I resent society's irrational fear of sex: An intersectional inquiry into youth sexuality in two Indian states

Abstract

This research investigates attitudes about sex, sexuality and sexual pleasure, as well as awareness regarding reproductive and sexual health among Indian youth. The study takes place against the backdrop of a sea change in India in the last few decades brought about by economic liberalization, accompanied by rapid commercialization and consumerism. This has in turn been accompanied by changes in sexual mores especially among youth in India. Most of the young people I interviewed were either sexually active or would like to be sexually active, outside of the socially prescribed conjugal context. Some of the young men shared with great candor their immense frustration at being unable to find sexual pleasure with a partner. Others had the freedom to explore various aspects of their sexuality; however their sexual behavior was often dangerous because of their lack of knowledge about safe-sex. The experiences of young women were shaped both by their gender and their families' class status. The young people I interviewed, regardless of whether they were sexually active, had one thing in common—namely a profound ignorance about issues related to sex, sexuality and sexual health. Girls and young women in most cases were either denied sexual education or found their ability to access information about sex highly curtailed. However, the narratives presented in this article also problematize easy categorizations of India as being homophobic and intolerant of non-heteronormative sexualities.

Keywords

Gender heteronormativity sexual rights sex education youth sexuality

‘I resent society's irrational fear of sex,’ was the anguished comment of Navin, one of the 21 young people I interviewed as part of a qualitative study on youth sexuality in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu in the South and Gujarat in the West.¹ This research is an investigation of attitudes about sex, sexuality and sexual pleasure, as well as awareness regarding reproductive and sexual health against the backdrop of a sea change in India in the last few decades brought about by economic liberalization, accompanied by rapid commercialization and consumerism. This has in turn been accompanied by changes in sexual mores especially among youth in India. Brosius (2013), speaking of the rising popularity of Valentines Day celebrations writes: ‘[t]he festival of globalized love might have been celebrated by anglicized elites long before economic liberalization in the early 1990s. But its spread among wider, less-elite audiences only happened thereafter …’ Furthermore, for Brosius, the popularity of Valentines Day celebrations ‘promoted an individual's [emphasis added] choice for a partner, [and] legitimated the desire to be “in love” without necessarily wanting to be married to the same person,’ even as the growing popularity of such celebrations meant a windfall for corporate interests (Oberoi, 2017).

Such a legitimization of desire outside/without the confines of marriage represents a disruption of traditional social norms that—for reasons explored later in this article—favor and work within the framework of conjugal hetero-patriarchy, typically within arranged marriages (Allendorf and Pandian, 2016; Bose and Bhattacharya, 2007: xxv). At the same time, Trivedi (2014: 157) reports the rising numbers of abortions sought by women between the ages of 20 and 28. While sex-selective abortions by married women have been prevalent in India for many decades, what is different today is the large number of unmarried women seeking a termination of their pregnancies.

In this article, I will explore how socioeconomic changes have shaped youth sexuality in India through the voices of young people in India, drawing from the narratives of young people in Tamil Nadu² and Gujarat. Navin's words quoted at the beginning of this article in many ways capture what many of the young people I interviewed felt about Indian society's strictures against sex, sexuality and sex education. The attitudes of my informants to issues of sex and sexuality in many ways differed from larger surveys done in various parts of India, which tend to suggest conservative attitudes towards issues relating to sexuality, such as premarital sex (Ghule et al., 2007; Jaya and Handin, 2009).

The ability to achieve sexual pleasure, if one so chooses, is an important aspect of social/sexual justice (Allen, 2008: 584).³ Furthermore, Allen and Carmody (2012: 455), citing Lamb (2010), speak of the role played by feminist scholars in foregrounding pleasure and desire within the discourse on sexuality in order ‘to recoup power for young women lost through their sexual “objectification”, “abuse and victimization” and “stereotypes of female passivity.”’ Kapur (2000: 7) speaking of the sexual subaltern in India, specifically sex workers, writes:

The pursuit of a politics of pleasure and desire is an important political goal. Pleasure and desire is a feature of the lives of women in postcolonial India, rich and poor, urban and rural. Yet its denial has stigmatized pleasure as much as it has stigmatized sex. Almost every representation of the erotic or sexual pleasure is cast within a pornographic genre or as a cultural transgression, characterized as western and foreign.⁴

This article interrogates gender, pleasure,⁵ sex and sexuality drawing from interviews of youth in India including males and females,⁶ straight and gay-identified, and those engaging in heteronormative and non-heteronormative sex, even when the latter may not identify in non-heteronormative terms. Attwood and Smith (2014: 2) underscore the need for the ‘[r]ecognition of the considerable lack of actual knowledge about young people's sexual cultures, and a particular need for qualitative work in this area.’ This is particularly true in the case of sexuality studies in India, which has a rich literature dealing with the sexual subaltern—such as sex workers, those engaging in non-heteronormative sex and women. But few qualitative studies in India have engaged with youth as a category, and the few that do tend to focus on heteronormative youth in larger metropolises such as New Delhi or Mumbai, with a large Anglicized population. This article, drawing from interviews in two smaller cities in the states of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu—each with a population of about 2 million, which is rather small in contrast to larger cities in those same states—focuses on non-elites away from the mega metropolises.

