BOREDOM IN BEDROOM

A number of married Indian women are increasingly reporting troubled sex lives. Why?

It may be the flip side of liberalization. As the urban Indian woman asserts her individuality, one of the parameters she thinks significant is her level of sexual satisfaction. This is both good and bad. Sex is happily becoming a major relationship-indicator for couples, but the problem is that many Indian women seem to be complaining.
Like furniture designer Parul Arora who says it's not the men in her life but the life in her men. “I don't think they were worth anything. What else can explain our dead sex life?”, says this 37-year-old who has been divorced twice, though sex was “only one big reason.” She has had lovers in between her marriages and since but it is the same story in the end. “After the initial euphoria dies down, sex in all my relationships has been like maths class: I always wondered how the person next to me is doing his work, and I always score badly.”
Experts confirm this trend and it’s a fact that’s illustrated in a new book by a Chicago-based clinical psychologist who researched 400 urban middle and upper-class Indian couples over a 12-year period. Dr Shaifali Sandhya says the “Indian marriage is burning” and around 80-85% divorces are initiated by women. About one-third of her respondents — aged between 22 and 55 and married for any where between one and 36 years — said they were unhappy with their sex lives.
The problem may be the dichotomous nature of the urban Indian marriage. The sexual revolution, says Sandhya, is still incomplete, which means Indian women can oscillate between embarrassing sexual naivete and embarrassingly wide experience. Meanwhile, couples face the “culture wars” of gender role play, which show up most sharply in issues such as work-life balance, earning and spending money, who looks after the children and who initiates sex.
Sandhya says that Indian women still “bear the burden of marriage”, which may be the reason as many as 72% of the wives she spoke to reported mid-to-full-blown depression.
But never mind the sociology of the marriage bed. Sexual health experts agree that the middle class increasingly evaluates marriage on the basis of the physical and emotional pleasure of sex. Sexologist Dr Prakash Kothari says that when he began to practice 36 years ago, a woman patient would never complain to him about sexual dissatisfaction. “But now women know that sexual right is a basic right. It is not like they were not unhappy earlier but now they are voicing their concerns. I get about 150-200 complaints every day,” he says.
He suggests that Indian women are sexually unhappy because most Indian men “use their partners as sleeping pills.” India, he says, is still in a patriarchal bind, which sees a man giving love to get sex and a woman giving sex to get love. The pattern is changing in urban areas but Kothari points out a number of couples who haven’t slept together for 25 years or may never have slept together.
Kothari says India's blinkered sense of shame about sex goes against its traditions. Ancient Indian texts such as the Kamasutra advocate the concept of ‘sambhog’ or equal pleasure and “emphasize sexual equality and mutuality”, even listing ways in which a man should satisfy a woman so that “sexual pleasure is a happiness that is shared.”
Sexual medicine consultant and counsellor Dr Rajan Bonsle points to a gradual but positive change. “Earlier, female patients came to me only with their complaints. They still do but increasingly, their concern is shifting to knowing and exploring more about themselves. Finally, Indian women are realizing that their sexuality is not just defined by the men in their lives,” he says.