Tinaz Nooshian MiD DAY's Features Editor cites Ensler to argue that the Indian woman's best friend could be the vibrator
Tinaz Nooshian MiD DAY's Features Editor cites Ensler to argue that the Indian woman's best friend could be the vibrator
Late night radio is amusing. That's after it stops being creepy. Dentist's secretary or HR executive by day, forlorn lover by night. Callers tear through the chrysalis of middle-class morality, spilling secrets to an FM love sage across the line; anonymity making an audience gathering of a couple of lakhs spluttered across a radio frequency, acceptable.
A hesitant but determined voice; female to everyone's surprise, throws an uncomfortable volley at the sage. She isn't satisfied, she says abruptly. The husband doesn't understand, she shrugs, before the sage can dole out, "unse khulke baat kijiye".
We haven't had sex in two-and-a-half years. Hubby is good-natured, successful but just not bloody interested. I am doing it with a close college pal, admits "Confused Cookie" to a newspaper agony aunt, who gives urban lovers a patient hearing, and customised advice edited to a crisp 75 words, six days a week. Do you love him? "Well, ya." Can you live without sex? "No." Does college pal seem better partner bet? "Maybe".
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Women in India, barring a few bright disgruntled urban sparks, view sex as a means to procreation. And just as well; the enlightened few who miss the pleasure end up cribbing to girlfriends over Costa Coffee. So, what's the hitch? Guys treat sex like business, said a hilarious news item about mercantile-minded Ahmedabadi men, who with their flair for making a quick buck apply the swift approach in bed too. Foreplay? What's that? ask the oblivious. Does it always have to be about her? ponder the narcissists.
This is how I see it. The body is a machine; you can drive it only if you understand it. And there's no way a foreign driver interested in arriving at his own destination, is going to chauffeur you to yours. How many women know everything there is to know about their body, have stood before a full-length mirror, naked, observing every contour. Most stand embarrassed by the starkness of skin, repulsed by that dam fold on the waist that refuses to melt even after skipping carbs for dinner. Or they are just plain busy to waste time watching what's theirs.
American activist and writer Eve Ensler, best known for The Vagina Monologues, a play that's expected to be feminist harangue but is actually a witty, sometimes poignant take on female sexuality, says Italian anatomist Mateo Realdo Colombo may have discovered the clitoris 500 years ago (although Gabriel Fallopius got into a scrap with him, arguing he'd laid eyes on it first), but most women are yet to hit upon what he called "pre-eminently the seat of a woman's delight".
I guess we can blame western medics of the late nineteenth century who declared that female sexual pleasure didn't play a role in reproduction, stripping the clitoris off its significance much to the delight of the Christian church. Instead, a fold of tissue named after the Greek God of marriage who died on his wedding night became the focus. The moral significance behind the hymen suited the men, making it easier for them to ensure that children of women they married were their own.
Strangely, back home in northern India, Tantra traditions claim an orgasm is essential to a woman's health. Not very different from women in the West who'd drop in at a doctor's clinic for a $2 massage that guaranteed an orgasm. In The Story of V, Ensler tells you how in 1890s America, applicators (what we know as vibrators) became the fifth household appliance to be electrified (after the sewing machine, fan, kettle and toaster), and even made it to advertisements of "electrical aids that every woman appreciates", sandwiched between radiators and mixer-grinder attachments.
The fortunate lot of urban Indian women, familiar with Internet shopping, are free to pick their Rabbits from their Butterflies. The resourceful explore Palika Bazaar and ramshackle stalls in VT's dingy archways to find neck massager substitutes.
The rest will have to live with the curious reality that the sale of vibrators is illicit, but that of guns is permissible. Like one of Ensler's monologue characters says: "We have yet to hear of a mass murder committed with a vibrator."
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