Additionally, Attwood and Smith underscore the need to go beyond the role of sex education in youth sexual culture, and widening the scope of the exploration to ‘the relation of culture to sexual behavior and attitudes’ among young people (2014: 3). This article, based on qualitative research in India seeks to address the lacuna in the scholarship on the sexual cultures of youth, as well as seeking to go beyond an investigation of the shortcomings of sexual education in schools by illuminating the ways in which cultural taboos about sex and gender are often internalized by young people.

This article draws from interviews conducted in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India and in Gujarat in western India. As mentioned previously, most ethnographic research on sexuality in India has tended to focus on large cities such as Delhi or Mumbai. Furthermore, most of these studies focus on the middle class, because often it is the bodies of the Indian middle class—especially middle class women—that have been sites of contestation, control and circumspection (John and Nair, 2000: 8; Puri, 1999: 2), as will be detailed in the next section. However, it is important to note, as Spivak asserts:

the culture of the rich and the culture of the poor [in countries such as India] are marked by a cultural difference that is larger (than between diasporic communities and metropole whites) … Metaphorically, this ‘cultural difference,’ the cultures of class [emphasis added], is much more significant. (Sharpe and Spivak, 2003)

This article, investigates the ways in which gender, sex and sexuality issues intersect with class. The interviews in Tamil Nadu were conducted in a slum in the South Indian city called Tiruchirapalli, (also known as Trichy), and included seven girls and six boys. These interviews were conducted in the course of my previous research on HIV in Tamil Nadu. In 2017 when I began work on a larger study on youth sexuality, the western state of Gujarat was one of the sites of my research. Thus, the second set of interviews discussed in this article involves college students, two females and six males, in a small town in Gujarat.⁷ Additionally, while Spivak was speaking in the context of the diaspora and metropole, I would argue that, similarly, the cultural differences between Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, while they exist, are not quite as stark as the difference between my two sets of informants in terms of their class status, and its intersections with gender and sexuality.

In Tiruchirapalli, none of the respondents identified themselves in non-heteronormative terms, although the boys spoke of engaging in non-heteronormative sex. The interviews in Trichy were based on focus-group discussions separately with the girls and the boys. In Gujarat, two of the young men identified as gay; one young woman spoke of engaging in non-heteronormative sex, but did not identify herself in non-heteronormative terms. Interestingly, one of the young men in Gujarat, who came from a non-Anglophone family of modest economic circumstances and who identified as gay, told me that he had not heard the term ‘gay’ before college. In college, a female friend, upon hearing of his non-normative preferences—not just in sexual desire, but in choice of dress and profession (he is a dancer)—told him that he was then ‘gay.’ Thus, his identifying himself as ‘gay’ was a very recent phenomenon.⁸ The interviews in Gujarat involved a focus-group discussion with the young people followed by one-on-one interviews with each participant. The interviews in Trichy were conducted in Tamil, while the ones in Gujarat were conducted in English and Hindi.⁹

Sexual experience

As John and Nair theorize in their path-breaking volume on the subject, questions of sexuality have preoccupied Indian discourse within the context of a nationalistic imagination of Indian-ness developed as a response, and in opposition to, colonial constructions of the colonized subject (1998: 7–10). This imagined Indian sexuality was furthermore refracted through the prism of class and gender, whereby it was the middle class that was seen as the embodiment of this imagined Indian-ness; a sexuality that is to be restrained and only deployed for the purpose of reproduction—reproduction not only of the next generation of Indians, but of morality and sexual reticence. The sexualities of class/caste non-elites, while necessitating control, did not engender the same sense of moral threat to the social order. Furthermore, while the female body has been the discursive site of control and confinement within this nationalistic discourse (Puri, 1999: 2) the necessities of nation building also impose restrictive, and often conflicting, ideals on Indian middle-class masculinity. The Indian male, in the Gandhian-nationalistic framework, had to control his sexual urges; however, the rising ideology of militant Hindu-supremacy and the more recent constructions of India as an economic and militaristic super-power, also necessitates a masculinity that is virile. The liberalizing cosmopolitanism ushered in by globalization further complicates nationalistic imaginings of restrained sexuality within the confines of monogamous conjugal heterosexuality. As one of my informants in Gujarat, Aditya, speaking about his and his peers’ desperation to have sex, said: ‘after seeing films like American Pie, we were like, “no, we cannot graduate [from High School as] a virgin.”’ Brosius (2013) interviewed students and urban professionals who insisted on the ‘right of freedom of choice of one's (sexual) partner, be it temporary or permanent, legalized by marriage or not’ (2013: 269). In interviews of urban, middle-class, professional, heterosexual women conducted by Phadke (2013), she notes, ‘when asked how many sexual partners one could have without jeopardizing their reputations as “good women” the magic number appeared to be three.’

