrong person is very probable when you’re 15.
- Falling in love with someone of the same sex isn’t the end of the world.
- Nothing that happens to you at 15 is the end of the world.
- You’re going to be bad at certain things. You’re going to be worse at others. That’s okay.
- Learning how to nourish close friendships is as important as any other life skill.
- There’s no reason to be ashamed of your body, no matter what it looks like.
- What other people think of you doesn’t matter as much as what you think of yourself.
- Mental health is no different from physical health.
- Respect your elders, but don’t compromise on your own happiness in order to live by their rules.
I know that there aren’t enough mentors for young girls, because I didn’t have one myself. I often wish I’d had a big sister to explain a few things to me, practically and kindly.
As a 19-year-old in American college, I often felt like I was struggling to figure out some code everyone else knew. Like other South Asian kids I met, I had a kind of internalised shame and racism about my own identity: I refused to hang out with other Indian kids and do “stereotypically Indian things,” like watch Bollywood movies or reheat chicken curry in the dorm kitchens. When white boys told me I was “cute for an Indian girl,” I felt flattered rather than recognise that the ‘compliment’ was actually an insult.
When it came to relationships, I looked to the West to find myself. People dated casually, American girls were less ashamed of having desires, and Sex and the City had been hugely popular for some time now. It was common to go to Sunday brunch and hear a group of happy, hungover girls discuss their latest sexual experiences. There were any number of personal essays and feminist memoirs that acted as handbooks for young women there to teach them how to be, and how to come to terms with themselves. (Ironically, a lot of these books recommended that white women come to India to find happiness: I nicknamed it the Eat Pray Love model.)
But when it came to Indian women — well, we didn’t seem to need to “find ourselves”. We didn’t have the right to have identity struggles. Our duty was to be good, caring daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. Happiness was only sought by selfish women. There’s a phrase in Kerala, where I’m from, which goes adakkam odukkam . It means a woman who folds herself up, who sits quietly in the corner, who takes up very little space in the world.
Once I started looking, I saw the sexism everywhere. It was in our mythology; in our movies. A good Indian woman was demure like Sita. Chaste, but desirable, ready to sacrifice for her family. Her needs – if she was so uncouth as to have needs – came last.
Is the app broken?
When dating apps came to India, I read that Indian men on Tinder were furious because they weren’t getting any matches. They wrote on Yahoo Answers! “Why am I not getting matched with any women? Is the app broken?” They were more inclined to believe that the app was broken than that they weren’t getting swiped on because they weren’t desirable.
They couldn’t understand that women had a choice to say ‘no’ to them, and that they were exercising that choice on the app.
When I wrote an article about casual hookups, I was flooded with a stream of messages from Indian men. They emailed me, found my Facebook, messaged me on Instagram.
“Hey sexy”
“Wanna hookup”
“Lets go on a date?”
“Come to my bedroom?”
I longed to write back: “No, thanks. I don’t like slutty men who are easily available.” I abandoned the idea, only because the irony would be lost on them. There are so many deeply gendered terms in our society (in all of our regional languages). Slut. Bitch. Nag. Whore. Loose. Prude. Besharam. Whether you have sex or not, there’s a cussword for you.
That was how I came to write my book, Besharam : of Love and Other Bad Behaviors. It’s for the girls who are told to sit with their legs together, be softer, more tractable, more easily managed, less authentically themselves. Above all, it’s for the girls who are shameless in their pursuit of independence, happiness and freedom.
The author is a lawyer and writer based in New Delhi.
