Sex is a funny thing. Not least because it involves making strange faces while assuming yogic positions, but also because its cultural expression (endorsement and taboos) often take up bizarre, almost surreal, forms. Everyone does it, from the authoritative ranks of politicians and generals to the man selling his wares on the street, yet it is as curiously absent from visible Pakistani life as it seems pervasive. It took incontrovertible scientific evidence for me to consider the possibility that maybe, at some point, in the past, my parents might have actually, you know, had sex. I think many here share my experience. In general, parents and adults here seem to subsist on a non-sexual plane of existence. Sex, like matters of national security, is only discussed behind closed doors.
It’s normal for a family watching TV—the dignified father, the mother with a dupatta over her head, the kids sprawled on the floor—to be jolted as I’m Too Sexy For You starts blaring out of the speakers, accompanied by Katrina’s rhythmic gyrations. After that brief, but sensual assault, it’s ‘normal’ again. The father goes back to his newspaper, the mother to her book, while the kids are left wondering what the half-naked lady dancing with shirtless men was all about.
I learned about sex in the same place where I learned how to read, write and invent excuses: school. True, there are no sex education classes in Pakistan, but that doesn’t preclude sex education from classrooms and school yards, behind textbooks, amidst winks and giggles. Of course, this is unreliable, the teachers too being pubescent kids with raging hormones and vivid imagination, but no practical experience. Children pick up things elder siblings and cousins say, things they see and read, and assemble them for a narrative that may be, or not, close to reality.
This spawns countless myths about sex and masturbation. I was once asked by a younger cousin with wide, worrying eyes, whether it was true that masturbation can make you blind. Of course, I wanted to tell him it was nonsense, but I realised my own face was framed by a pair of thick glasses without which I often walked into furniture, so any reassurance on my part would hardly assuage him. A boy in school who was hit in the crotch by a wayward cricket ball spent many hours crying and swearing because he thought he’d never father children now, as “it was broken”. “But there isn’t any room!”, a girl I knew wondered incredulously, while refusing to believe the descriptions of “what goes where!”.
Later, with a better understanding of the subject, social, religious and legal stipulations make their presence felt. Broadly speaking, you’re not ‘allowed’ to have sex outside of wedlock in Pakistan. That’s why the youth take recourse to marriage so frequently. But despite obstacles, resourceful young people seem to find a way. In cars, apartments, motels, in public parks after dark, at empty homes, in dormitories and in nooks and crannies of campuses—where there’s a will there’s a place, though getting caught is always a risk, and tales of jumping out of windows or having to pay off policemen aren’t uncommon.
Of course, many are content with holding hands on dates until they’re married. It’s all about how many boundaries your social context and personal beliefs let you push. The risk and associated guilt is much larger for girls. They are concerned about their hymen; ours is a hymen-obsessed society—it’s something to be guarded sacredly until some cleric signs its obituary in a wedding contract. Then there’s premarital pregnancy, a possibility that leads to social hell. Young women are almost seen as sexual time-bombs, ticking away in minds of parents who try to get rid of them quickly. The practice of girls married off to older men, usually within family circles, leads to curious situations and witty insight: “Sari umr bhaijaan, phir ek din...sirf jaan?”
Then there’s the matter of sexual release for those who aren’t married. The easier alternative to sex outside marriage, with its many risks and deterrents, is to simulate sex. Hence the popularity of phone sex, cyber sex, sexting, masturbating to pornographic material—we Pakistanis always put technology to its best possible use. Pornography has been eagerly consumed in this land of the pure. Before the internet age, precocious youths went to video rental stores and used time-worn euphemisms: ‘I want a love story’, ‘action wali movie dena’ and rented X-rated films for a few days. These would kept hidden in shelves behind Hollywood/Bollywood features.
The internet brought the house down. You didn’t have to go to porn, it came to you, first on horrible dial-up connections, where downloading was interrupted by someone picking up the phone in the other room, then on broadband, where it could be put on queue and college business attended to. The Pakistan government frowns on porn. Their recent decision (after having thoroughly reviewed the material, I’m told) to deem online porn unfit for public consumption and ban it has led many youths to seethe with indignation—not only at the government fiat, but also at the internet itself, for having nothing else as interesting!
There are other outlets too. Phone sex has been riotously popular for long—for minimal risk one has pleasant company. In fact, mobile service providers now offer special youth-oriented packages for cheap all-night calls. The tagline for one such offer, ‘Sab kah do’, sounds like an invitation.
Cellphones in Pakistan are ubiquitous and facilitate sexual escapades across social classes. This has not escaped the state’s attention. They squirm at the thought of phones being used for something that besmirches any Islamic state—young people having fun. Sadly, tongues are not as easily banned as websites. Likewise, ‘chat’ websites, though blighted by duplicity (one’s horrified to find out that the woman he has been flirting with is really the unlovely young man living down the road), are hotbeds for sexual contact.
Even if all else fails, there’s always ‘poondi’. Ogling, as it is so inadequately called in English, is considered by many to be the real national sport. That simple act of unabashedly, brazenly staring at the supple contours of someone’s figure, which might result in a restraining order in other countries, is a regular indulgence for Pakistani youths. Boys do it, girls do it, everyone in between does it, so there’s a sexually charged environment even in streets, markets and malls.
Thus, behind the unnerving social silence on sexual matters, there is an entire underworld of glances, trysts, phone-calls, text messages and video clips, in every household and on every street. Sexuality continues to find inevitable expression, even as Pakistan continues to espouse religious conservatism on a state level.
(Haseeb Asif, 26, is a Lahore-based writer. He tweets as @haseebasif and blogs at Iblees.wordpress.com)