The young people in the slum in Tiruchirapalli lived a life with little oversight from parents and other elders compared to their peers in more comfortable socioeconomic circumstances. As a result they were able to explore their sexuality in ways that young people in middle-class families such as the college students in Gujarat were not free to do. My interviews with the youths in Trichy underscored gendered notions of sex and sexuality, whereby boys embodied societal expectations of males as having sexual urges in need of frequent release (see Puri, 1999: 32), while girls emphasized societal expectations for sexual restraint. The following are a few quotations from my conversation with the boys in Trichy (Manian, 2017):

There are about 30 women in our slum who will have sex with us. About 8–10 of those women are married women. Girls of a young age are more likely to do group sex—only an 18–20 year old (girl) can last that long. (Manian, 2017: 11)

[Author: Do you pay for sex?] With girls usually the sex is free. If she is good—she is fat or beautiful—then we will pay them about Rs 100–150. Also after group sex,¹⁰ we will pay. We think, ‘poor thing she has done it for 4 hours.’ (2017: 10)

We usually have sex with the same girl. One after another; not all together at once. We do it 3–4 times each and then leave. It takes us 3 hours. (2017: 5)

Thus, the boys in Trichy engaged in consensual sex with older, married women as well as their female peers. In some instances, according to the boys, married women who had quarreled with their husbands would have sex with them as a way to punish the husband (Manian, 2017: 11). The boys also spoke of their female peers inviting them for sex. In Balan's words, ‘If a girl is in the “mood” she will call [to us]. But when a girl called me once, I was afraid and sent Kumar instead.’ While these narratives indicate that women and girls demonstrate a certain degree of agency over their sexual lives, not all sex in which the boys in Trichy engaged was consensual. Kumar laughingly described women being raped, his mirth shockingly underscoring the quotidian nature of such assaults:

Some boys wait in the forests for women who go there to go to the toilet or collect firewood, banana leaves and betel-leaves. The boys tie her up spread-eagled, stuff a rag in her mouth and then take turns. (Manian, 2017: 10)

Upon further questioning the boys insisted that they did not engage in forced sex with women and girls. However, when Kumar was not in the room they admitted that his vivid recounting of such acts was because he belonged to a gang that regularly engaged in exactly the behavior he had described. Thus, women and girls, at times, asserted agency over their sexual lives, but not always. Some women and girls ‘called to the boys’ in order to engage in sex. However, economic necessities that forced women to sell banana and betel leaves for a living, as well as failures of the state in providing basic amenities such as toilets and fuel forced women to venture into the forest, putting them at risk of rape and sexual assault underscoring the limitations to bodily autonomy for women living in conditions of economic deprivation.

The boys in the slum in Trichy were extremely eager to speak about their sexual exploits, consensual and non-consensual, in great detail in ways that were different from several of the young men in Gujarat whose lives—mediated through middle-class social norms of sexual restraint and compulsory conjugal heterosexuality—will be detailed later in this section. In contrast, the girls in Trichy were very reticent in speaking about having sex, again in ways that were markedly different from the two women in Gujarat, whose Anglophone, middle-class status empowered them to speak of their sexuality more openly. Indeed, when asked about sexual behavior, the girls in Trichy responded by talking about the many ways in which their sexuality was policed by parents and extended family:

Valarmathi: Parents always question girls about how they interact with boys.

Savithri: Even if I am in love, I won't indulge in sex.

Mahalaxmi: One day I went to the tea-shop with a boy who was like a brother to me. I even paid for my own tea; he did not buy it for me. But my pati [grandmother] saw me. At 11:30 that night my pati reported it to my parents. I was already asleep. [After hearing my grandmother's complaint] my mother went mad with anger. She woke me up and started abusing me—screaming and shouting at me; and beating me. (Manian, 2017: 11–12)

While the girls spoke at length about the familial strictures and social taboos against associating with boys, none of them spoke openly about having sexual relations with boys. However, the NGO worker who had been in the room with me as I was having my conversations with the young people told me as we were walking to the bus-stop that she routinely had to provide several of the girls I had interviewed with treatment for sexually transmitted infections. Thus, while the girls did not speak openly about engaging in sexual activity in the way that the boys did, many were sexually active.

The mostly middle-class college students in Gujarat described lives where there were few outlets to explore their sexuality. Among the eight students (seven college students and one high-school student) I interviewed in Gujarat, half were not sexually active. Two of the men, Sohan and Dhruv, who were not sexually active told me that they did not want or expect to be sexually active until they got married. One woman, Ananya said that she would like to be sexually active in principle, but she had not engaged in sex because Indian society presents few outlets for girls and boys to do so. One young man, Navin, a philosophy student who was quoted earlier, was the most vehement in his frustration at not being able to engage in sexual activity:

Navin: I'm sexually inactive and a virgin. My friends similar to my age group are also inactive as far as my knowledge is concerned. Two of them have mentioned having intercourse before. The main reason of participating in the discussion was to express my sexual frustration, which must've been pretty evident from my comments and questions. I resent the society's irrational fear of sex.

Three of the men (Arvind, Aditya, Sagun) and one of the young women (Abha), who is a high-school student, were sexually active. There are several salient features that distinguish those who broke middle-class social norms that restrict sex within the confines of heterosexual conjugality in India.

