"What do you mean then? That’s all that happened," he said. "We just sat there, in our blue Levi’s, T-shirts sexily crumpled, her purple bra strap showing, a cigarette smoking itself on the grass, her hairclip in my hand-like a wasted prop." The smell of sex was in the air, says Ankush. But they didn’t have sex. "She was faking it all, man," he added. "This drama of melting in my arms—I knew she had no feelings for me—and I just withdrew."
Five years back, Ankush Barot*—who can best be described as an almost confused upper middle-class 26-year-old man with bulging biceps and interest in ‘gurlz’—and others of his ilk, would have bragged otherwise. The sentence would then have read, "Oh man, she was so good, too sweet and we did it thrice in a row."
Now, thank God, not all men brag about the number of times they can get it up. They have realized that’s not the point.
Men and women still do it thrice. Or maybe five times on a steamy, frenzied afternoon, furtively groping at each other while tunedin to the WorldSpace radio at some friend’s vacant apartment. But nobody is counting. Math doesn’t matter but chemistry does. And the chemistry itself has changed. Men behave as if sex is not all that they want, while women have converted faking into an art form. So even if "has the sex changed too?" is a rhetorical question, the answer is yes.
First, let’s get the sacred cows out of the way. As far as sex goes, these days you can have what you want and how you want it. If it is about frequency, there is Viagra. If it is about add-ons, there are provocative porn CDs or candles in all shapes, aromas, colours and sizes, scented feathers, luscious silky scarves (by the way, what do you do with those?), flavoured condoms—even whisky ones, wow!—and fat pink dildos. If it is atmosphere, hotel rooms look prettier than they ever did with strategic lighting and silky body lotions available at hand. If it is aphrodisiacs, there is the new attitude—the most important turn-on in New India. If it is boredom—well, simple, hire a companion for the night or keep a sex buddy. If you have been there and done all of that, there is bisexual sex or orgies. If you are not into people, you can opt for virtual sex or Net sex. Or, participate in one of the many ‘show your panty contests’ and the like at a polysexual salon in Bangkok.
Has this whole new culture of open minds and a very open market changed sex? Oh yes. Has it changed men? Perhaps. If they have more of everything, they also realise that women do too. So how do the two sexes share real intimacy in this changing society to experience that rare, volatile bout of sex—read real, good sex—with or without KY jelly?
What’s interesting is the manner in which the internal and surface changes in people have crept into the sheets with them, changing the pursuit (and perhaps the experience) of the orgasmic moment.
More men are practising romance in love and sex. Or, as Tulika Ranaut, a 33-year-old executive who’s just relocated to Delhi from Mumbai, explains, "They do their romantic homework well." Romantic homework in urban lingo means: buy orchids, not rajnigandhas, keep smiling while she is talking on the phone, get her the post-coital martini, don’t shut your eyes while you are at it, keep the foreplay long, and the actual wham bam longer if you can. And before you pick her up, send a sweetSMS to her mother with a Hi Aunty!
While men are doing all of that, quite a few women are doing the male thing. Of all things on earth, they say they are bored with the romance. "What the f*** is wrong with men?" asks the same Tulika. "I get really hassled when they play the lovey-dovey man, hanging on till long after ‘it’ is over, indulging in some silly afterplay they have read about in some men’s magazine. I am like: why don’t you leave me to myself—ab ho gaya na?" she says animatedly. Tulika cools down soon and admits that men seem too much under pressure to be nice rather than real.
The young ones will admit as much. "You have to please the girl, show you are caring, wear a good deodorant, sport a brand, file your nails and smile when she cancels a date—even if all you want is sex," says 19-year-old Farhad, a Delhi University student who has already changed five girlfriends and has had sex with each one of them.
However, Ghazala Wahab, who is in her early 30s and is the executive editor of Force, a monthly newsmagazine on national security, does not think that the man who is bending backwards all the time is attractive in bed. "Who needs a man who spends as much time grooming himself in front of the mirror as a woman does, or goes all weepy watching KANK?" she asks. "Ditto in bed. Women taking the initiative and extended foreplay is fun, but at the end of the day, what women want are civilised cavemen," says Ghazala.
And, probably, that’s what most of them are—under the suave, sentimental and sensitive garb. Sunaina Talwar, a PR executive from Mumbai, may agree. "I lived in India till I was 14 and then returned when I was 22, and I don’t think men have changed much when it comes to sex. This new identity of theirs is very inconsistent when it comes to real choices. Most men still look for the ‘ideal’ woman and out of bed, they are not as emancipated as they sound," she adds. Touché!
Everyone agrees though that the pressure on men to perform in the bedroom and on women to perform in the boardroom has done good things overall. There is extended foreplay, sex is fun and not taboo anymore, men are more sensitive, girls don’t make a fuss about getting intimate and the game of hunting, chasing and mating is easier—without too many "will she, won’t she" doubts. The waiting period has been edited out. Sexual longing has given way to sexual experimentation.
If you remember your social anthropology lessons well, the hunting-mating game was always determined by women. The male of the species followed in a pack, the woman then chose one. But once she made the choice, she had to abide by the male rulebook of submission and dominance. That is no longer so.
And that, says Swaroop Kukreja*, is altering a lot many equations. Swaroop is 40, was divorced many years back, has a rocking career and defines herself as mature wine, adding that not too many men have been able to appreciate her no-strings approach to sex. "They find it odd when I say, ‘I don’t want to cuddle or cling, I don’t want a marriage or a baby. I only want a relationship which could mean a movie on one day and sex on the other,’" she adds. She also thinks men are not half as risk-taking in sex as women are now. "They can’t handle a woman who says, ‘that was nice darling, let’s do it again’ and that’s only about the sex, not the wine or cheese."
Obviously, bedroom politics unfolds in different ways among married and single couples. So far it seems that all the sordid tales of erotic flirtations and sexual adventures of the ‘new type’ are the preserve of the singles or those who have just got into a relationship. The married ones don’t seem to qualify for the "we do it 19 times a fortnight" Durex surveys. Unless you factor in the exhausted I-love-yous at the end of a bi-weekly marital quickie as "sex". Long-term sexless relationships remain the same, peculiarly unaffected by the Alpha Male Lite syndrome.
In India, with relationships on a rollercoaster, marriages on the rocks, and sex being just a phone call or a weekend retreat away for most people, there is an unnerving unrest in the air, an edgy uncertainty about everything, which may be bad for love but good for lust. Sex must be rampant, frenzied, intellectually adventurous, wild and decadent. So says Esther Perel, couples counsellor in the US, card-carrying shock shrink and the world’s leading authority on the sexlessness of the long-term relationships. Her book Mating in Captivity—Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic has caused a media furore publishers dream of. "Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs. Desire needs fights! Fights generate erotic energy, a general exuberance and vitality! Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them sexually. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties," she says.
If you interpret Perel’s provocative words in the New Indian context of pseudo-relationships, it explains a lot why sex is no longer the same. Fewer people now own each other—sexually or otherwise. No wonder the air is bristling with unbridled lust. With attitude as the new aphrodisiac, unsurety as the new libidinal instigator and men as the new women, sex is certainly on the top. But love?
Now, that’s another story.
(* Name changed.)
