My Strange Relationship With Sex

By Raj Bandyopadhyay, Open Magazine. Posted May 12, 2008.

I consider myself to be the world's least qualified person to be writing anything meaningful on the topic of -- deep breath -- sex. First of all, I come from a country and cultural background where open discussion of this topic is unacceptable. On top of that, I am an Engineering major, and nerd to boot. This double whammy means that my sexual knowledge probably ranks lower than the stereotypical American undergraduate. So what am I doing pretending that I could say anything insightful about -- sex?

I grew up in an urban middle-of-middle-class milieu in Mumbai, India in the eighties and early nineties. This was still when India was a partly socialist economy with several aspects of life controlled by Government. While India had a politically free and lively media since its independence in 1947, moral censorship was a fact of life. This meant that television, newspapers and films were carefully bowderized and no public discourse of sex and sexuality existed in the mainstream media. Even socially, sex was taboo as a discussion topic and inseparable from (very heterosexual) marriage. I was not aware of homosexuality until I came to the United States. This censorship was not something that was forced by the government. It was very much a part of society and what a large number of people wanted and appreciated.

However, unfortunately for me, I've always liked reading too much for my own good. My parents provided me with a bilingual and secular upbringing, and always encouraged me to read and think for myself. A turning point for me was when, for my tenth birthday, I received a complete set of a 20-volume encyclopedia (this was before the Internet and Wikipedia existed). This was where I went when I first heard the word "sex" whispered among older students in middle school. Reading books like these told me that sex and relationships were perceived very differently by cultures around the world.

However, my purpose is not to present my country as sexually backward or perpetuate outdated notions. India has a social system that has developed organically over centuries and has served its purpose historically. Once I settled in the U.S., I found that there are two distinct stereotypes about Indian sexuality. One thinks of India as some kind of sexual paradise based on the Kama Sutra or Tantric sex, and the other view, mostly held by people who have actually been to India or studied it superficially, sees Indians as asexual beings who somehow still manage to have lots of children. Conversely, growing up in India, the U.S. seemed to be both a land of sexual excess and a utopia where people were far more open about their sexual needs and desires, judging from its movies and television shows.

As always, the truth is far more complex. India is a big and diverse country, and attitudes to sex can differ drastically among different subcultures and social classes. In addition, India is currently in the throes of a rapid transition in sexual attitudes. This has several causes: globalization, western media, and the AIDS pandemic. These days open displays of affection such as kissing are far more acceptable in movies, and a few urban societies, and homosexuality now exists as a peripheral topic of discussion in media. On a recent trip to India, I needed a transcript from my college, which is on the banks of a lake. On the way back, I saw a bunch of workmen dredging the lake, piling up mountains of white shiny stuff on its banks. Upon closer examination, I was shocked to see that those were piles of used condoms. Apparently, a favorite activity for nearby high-school kids was to rent little boats to take out into the lake and "do it". Should I be relieved that at least they remembered to use condoms, or should I be appalled at that particular addition to my city's major water supply? Whichever way one looks at it, this is highly illustrative of some major changes in Indian society.

As I found out after I landed in the U.S. for graduate school, sexuality here is far more diverse than American TV shows would have the world believe. While the American media is highly explicit and commercialized in its depiction of sex, a spectrum of attitudes exists in American society. Even in a small school such as Rice, I meet both people who abstain from sex and those who treat it as just another fun activity. In addition, the sexual mix here includes people who are openly homosexual, bisexual, polyamorous and have other sexual preferences. This relative openness towards sex in the U.S. was quite a shock at the beginning. I was amazed to find myself in groups where people actually discussed sex-related topics, especially in mixed-gender gatherings. In contrast, I found myself having to switch to a far more conservative version of myself when in predominantly Indian events, a cultural schizophrenia familiar to many immigrants.

My personal sexual awakening began with an accidental relationship in my first year of graduate school. My partner, a graduate student from an East Asian country, and I did not have proper sex. We were both bound by cultural mental blocks that were too hard to surmount. However, what shocked me about this interracial/intercultural relationship were the reactions of people about it. I was horrified by the racist treatment meted out to her by my more conservative Indian acquaintances, and I began to question if I wanted to base my identity on unquestioned cultural values that allowed such treatment of another human being. This started me on a personal journey, leading to massive changes in my attitudes towards culture, sex and relationships on the whole.

The cultural transformation of migrants, particularly males, through sexual experiences is well documented in immigrant literature. A popular little novel among Indian graduate students is The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur, which provides a hilarious, if somewhat stereotyped story of the protagonist's quest through American society to get laid. On another note, Seasons of Migration to the North by Tayeb Saleh, is a far more serious take on a Sudanese man's cultural journey through sexual experiences in Britain. On rare occasions, this clash of sexual ideologies can have tragic consequences, as demonstrated by the life of the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb. During his Master's degree in the U.S. in the late forties, Qutb was unable to reconcile the sexual openness of American society with his native Egypt. He reacted viscerally to it by returning and founding an ideology of hatred against American decadence, which profoundly influenced radical Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda several decades later.