Arvind and Sagun identified as gay. While strict social mores prohibit sex between males and females in India, the rules for same-sex sex is much looser, as will be discussed later in this article. There is tacit acceptance of same-sex relations within the interstitial spaces of an otherwise heteronormative society. Their sexuality and sexual lives will be explored in a later section on non-heteronormativity in India.

Abha came from a very westernized home and attended a high school that followed an international curriculum—both of these being markers of class status. She was at an experimental stage of her youth and had many sexual partners, male and female. In fact, during our conversation following my interview of Abha, what came through was her angst at having such an active sexual life that she worried that she was missing the opportunity to establish healthy friendships with people of both sexes.

Aditya had a girlfriend and engaged in sex with her exclusively. While he and his girlfriend were committed to each other, they were also committed to their future careers. They had decided that they would break up if they obtained jobs in different cities. They had had a few pregnancy scares and each time had committed to having an abortion, so that a baby did not compromise their ability to advance professionally.

Thus, among my interviewees, the ability to explore their sexuality varied by class, gender and sexuality in distinct ways. Among the youth living in a slum, gender trumped social norms in ways that allowed boys to not only engage in compulsive sex, but to speak about it very openly and indeed quite proudly. Their female counterparts, who were also among their sexual partners, had to abide by social norms and would not divulge their sexual behavior even though they were sexually active. A middle-class, educated young woman like Ananya was open to being sexually active, but middle-class social norms, which have not kept up with changing expectations of sexual exploration and gratification, kept her from being able to translate her sexual desires into action. Unlike the boys in the slum in Trichy, Sohan, Dhruv and Navin's experiences suggested an adherence, whether voluntary or involuntary, to Indian middle-class notions of sexuality as only permissible within the confines of conjugal heterosexuality. While Sohan and Dhruv expressed comfort, and indeed faith, in the notion that sex is best confined within marriage, the societal strictures against premarital sex had led to great psychological stress for Navin. The tension between a consumerist society that is highly sexualized and seems to open many opportunities for sexuality but at the same time does not empower young people to actually engage in sexual exploration in healthy and safe ways led to Navin saying:

I’m worried that this [sexual] repression might result in an ‘explosion’ at a later stage. Can I handle this frustration without any ‘explosion’ or maybe even an ‘implosion’?

For someone like Abha, her family's socioeconomic status allowed her to flout traditional norms, and more importantly, embrace changing social mores about sex. However, it also seemed that rather than freeing her to explore her sexuality as a part of healthy teenage explorations of different aspects of life, the changing mores had simply replaced compulsory monogamous, conjugal, heterosexuality of traditional India with a compulsory consumerist consumption of sex, where the ability to engage with a large number of sexual partners gave a person social privileges as someone with the socioeconomic means to amass not just things but experiences. But rather than enrich her life, she found herself wondering if she was missing out on a more meaningful existence.

Sex education

Sex education in India is primarily a vehicle to promote ideas of gender and sexuality shaped by the nationalistic discourse and anxieties about Indian-ness, developed in the context of anti-colonial struggles. Puri (1999) underscores the ways in which ‘heterosexual activity, sexual responsibility and nationalism is promoted in state sponsored sex education literature … which colors popular discourses as well’ (1999: 105). Within the discourse of sexuality and sex education, the feminine subject is understood as a reproductive being, where the reproductive imperative is divorced from any notions of sexual desire or pleasure, for either females or males. As Ananya is quoted as saying in the next section, sex education in her school was restricted to the ‘(introduction) to the subject of sex and sex organs … stuff like condoms, birth-control pills, erection, etc. was barely touched upon.’ The young people I interviewed, both in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, regardless of whether they were sexually active, had one thing in common: namely a profound ignorance about issues related to sex, sexuality and sexual health. The interviewees often blamed schools or parental reticence around topics of sex for their lack of knowledge, even as many of them, either through their words or actions demonstrated a thirst for more information.

In the case of teenagers in Tamil Nadu despite being sexually active the boys and girls lacked knowledge about HIV, and repeated several misperceptions about HIV prevention. Here is a sample of the responses given by the boys when I asked them about what they knew about HIV/AIDS and how to avoid becoming HIV positive¹¹ (Manian, 2017: 182–185):

Shuddhama theriyadhu [I know absolutely nothing]¹²

Kissing gives AIDS

Thuppu pannina [literally, if you make a mistake; metaphorically to have sex outside marriage] you'll get AIDS

When a boy has sex with a girl, she gets AIDS and a child

What happens to girls (if she gets HIV) happens to boys also

You can avoid AIDS if you stay away from people who are sneezing, if you don't wear other people's clothes—especially underwear.

To avoid AIDS you should keep yourself clean—not share clothes, not sleep (in the literal sense) next to anyone, share soap. You should not do thappu.

When I asked the girls the same question, including how to avoid becoming HIV positive the responses also showed a lack of knowledge, but in ways that were distinct from the boys. The girls' responses also fell broadly into two categories, the first category being of personal cleanliness as the following comments demonstrate:

Keep your body clean, cut your nails and shave your body hair.

