What India Today's sex survey revealed to me
The ageing middle class in this country is shocked that people are having sex, as the annual India Today sex survey for 2014 – focused on adolescents – has revealed. That is, children (mere children!) are making genital contact with each other, and that too with gusto. But sadly, these "errant" young ones are having little or no sex education that is useful, and as a result their parents are scared. Regardless, most parents seem okay with sex education consisting of bananas, which stand in for penises, and condoms at their kids’ schools. What in this scenario, a banana might ask, is innocence, and what, perversity?
Precociousness is abundant in the world right now. Children teach us much, and I don’t say that in the symbolic romantic sense, that a child is the father of man, I mean this literally. For instance, my seven-year old nephew was to whom canny hotel staff handed their comments book at the end of a family holiday. He made a seven-point entry where he did not forget to compliment the staff, the chef, a boat. He didn’t miss mentioning the dolphins as they’d gone to the Sunderbans, and its other fauna.
This pleased the proud parents, who of course also know the world has been made obscene by the graphic picturisations of naked body parts and their cutely officious seven-year-old probably got the information about the regional flora and fauna from same place where face-sitting and female orgasm may be learned. The internet is the oracle. And like desperadoes drinking bottoms up and ordering one for the road at last orders in a London pub, kids are really making a night of it. And who can blame them?
Children have the increasing awareness that life is tough – school is important; if you’re talented you will be worked to an inch of your life; if you’re not, life will be tougher still; it shall never be possible to be beautiful enough, though as you get older life will become boring and you will be, well, old. The cards have all been laid in front of the children in a way perhaps they were not in front of us, the older bunch, who were dismally resource poor.
It wasn’t for nothing that Pete Townshend sang, the "The Kids Are Alright" in the '60s when psychotropic drugs and affluence had allowed young people in the West what the internet is providing now: the means to know. The drugs and alcohol were, and remain, a bonus.
Frankly, I don’t care about scared parents. Privately, I’m quite delighted about all this corruption. Corruption had another meaning before it acquired the recent one: vice. Now of course we all know what Vice is. A magazine that started as a smutty but stylishly alternative fashion rag for hipsters but emerged to offer intelligent news to the same youth or age-group now jaded and fiercely well-informed thanks to broadband and now, smartphones. Vice, some say, was the death knell for the ladmag in the West.
Maxim, Nuts and Loaded, all great examples of that market sector, have now shut shop. As a Guardian columnist put it – "in the '90s you couldn’t move for boobs". It is the end of an era. Katie Price better known as Jordan, a poster girl for ladmags and plastic surgery, has gone back to a bra size of 32B, from an irksome 34FF. This is not to say that pornography has changed: it is still made from the perspective of men, as it has been. But it’s becoming pedestrianised. Canadian porn star Sunny Leone whose pictures had to be hidden from wives, mothers or sisters before, in the Adobe folder before are now resplendent across screensavers. Hopefully the teacher with the condom and the banana will catch-up, as bemused young people go from green to jaded.
But they don’t have it in them, yet, to face up to one sad thing, I suspect. And that is "duty sex" – missing from the glossary of teen terms India Today has included in the issue. At some point in their conjugal lives – and I’m sure there will be many healthy exceptions – they will stop having sex. That is when the rot will set in, but they won’t think about it, yet. And just out of spite, let’s not tell them, let’s keep this a secret. Let that awakening come and let it be rude. (Bemused smiley here).
But India remains adolescent in the sense that boys and girls here learn that forced sex within a marriage is not recognised as rape: so why not abolish marriage? They might want to question the grown-ups editing the issue why homosexuality was not mentioned in an entire issue about adolescent sex.
As I get older, I realise how difficult it was to be young. As a child you were always at the mercy of adults who were fickle and full of folly, like they are, but all the power equations were skewed to them. The kids may be carrying a revolution in their heads but at the moment the most they can do is wear a t-shirt that says "I’m with stupid" and continue to be at stupid’s mercy.