Who needs men when a mobile can get us off

The brouhaha over "Radhika Apte's sex tape" got me intrigued and curious about this new movie Parched.

As I sat back to watch its trailer, I found myself glued to it, wide-eyed, replaying. And ended up shamelessly stealing its line - Who needs men when a mobile can get us off?

After this video leak, a lot had been said about how women's sexuality is scandalised, and men do not even make the headlines, how Indian men, repressed at home, vent their excitement over such leaked videos, how we Indians, soaked in secret pleasures, call it dirty openly.

Well, I was not actually in a mood for all these precious lectures; I was tempted to see the video. Radhika making headlines is not a new issue.

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I would love to see her act, especially with my childhood non-Bollywood crush "Jasoos Vijay" Adil Shah. I could not get the link with my amateur surfing skills for banned or leaked videos. I look forward to it when the movie comes, or if a well-wisher shares it.

The trailer courageously shows four Gujarati women taking a different road, breaking stupid social taboos and having the fun of their lives, travelling, conversing with men and women openly and intimately. In between, one of them says: "Who needs men when a mobile can get us off".

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I could not help but wonder if it is a new kind of adultery, an unbiased, not shameful adultery!

Technology has reached our homes, bedrooms, minds and hearts. It is like the emotional liberalisation for young women, where smartphones and interesting apps provide us a free market for love and lust.

Women who were questioned over a visit to the market, draped in dupattas, overprotected in the name of affection, found a new way to shun it all. And this new technological space is so full of choices.

Where there is hardly any judgment about what we want, sexually and emotionally. Mobiles have certainly empowered young women. Ladies who use dating apps can relate to it very well; where, unlike in social situations, every man hits on you and you hit on every man.

These open conversations are plenty enough to make us know and feel what we want from men, and what we do not (or whether we do not want the man at all).

Starting and closing a conversation gives power, cleanses away all the crap we have been fed with from childhood about shyness and purity being a woman's jewel. This is empowering.

These guilt-free multiple conversations, encounters and intimate moments are quenching the thirst for Indian women, who hardly had any chance 10-15 years ago to talk to more than two or three prospective men, and faced the compulsion to marry one of them.

Generally speaking, activities such as visiting shady movie halls and video-sharing were reserved for men, strictly. Internet, mobiles and smart applications challenged this monopoly and are giving us a chance to explore things in a digital manner.

So ladies! Let us all watch Radhika, appreciate her beauty and boldness. The dusky divine sexuality she carries. Talk about it, talk about yourself, and your bodies. To as many as you want and as much as you want.

Let's not settle so quickly. We have been settling for whispers and fears of being caught for so many years. It is a digital era, use your mobile and keep swiping right!