Don't touch blood of AIDS person

Don't touch things used by AIDS person. If you do, wash hands immediately. Must not eat echil [literally saliva, but here refers to leftovers of food eaten by someone else] of AIDS person.

The other category into which the girls' responses fell highlighted the gendered norm requiring a girl to protect herself from boys before marriage which was far more reflective of societal attitudes that frowned upon the mixing of boys and girls, rather than safe-sex:

You should not have sexual contact prior to marriage

Must not talk to boys

Must not touch boys

Not allow boys inside the home

If you love a boy, don't stand too close to him

Don't go close to men.

Clearly, talking and touching boys or sharing physical space with them has little to do with a girl becoming HIV positive; but these are the social norms defining appropriate behavior for girls, which the girls had internalized as ways to avoid HIV. Thus neither the boys nor the girls were well informed about HIV, but the girls’ ignorance was further refracted through the prism of gendered norms about female purity, either in the form of perceived hygienic behavior (which included shaving of body hair) and/or in the form of decorous behavior that included secluding themselves from the opposite sex. Indeed the fact that the girls believed that ‘you should not have sexual contact prior to marriage,’ is ironic given that the majority of HIV infections among non-sex-worker women in India is from intercourse with their husbands (Manian, 2017).

When I met with the college students in Gujarat while introducing myself I had mentioned that my previous research had been on HIV in Tamil Nadu. Before I could begin asking the questions that I had prepared for the focus group, many of the young people started peppering me with questions about HIV. Given their socioeconomic and educational privileges, in contrast to the young people in Trichy, they were somewhat more aware of the existence of HIV. However, they lacked full awareness about HIV, and wanted to ask me questions that they had been unable to ask others, clearly signifying the failures in their schooling:

Aditya: I have two questions. What happens after you have AIDS/HIV? I already know that it causes an immune deficiency in your body. But then how does a person die of AIDS? Second question is, I saw this recent movie, Dallas Buyers Club … I may be wrong, but I think it said that 71% of HIV is because they are homosexuals. Why is that higher? With heterosexuals it is only 17%.

Sohan: When someone becomes HIV positive, what is the first thing he needs to do? What procedures he needs to go through?

It also was soon apparent that these college-educated students harbored many misconceptions about how HIV is spread. For instance, Sagun shared an apocryphal story about a child becoming HIV positive from a juice seller:

Sagun: There was a juice-wallah in Bangalore. He had a cut in his finger. When he was making the juice his blood got into the juice and infected a child who became HIV positive. When he got fevers, etc, his doctor asked his parents to get him checked for HIV. They also checked the parents; they were not HIV positive.¹³

As the Center for Disease Control informs people on its website: ‘[y]ou can't get HIV from consuming food handled by an HIV-infected person’ (Centers for Disease Control, n.d.). However, even a college-educated person in India such as Sagun still falls prey to such rumors.

It was also clear during my conversation with these students that they wanted to be sympathetic to those who are infected or affected by HIV, and they expressed criticism towards a society that shunned those who are HIV positive. However, notwithstanding their sympathetic attitudes towards those infected/affected by HIV, the lack of education about HIV left them with mistaken notions regarding what an HIV diagnosis meant.

Ananya: [HIV is] a deadly disease … So, once the person is going to die, he is blamed for his own death. You did something wrong, you had sexual relations that was not acceptable, so you have this [disease] … That association is the reason for the stigma [against HIV positive people].

Sohan: When a person gets AIDS he undergoes psychological crisis and slides into a state of madness. Can he take the help of a counselor or psychologist? And apart from NACO [National AIDS Control Organization] are there other agencies working in this direction?

Thus, Ananya was critical of a society that abandons and stigmatizes a person who is HIV positive; Sohan wanted to learn about providing mental health counseling for them. However, despite the fact that anti-retroviral medication — which is available for free in India — make HIV a manageable disease, Ananya believed that HIV was a ‘deadly disease’ and that the person who is HIV-positive faces imminent death. Similarly, becoming HIV positive does not mean that a person will slide into ‘a state of madness.’ While social stigma and a state of morbidity causes higher levels of mental distress, there is little evidence that HIV directly causes a person to become ‘mad.’ Thus, while Sohan's instinct for the need for counseling was right, his belief in imminent danger of madness stems from misconceptions about HIV.

The lack of information or misinformation about HIV is largely due to the lack of effective or adequate sexual education in schools. When I asked the young boys and girls in Trichy where they got their information about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, here is what I was told by the girls (Manian, 2017:182–185):

At school, from miss (female teacher) to headmaster they all tell the boys about what not to do. They do this in the 10th standard. Other than that we learn from TV, newspaper, parents, street plays.

Thus, in the school, girls are not taught about HIV and had to find out what they could through their own initiatives. This stems from Indian cultural mores about gender and purity that believe that girls and women should be shielded from information that is sexual in nature. Thus, all the information in their school is targeted towards boys. Given that all the education about HIV in schools is provided to boys, I asked the boys the same question. The boys said:

Our teachers don't tell us anything in school. NGOs come to the school [to talk about HIV]. But, it is so boring. When we know they are going to come to talk to us, we escape.¹⁴

Thus, in the case of Trichy, gendered norms ensured lack of information to the girls about HIV even in the schools; boys find their schools' programs on HIV education too boring to pay attention, although as will be discussed more thoroughly in the next section, the boys in Trichy got their information on sex entirely through watching pornography.