Fortunately, my own cultural journey has been far more benign. One of the first decisive moments that I remember was during my third year in the U.S. I was driving with one of my few American friends when I took a deep breath, turned around and asked him, "So, tell me more about this dating thing that you Americans do", thus taking a figurative plunge into the topic as if it were just another research project. I began discovering preconceived notions about sex and virginity that existed both in my own mind and in society around me. Growing up in India meant that I took virginity before marriage as a no-brainer. It was hard to question that assumption. I remember some heated discussions I had with some of my Indian friends who argued why they wanted their wives to be virgins before marriage. The arguments, which were repeated by more abstinent Christians, mostly revolved around the assumption that losing one's virginity was a life-altering event, and would tie you to a person for the rest of your life. In particular, women apparently never forgot their first-time partner, so it was necessary for me to ensure a woman's lasting loyalty by being her first. Somehow that same logic did not hold for men, who were permitted a few indiscretions, though they were frowned upon. On further scrutiny, these kinds of arguments did not fly. A quick survey of my more liberal friends, both male and female, showed many who had been in multiple sexual relationships that were both healthy and happy while they lasted.

On the other hand, I ran into some equally surprising double standards that exist about male virginity. Obviously, most women who are open to sexual relationships outside of marriage tend to be the liberal type. Contrary to all the enlightened feminist discourse out there, in reality, women still want their men to be sufficiently masculine in terms of sexual experience. For most women that I met, I found that being honest about my lack of sexual experience was a serious turn-off, and an opportunity for women to exercise sexual power. Apparently, since I was a guy and a virgin, I'd obviously be willing to do anything for the promise of getting laid. One particularly honest partner told me that she did not want to be my first time because she refused to be a "crash-test dummy". A close friend of mine, a lesbian herself, gave me a piece of sage advice, "Dude. Don't freak out so much about sex. It's not that hard. You're good at reading, aren't you? Pick up a book on anatomy with lots of pictures. Figure out what it says about the sensitive body parts and you'll do ok".

These barriers of entry to the sexual marketplace created several self-esteem issues for me at that time. I started buying more into depictions of sex in the media around me. For instance, I remember reading a survey in a mainstream newspaper, which stated that the average American man slept with about 8 different women before marriage. Statistics like that made me feel horribly inadequate and ashamed for lagging behind. I was angry at my race, my culture and myself for not making me man enough. Real men were supposed to be tall, white jocks with perfect six-packs or black basketball players. Even today, I find it a bit difficult to be friends with French or Italian men or appreciate those cultures. I feel envious that their romantic stereotype seems to gives them a highly unfair advantage in the playing field. A colleague who was into the pick-up artist culture, tried to educate me out of, as he eloquently put it, "being a chump". I went out with him to bars and attempted to use some tried-and-tested techniques of getting a woman into bed. However, I still found myself unable to pretend to be something I wasn't in order to get laid, even if it seemed to be all fair game out there. Another friend decided to take pity on me and dragged me out to strip clubs a couple of times, but the fakeness of it all did nothing for me.

In the end, when I finally did have my first proper sexual experience at the ripe old age of 26, it was both anti-climatic and life-altering at the same time. It was anti-climatic in the way it just happened; I met a girl, we talked, one thing led to another and we ended up in bed. We slept together for a few months and broke up quite amicably. No, I did not tell her that she was my first sexual partner until months later. It was life-altering because my worst fears and nightmares proved to be completely unfounded. Sex turned out to be an extremely fun activity. I did not feel like I'd lost my innocence. I did not feel like I'd done anything morally wrong or committed a sin against my culture. I did not feel like I was inextricably tied to my first partner. When I have sex with someone now, I don't see my first partner's face, and I still don't have any overarching urges to have sex with a virgin. In a nutshell, I am still who I am, just another perpetually horny 28-year old guy who enjoys it when he gets some, likes to see his partner enjoy it too, and is always looking for some more.

An Indian epic, the Mahabharata, has a story describing a wise prince who was given a riddle by a Sphinx-like demon. The demon asked, "What is the greatest mystery in the world?" The prince answered, "The fact that we all have to die, but we spend our lives denying it". If I had to answer the question today, I'd say, "The fact that sex is such a fundamental part of human existence, yet we refuse to talk about it". As my struggle with writing this article has shown, sex is a difficult topic even for somewhat liberated people to discuss. It should not be that way. My views on sex are aligned with my views on religion and culture in general. There's a vast buffet of dishes we can try, which may all be satisfying in different combinations, and there are no fixed courses. I believe that no matter who your partners may be and whatever genders they identify as, an act that brings satisfaction and joy to everyone involved cannot be morally wrong, and does not have to come with a dose of guilt or shame.

Acknowledgement: I'd like to thank my friend Rhonda Ragsdale, the most sexually liberated person I know, for helping me get these words out of my system, then proof-reading and giving her invaluable feedback.

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