Despite being sexually inexperienced and a total virgin, I deeply dislike prudes.
The reason is very much rooted in my psyche. You know when people talking about America’s fixation on abstinence and virginity, and how it hurts young women, I find myself laughing, because they clearly don’t know about what us Indian girls have to go through.
You know, stuff like this has been on my mind for very long. It is seldom I feel the need to rant about till it affects me personally.
This has to do with a situation that happened the other day. I was at a party. We weren’t even drunk and my father gave me a call. A good (and crazy) friend of mine wanted to say hi, but didn’t realize I would actually give her the phone with my dad on the other line, so she thought it would be really funny to talk about how I’ve been naughty giving the whole world blowjobs. That might have been ironically funny then. But later when I spoke with my dad, he was unreasonably upset. Not only did he think that I need better friends, despite explaining what a technically good girl that friend was (i.e. good academically, does her chores, responsible etc) he hated that I would associate with such a foul-mouthed girl and unchaste girl. I guess he had a point in that we should keep our dirty jokes to ourselves, within the group without getting our parents involved in it. However, he went on to explain that how a woman’s value and integrity is measured by her modesty and all that jazz. It hurt me a lot, since I was brought up by the same father, to break the glass ceiling.
The biggest shock however, came from my mother, who I talked to over the phone, and she completely pretended not to know what a blowjob actually is, when I totally am aware that she asked my father to make sure to ask whether I did give the whole world blowjobs. She had this puritan tone while she was talking to me, and was visibly careful never to bring up anything regarding sex.
This is the mother, who never really told me about sex. This is the mother who makes a taboo out of the topic. This is the mother who told me that menstruation is a secret condition to be kept to oneself at all times. She is the one that made me think of sexuality as a purely dirty thing (until recent times). She told me that I should never think about sex because it screws up your mind. And she is a scientist.
This is where my roots lie. A bunch of cowardly, unnecessarily prudish set of mates, who had to resort to reproductive technology to create me.
Sometimes I wonder, if they themselves, ever tried enough to have me, before making me in a fucking petri-dish. May be it was the Universe’s way of telling them that prudes like them deserve to have their genes die off.
Before I am too harsh on them, I should reflect on the pandemic nature of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy on the Indian psyche. There is of course no middle ground. You either keep it indefinitely in your pants unless it’s to produce grandchildren to appease some senile generation. It’s a country where anything involving sexuality is never spoken of, and magically a population of 1 billion just happens.
It’s the hypocrisy of the system I am against. While many abstinence advocates in America directly speak of the dangers of sex before marriage (as flawed their arguments may be), at least discuss and talk about sex in some shape or form. In India, it is just assumed that everyone finds out what sex is on the wedding night, and no one needs to be informed about it. All of this irrational crap just gets handed to us good brown girls as part of our traditional family values.
You know, when I see myself as a product of this system, a system that undermines expressions of sexuality in non-traditional contexts, I am not surprised that I will die a virgin. It is not surprising that people with genes and backgrounds like mine, with their purposeful denial of the normality of sexuality, cannot live up to the expectations of a more liberal world. Don’t get me wrong, my parents are liberal about the fact that I get to choose my own mate, but that’s about it. That is also not to say that everything about the new worldview of sexuality is okay. Take the pressure to be sexually active for example. There are at least as many girls who fall into the trap of abstinence-only brainwashing as the “Fuck sex means nothing, let’s fuck and lose the V-Card already” bandwagon, when they are clearly not ready. I am hoping, to somehow represent my the middle ground in the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy. One of these days, my position, or the position of others like me, will become more publicized. I feel like as if a lot of feminist literature these days is misinterpreted as sexually liberating the individual women, without considering fully well whether she is ready. Of course, I don’t think that’s what a lot of feminists mean when they speak of when they emphasize sexual liberation. I think that due to the effect of the existing mass media’s objectification of women, the feminist message about sexual liberation gets misconstrued as women encouraged to just be indiscriminately slutty or promiscuous. This misconstrued message doesn’t help the self-esteem of many virgins, males and females alike, who are seen as old-fashioned and sort of backwards in their sexual worldview.
I think I need something like an Angry Virgin Feminist movement.