The young people in Gujarat were very aware that their educational system and cultural taboos prevented them from gaining important information about sex, and were critical of this, even as they acknowledged that many of their peers shared society's prejudices against educating young people about sex. While speaking of the lack of sex education the students employed a lot of sarcasm and mockery, so that there was a tremendous amount of laughter at the expense of teachers and elders during the focus-group discussion:

Aditya: Basically in Class VIII and X there are these chapters on sexual reproduction. It is a very comic experience in class. It is almost always a female teacher. On the day we have to discuss this she walks in very shamefaced, blushing because of embarrassment, and talking in a low voice. Then the teacher is like, ‘if anybody laughs or giggles they will be sent out.’ And then most of [the kids] giggle, and they are sent out. Before you know it the whole class was out!

It was basically really funny that we had only one paragraph about HIV and even the teacher was embarrassed to say anything about it. I saw the teacher's face and she was looking down and talking very low. She was like, ‘HIV is zzzzzz… [incoherent mumbling].’ So, when I got sick with chicken pox and I came back to school after one month [the other kids] were like, ‘tere ko HIV hua kya? [Did you get HIV or what?]’ That does not even make any sense.

Then you get this prejudiced belief that if you engage in sexual intercourse with anybody, then you'll get HIV. ‘Arey, you should never do [sex]. If you do sex, you'll get HIV.’

Thus, cultural taboos against sex meld with the lack of knowledge about HIV, convincing young people that anyone who has sex outside the confines of conjugal heterosexuality will get HIV. This is similar to the girls in Trichy believing that talking or being close to a boy will give a person HIV. Additionally, both Navin and Aditya spoke of the ways in which their peers internalized gendered notions of purity, echoing the reality for girls in Trichy who were denied sexual education.

Navin: Girls are even more protected from hearing about HIV.

Aditya: I have been in Bombay (the cosmopolitan, financial capital of India) as well in Raigarh (a small town in the state of Chatthisgarh). Raigarh was very conservative; Bombay is very open … In Raigarh the students were very skeptical of the teacher (who taught sex education) … The [male] students were like, ‘How could he say that, yaar. He should not say these things in front of girls.’ All these types of prejudice were there. I did not want to say anything at that time. I did not want to be the preacher in the class. Peer pressure!

Pornography and paid sex

Given the social strictures regarding dating and premarital sex, I was interested in finding out about sexual outlets other than dating, such as paying for sex or accessing pornography. In my previous research on HIV, I had interviewed male and female sex workers, many of whom spoke of their clients as being young people, male and female, straight and queer, who explore sex through visiting sex workers (Manian, 2017). Given the ubiquitous prevalence of mobile and smart phones in India, I additionally wanted to learn the role that easier access to pornography played in the sexual lives of youth in India.

The six boys I interviewed in the slum in Trichy spoke of watching pornographic videos that they jokingly called swami-padam (sacred films). They preferred to watch the films in groups of 8–10 boys. They said that they wanted to see how to insert the ‘machine’ and ‘beer-bottle’ (euphemistic terms for the penis) to enhance sexual pleasure. Watching the porn usually got them sexually aroused and they would seek out sexual partners so that they could ‘go to the temple’ (i.e. have sex).

While watching pornography was seen as educational by the boys in Trichy, which aroused them sexually and spurred them to seek out sex workers, others like Navin spoke of sex workers and pornography differently:

Navin: I've been repressing my sexuality since as far back as probably when I entered my teens or even before that. I see no way to engage in a sexual act except maybe through sex workers when I begin to earn for myself, which at the moment I don't. And even that is just a possibility. I make use of occasional pornography and masturbation to lessen the sexual frustration.

While the boys in the slum spoke of begging, borrowing or stealing money to fund their pornographic video rentals and sexual activities, a middle-class student like Navin did not have any opportunities to procure the funds necessary to engage a sex worker. To him pornography was his only sexual outlet.

Like the boys in Trichy, Ananya spoke of pornography as a means for girls to learn about sex because of the failures of schools in educating students about sex. She also spoke of girls who avoided porn because of internalized social stigma against porn in general and gender notions of appropriate female behavior in particular. She also spoke of watching porn as a private affair for her female peers, while for her male friends watching porn was a group activity for entertainment, similar to what the young men in Trichy reported:

Most of us were introduced to the subject of sex and sex organs in school, but as we discussed earlier the topic was taught very hush-hush, with the teacher very eager to wash her/his hands of it as quickly as s/he can. And stuff like condoms, birth-control pills, erection, etc. was barely touched upon … [But] porn is easily available online. Some girls avoid it out of shame or fear of family members … Those of us who have access and feel it to be normal, talk about it and even discuss about it at length sometimes. Personally, I am comfortable talking about porn with my close group of girlfriends … Another point I have observed is that watching porn is more of solo activity for girls, in a dark room with a blanket over the head. But boys, like my friend and his roommate watch porn together for afternoon entertainment.

