by Vani Viswanathan
‘Plzz help me my husband doesn’t want to have sex with me…what can I do??’
‘Dear MR, you can buy and wear a sexy dress to get him excited. See my suggestion below.’
This was a conversation in the ‘sex expert’ column on an online portal selling sex toys. ‘Sex Doctor,’ ingeniously employed by the portal, was out there to resolve the deepest and ‘darkest’ questions of Indians looking to improve their sex lives. Sex doctor, of course, diligently recommends one of the thousands of products on their site as the solution to the problem. Every single problem.
For all the public outrage and awkwardness around sex in this country, Indians are out there in the online world with a vengeance to ask questions, learn about and explore this aspect of their sexuality. From our mind-bogglingly large presence on global porn sites, to Tinder/OKC/Truly-Madly, to sex toys’ stores, to sexy lingerie on any underwear-selling website, to ‘Indians Gone Wild’ on Reddit (which I only recently learnt about), we are making our presence felt on anything to do with sex and pleasure online.
So much of this is bolstered by the internet’s ability to let us stay anonymous, smartphones and very accessible data plans, products that are packaged ‘discreetly’ so a vibrator could come in an innocently wrapped brown box, and perhaps the biggest winner, the ‘Cash on Delivery’ option, which helps avoid paper trails or awkward questions.
Despite all these opportunities to learn more and explore, our behaviour and questions remain at the same time appalling and sad. Let me focus on the questions alone, for discussing sex-related behaviour online will be a tome in its own right.
Questions come mostly from men and are, in irrational proportions, about the size of their you-know-what. Despite decades of (legit) experts explaining over and over that size isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of sexually satisfying a partner, this question seems to be the one giving men sleepless (and sexless, it seems) nights. Others ask about how to sustain for longer (possibly feeling challenged due to porn that gives an unhealthy and sometimes impossible picture of how long intercourse can go on) and why their (usually female) partner finds it painful when they try to do it.
Sadly, answers – especially if from online peers or from websites selling products – only serve to fuel wrong ideas that don’t help the cause of any of the partners involved in the sexual activities.
I work in the field of sexuality and spend quite a bit of time talking on various platforms and with diverse people on the importance of having accurate but fun conversations on sexuality with people, especially young people. If only we’d had these conversations, these men would have known that their size doesn’t matter (or at least ask the partner if it does, and then figure out what they could be doing differently); that (most) porn is just acting and entertainment and not space to learn how to have sex; and that if the female partner is crying out of pain during sex a little pleasure focused on her could go a long way! Thankfully, if one does bother to look, there are enough websites, Indian and foreign, that are actively addressing these topics and giving accurate answers to the biggest questions plaguing people over centuries. But still, the internet hasn’t gone too far in helping us address issues of consent or acceptance of people whose identities or behaviours are different from our own. We have populated the internet with our biases and faults from real life.
All the same, my biggest source of happiness when it comes to the internet and sex is the freedom and access that millions of women have got, despite the internet being an unbelievably misogynist space. Be it as a space to share experiences; write erotic literature; find dates, sexy lingerie or sex toys; or to simply feel sexy by sharing pictures anonymously; the internet has been a blessing for women to explore their sexuality. I enjoyed this old ad from Zivame that has women discussing what kinds of underwear they want, especially the policewoman who wants pink thongs! Before the internet, would we have ever been bold and open enough to consider women’s – of all kinds – rights to feel sexy?
And that is why I’ll go back to MR, the woman who wrote to Sex Doctor in desperation. After a couple of posts saying that the sexy dress didn’t work in exciting her husband, she posted again saying she was a working woman who wanted her share of pleasure when she got home.
Despite all my misgivings about the ‘Doctor’ pushing the site’s products, I did a ‘booyah!’ when they finally recommended a di!do to MR. For a society that doesn’t believe women can (and do) masturbate, here was a recommendation to a woman to take back (strongly) her right to pleasure in her own hands. As Swara Bhaskar tells a group of aunties in Veere Di Wedding, ‘Apna haath Jagannath’ indeed – only this time, it’s thanks to the internet.
