Why do we always assume a single woman is desperate?

A friend, also single and my age, 38, asked me a significant question a few days ago: "Why is it that when people get to know of my single status and that I am not dating anyone and haven't been involved with a man in the longest time, they immediately think it gives them some sort of a license to ask me about my sex life, almost always adding patronizingly that a woman must have natural physical needs.

A lot of my women friends ask me this too, especially the married ones who seem to think they have an upper hand because they are getting daily sex. I mean doesn't a man have the same needs as we do? And just because sex is biology at the end of the day, must I want it desperately, and with whoever comes my way? And me not having had sex, which I usually admit I haven't now in a while, does it make me a dried up, frigid spinster?"

Initially I take her longwinded text at face value and jokingly retort, "it means we are now re-virginised, there are cobwebs…"

"Is it the same reason why a married man in my office recently hit on me saying that he knew I was lonely and that he was too, adding when I asked him to back off that his wife wasn't sexually satisfying him after her menopause and since he assumed we wanted the same things - he was suggesting a 'discreet' fling. Does single mean sexually available and internally frustrated?"

I took a break from typing and thought of us. I paused, especially on the word need, and how and if, wanting to have sex was intrinsically different from needing to have sex as a woman?

Is waiting for the right emotional connect, first, is automatically viewed and conveniently labelled as being way too traditional/uptight and in some measure thereby, asexual, especially in a culture of instant hook-ups, smart dating apps and no strings attached sexual networking?

I ask myself why I haven't ever had been interested in one-night stands or why I could never indulge in casual sex, and if that made me a prude too?

Were women, single and like me, in their mid 30s - who on the contrary gave into her physical stirrings - also equally vulnerable? Was she too looking for a companion and worried about her heart being broken?

I think of women and sexual desires as a whole and how we are inevitably the sum of our womb, no matter what our achievements - whether it's for pleasure or procreation.

I recalled with a slight bittersweet encounter - one of my college friends in Kolkata with whom I have no contact now, after being married and becoming a mother, constantly spoke of single women battling a mental illness - citing the example of her unmarried and virgin aunt who lived in a solitary room on the terrace of their ancestral home, screaming on full moon nights.

Her words holding out a strange foreboding that women sans sex and the stability of their own families ultimately turned hopping mad.

That suggested men were the cure, as if by extension of some primordial, patriarchal logic.

I wanted to ask her, on many an occasion, if she was sexually fulfilled - if every woman who is married at the right age and has sanctified that relation by producing a few kids or even one is proof of being happy in bed.

Does sex make a woman more powerful in the gender battle? Can she dictate terms? Does she actually not have to fake it?

If sexual gratification isn't a narrow, one-way street and is guaranteed to be empowering? Is boredom not bound to set in?

If we are tight-lipped in asking a married woman, a sister or a friend or a colleague about her sex life, then what gives the society the right to invade the privacy of a single woman?

Why is a divorced or widowed woman shunned by her girlfriends and feared as being a husband snatcher?

Does being single put my sexuality on some kind of a sale - meant for public viewing?

Whether I am a virgin or a whore - whose sex life is it, and just because I nurture the same horniness as others, watch porn and masturbate - why am I an anomaly, when I do it alone, mainly?

"What would you say? What answer should I give, you think?" my friend pings me again after a few seconds of silence at my end.

I deliberate on the advice I should give her. We sail in the same boat after all. Just last week, I was told by a friend that she had decided to give in to her hormones and had wild sex with a man she met on a dating app, asking me to give up waiting.

He was clear he wasn't interested in settling down and was looking for company, as opposed to long-term companionship.

As singletons, we are constantly told not to be choosey when it comes to men, especially as we stand on the threshold of turning 40.

A lot of our single friends our age are actively dating, sexting, checking into Oyo rooms and popping the Ipill like the routine Crocin.

It's not like we have saved ourselves for marriage either and certainly aren't virgins - or that we don't wake up on mornings craving to be touched and pleasured or shudder while watching a torrid love-making scene.

It's just that for some of us, sex isn't a separate entity: it comes as part of a romantic relationship.

We haven't been able to segregate our bodies from our minds and though tormented and bribed at times and tempted by peer pressure, we choose to linger on for an appropriate time and partner - someone who thinks along the same lines.

"I'm gifting myself a vibrating duckling on my birthday. 'This little guy can pamper you discreetly like no other. Take it along for an indulgent long bath, ladies!" says the product description." I finally answer.

"WTF???" she texts, confused.

"Coz pleasure is personal, and it's time to take things in our own hands, sistah" I end, with a smiley.