Arvind, who is gay, spoke of watching pornography as well as visiting sex workers. Unlike Navin, his reasons for engaging sex workers was not because of a lack of sexual partners:

Arvind: There are many e-dating apps in India, and I have used them. There is a different category in them that is for paid guys. To be a bit frank, I'll say paid guys are better. Because this is their work, their job, they are better at it, compared to normal people [sic]. That is why people pay for sex. Sometimes you need that pleasure.

When I was interviewing Sagun, who is also gay, and who came from a traditional, lower-middle-class home and was studying to be a dancer, I asked him whether he ever visited sex workers. His response was one that was unexpected, as he spoke of his own strained financial circumstances forcing him to sell sex in order to make ends meet:

Sagun: At one point in college I found myself without any money to eat or pay my rent. I had no idea what I should do. I have a friend who is a transgender person. She performs at weddings and other occasions. When I told her my predicament, she said ‘why don't you join us at our performances.’ So I did that for some time, danced at weddings. When I was doing that, I had to do everything one does as part of that. You understand what I mean, don't you?

When music and dance troupes are hired at weddings, outside their artistic role, there is also often an expectation of providing sexual services to their male clients. Sagun had found himself having to allow himself to be used sexually because that was part of the expectation. This was something he had not fully comprehended when he signed on to perform. Sagun's experience will be contextualized in the next section.

Non-heteronormative sex

Sagun's experience of having sex with men within the ultimate site of validation of India's sexual norms that legitimate sex only within the confines of monogamous, conjugal heterosexuality—a wedding—is one of the many examples of the presence and acceptance of non-heteronormative sexuality in mainstream India. As I have discussed elsewhere, despite the nationalistic imaginings of India as a predominantly heterosexual society where sex takes place exclusively within the confines of monogamous conjugality, same-sex sex has been a part of Indian sexuality, both historically and in contemporary society (Manian, 2013). Thadani (1996) Vanita and Kidwai (2001) illustrate the rich history of feminine and male same-sex eroticism in Indian culture and myth, within both Muslim and Hindu contexts. This rich history of homoeroticism (and, to repeat, within both Hindu and Islamic traditions in India) was not only disrupted by Victorian colonial ideology, but more importantly, the Indian nationalistic reaction to Victorian homophobia invented a uniformly heteronormative past (Manian, 2017: 19–27). Despite the apparent disavowal of India's homoerotic past within contemporary Indian nationalistic discourse, same-sex male eroticism in the form of khel masti among male friends (Cohen, 2006: 273) and laundebazi (Cohen, 2002: 157) coexists alongside the heterosexual matrimonial/reproductive imperative. Sagun's experience as part of a dance/music troupe consisting of males and transfemales who also provided sexual services to male wedding guests further underscores the existence of such non-normative sexual practices. Sagun's narrative mirrors my own research on sexuality in India which suggests that sexuality in India is not strictly heteronormative, notwithstanding the colonial era law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that effectively criminalized male homosexuality until recently.

The boys in Trichy, while talking about their various sexual partners did not distinguish between opposite-sex, same-sex sex or sex with aravanis (male to female transgender persons). I had earlier quoted them in the context of sex with women. But, they also said:

We go to MSM [men who have sex with men]. They like to eat ice-cream (i.e. perform oral sex).

[We have] regular sex with ombodhu¹⁵—it is free. (Manian, 2017: 5, 9)

As mentioned previously Abha had had sexual relations with boys and girls. Both Arvind and Sagun, as gay men, while being critical of state policy regarding male homosexuality and bemoaning some of the stereotypes about gays and non-heteronormativity, also spoke of acceptance. Arvind had grown up in a prosperous part of Chicago and only moved to India in his late teens.

Arvind: I am lucky to have lived in two different societies. The Indian norm society and the Indian open society. In the [USA] even though we say ‘The American Open Society’ they are more homophobic and racist and shit like that than Indians. I have faced less homophobia in India as compared to America.

[Author: Do you want to elaborate some more?]

Yeah. In America there are, like, there are three main things—racism, homophobia and bullying. As a high school student I used to be the football captain, so it was pretty hard to bully me. But there were words out there [behind my back], OK? And I was an Indian, so I was automatically an alien to them.

But, when I came out to my friends in India, their first reaction was, ‘Oookaay, that explains a lot of things.’ So Indians are pretty open to it. America says it's an open society, but [in reality] they are the most homophobic. Indians pretend to be homophobic, while actually they are not.

To be honest, I feel safer in India. I mean, [never mind] the people like the police and all that. Around my friends and family I feel safer in India, more than I did in America.

Arvind's, and Abha's experiences mirror my own previous ethnographic research on non-heteronormative sexualities in India (Manian, 2013, 2017), whereby the subject position of the sexual minority is determined to a large degree by their socioeconomic class and linguistic (dis)advantages, quite separate from laws and social proscriptions that delegitimize non-heterosexual, non-conjugal sex. Arvind and Abha, coming from privileged backgrounds were able to embrace their non-heteronormative sexuality in non-exploitative contexts, starkly different from Sagun's experience as a member of an entertainment troupe paid to perform at a wedding (see also khanna, 2007: 159–610).

Discussion

The 21 young people whom I interviewed during the course of my study provided many rich insights into the sexual culture of youth in India. Other than two of the young men I interviewed in Gujarat, Dhruv and Sohan, all the participants were either sexually active or would like to be sexually active, outside of the socially prescribed conjugal context. Some of them, such as Navin, shared with great candor their immense frustration at being unable to find sexual pleasure with a partner; others such as Aditya, whose sexual liaisons with his girlfriend had to be kept a secret, expressed their frustration at the various social strictures that prevent young people from being open about their sexual lives. In the case of the teenagers in Trichy, males had the freedom to explore various aspects of their sexuality, however their sexual behavior was often dangerous because of their lack of knowledge about safe-sex. The experiences of young women were shaped both by their gender and their family's class status. The female teenagers in Trichy, many of whom were sexually active, would only speak of their sexuality in terms of familial expectations/restrictions. In the case of the young women in Gujarat, Ananya, like Navin, was unable to explore her sexuality because the middle-class social norms do not offer many avenues for experimentation. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, Abha found her sexual freedom compromising her ability to form other, non-sexual, healthy relationships with all genders.

The responses of my informants also underscored that while youths, whether they were male and female, were expected to abide by norms of compulsory heterosexuality confined to the conjugal context, there were gendered ways in which these strictures manifested themselves. Girls and young women in most cases were either denied sexual education or found their ability to access information about sex highly curtailed. In many instances social norms about maintaining feminine innocence were internalized by many girls and young women, as well as their male peers.

My interviews in general painted a picture of the majority of young people aspiring to sexual freedoms and desiring sexual experiences such as premarital sex that stood in contrast to mainstream notions of conjugal heteronormativity, and being failed by society and institutions that were out of step with the needs of contemporary youth. The Declaration of Sexual Rights by the World Association for Sexual Health (2014) asserts that sexual rights are, inter alia, a constituent part of universal human rights because ‘sexuality is a central aspect of being human throughout life…’ The Declaration of Sexual Rights goes on to state that:

sexual health is a state of physical, emotional, mental and social wellbeing in relation to sexuality; it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity [emphasis added]. Sexual health requires a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences [emphasis added], free of coercion, discrimination and violence. (World Association for Sexual Health, 2014)

The Declaration of Sexual Rights underscores the intrinsic and instrumental importance of open and honest dialogues about sex and sexuality directed at Indian youth. The intrinsic need for allowing individuals, including youth, to explore sex and sexuality comes from the tenet as enshrined in the Declaration of Sexual Rights that sexuality is a central aspect of being human, and that its denial is not only detrimental to one's well-being but is a violation of ones ability to function fully as a human.

Simultaneously, it is important to keep in mind the instrumental importance of engaging openly with issues of sex and sexuality in a society where, for instance, gendered norms on the one hand prevent girls and women from accessing information on reproductive health and/or sexually transmitted diseases leaving them at the mercy of the vagaries of husbands and in-laws, and on the other hand promote ideals of masculinity that frame men and boys as having uncontrollable sexual urges, both of which have adverse effects on health and well-being for males and females. However, as the Declaration of Sexual Rights rightly emphasizes, the importance of sexual rights is not simply in its instrumental role in preventing disease or dysfunction. Thus, while the narratives presented in this article, for example, demonstrate the lack of sexual education and its worrisome implications for sexual and reproductive health, it is important to emphasize that this is also a violation of Article 9 of the Declaration of Sexual Rights, which asserts the right to ‘scientifically accurate and understandable information related to sexuality, sexual health and sexual rights through diverse sources.’¹⁶

Lastly, notwithstanding the mainstream discourse in India that portrays it as a heteronormative society, where any presence of non-heteronormativity is a foreign import, my interviews showed the existence—and in many instances, acceptance—of non-heteronormative sexuality across various socioeconomic and cultural milieus within India. The young men in Trichy and one young woman in Gujarat, Abha, spoke of engaging in non-heteronormative sex but did not identify themselves in non-normative terms. Sagun's experience of being forced to have sex with men as part of his duties as a dancer at weddings further underscored the presence of non-heteronormative sexual relations in India, albeit one that is clandestine and exploitative. Sagun and Arvind, who identified as gay, spoke of finding acceptance among their peers. Arvind in particular, found life as a gay man in a small town in Gujarat to be far easier than in Chicago. The narratives presented in this article thus problematize easy categorizations of India as being homophobic and intolerant of non-heteronormative sexualities.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author would like to thank the Georgia College and State University’s COAS Faculty Development Grant for funding my research on youth sexuality in India, from which this article is drawn.

Notes

Sunita Manian is a Professor of Political Economy and Women’s and Gender Studies. She currently serves as the chair of the department of Philosophy, Religion and Liberal Studies at Georgia College and State University. Her research focuses on issues of gender and sexuality. Her most recent monograph, published by Routledge, titled HIV/AIDS in India: Voices from the Margins, draws from ethnographic research conducted among those infected and/or affected by HIV in India, including male and female sex workers, transwomen and HIV positive women.

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