Putting Sex In Its Rightful Place

Sound the klaxons! I am about to go on to write a non-watertight post which will include some assertions and much musing. WHAT IT WILL BE: a reflection and an invitation to debate, discuss and ponder (I know, I know, call the ponce police NOW!). WHAT IT WON'T BE: sociological treatise supported by pages upon pages of peer-reviewed science.

Sex is overrated.

Yeah, I said it. That's right. You read me right. SEX IS OVERRATED!

Now that I've grabbed your attention with my controversial soundbite, sit still and bear with me. I don't think ALL sexual activity is overrated...

but when I said 'sex,' you thought of penetrative intercourse, didn't you? Go on, it's the right answer! It's the answer I want you to give!

I've always been a bit dubious about penetration. When I was younger, it was the idea that something being inserted up you could be fun. If you think about it, that brings to mind injections. Injections are not very fun, now, are they?

(Incidentally, I've only just now made that link, so don't go crediting my teenage self with scope I didn't actually have...).

As an Asian woman though, the prospect of it absolutely fucking terrified me. Ideally, I would be imagined - and expected - to be a virgin, a sexual ingénue, whilst my husband could have had numerous sexual encounters, and we would not discuss it because you Do Not Go There. Why would you want to broach a topic that would only lead to strife? Wondering how many previous lovers he might have had, if he's being honest about that number, how you compare, why it's OK for him and not for you...

Not all Asian men are hypocrites. Some of the genuinely devout ones aren't. However, depressingly enough, it is the religion-following (rather than any sort of internal reflection and self-awareness) that makes them so, for a lot of the men I know of. Sikh men. Let it be said though, that the power structures are partly responsible. Even though men benefit much more than women in Asian culture, they're by NO MEANS free of baggage.

So yeah, I would wonder why the hell the whole world was so goddamn obsessed with sex anyway. From the age of eleven, I made a resolution, and this was my only life's resolution. Now it may sound sad to some, and maybe some sort of betrayal to others (OMG, WHY DIDN'T YOU LIKE, AIM TO BE AN ASTRONAUT OR SOMETHING?!), it was important to me. It still is - important and necessary, and I feel that I was very lucky to find it.

I vowed that I wanted to love and be loved. Note: I didn't say 'wanted to be married,' or that I 'wanted to be in love.' No, I wanted to be loved. Not drama and not tears. Not the sort of relationship where his basic acknowledging of me as a fellow human was a source of happiness. Not the sort of marriage where his leaving me to get on with the housework, rather than criticising me for not doing it the way his mum did, was considered desirable. A partner who could understand that, was THE benchmark by which I would set my standards, thank you very much.

Sex has always been important, but many would argue that it has become more recent in modern times. I would be inclined to agree, especially when you think of changing attitudes to pornography, the arrival of the Internet and a general liberalising of society. That's not to say we're all fine with talking about sex now, but you know, you have things like Anne Summers shops and mainstream papers such as The Independent running lists of 'The Ten Best Sex Toys.' Hard to imagine in the 1950s, eh?

However, the way we think about sex has often been problematic. For a long time, you had a love/sex dichotomy, and it still persists. The idea that love and sex could be separate (especially for women) began to develop towards the end of the nineteenth century. I'm thinking specifically of Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), which tentatively broaches a subject all too familiar to modern readers: the notion that you can love somebody - while simultaneously being attracted to someone else. No doubt it was there before, but it was very likely taboo, especially for women. Fancy someone other than your husband? You strumpet!

For some people, I don't doubt that love and sex is often - maybe even always - separate. That may even work for them. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for a lot of people. Read any number of letters to any number of agony aunts, and you see the same ol' time-weathered issues recurring: I love a married man, but he won't leave his wife for me, blah blah blah. Or I'm unsatisfied and I'm having an affair, blah blah blah. Alongside this kind of thing, you get celebratory articles about women finding sexual satisfaction in their 40s by having affairs, and stuff like that.

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that - perhaps because of an increase in sexual freedoms for women - it became more acceptable for women to 'do as men do' sexually. Unfortunately, however, that increase in freedom didn't necessarily coincide with a weakening of certain ideas about sex and gender. Hence, many women had more sex, but the old idea that women wanted love and men wanted sex still held firm in the minds of many. So, you got this stupid and painful situation where women could have sex with whoever, but for many, love and sex were intrinsically bound in their subconscious.

There's also the fact that sex leads to the release of oxytocin, which:

has various functions in the body, such as inducing labor contractions and milk ejection, but from evolutionary biology’s perspective, its main evolutionary function is to bond us to our children for life. It also serves to bond us to our mate…at least long enough to produce a child and (if we're lucky) get it on its feet.

We are not programmed for monogamy, nor our own sexual satisfaction, it would seem. I DO NOT mean by this to say that women should stop exercising sexual freedom like men. Evolutionary science has been conveniently used in the past to enforce gender stereotypes and permit men to 'sow their wild oats' while denying women the same freedom. That's what you'd call 'bad science,' though. Proper science shows itself to be egalitarian in showing that actually, we're all set up for the same goal: to further the species. If males will 'sow their wild oats,' then females will replace flagging partners.

This is where I come back in. Yuman beans are, of course, brain-equipped creatures and not just bags of hormones, correct? We realised the dangers of blindly following our instincts since very, very long ago (see: Greek tragedy), in the form of overpopulation, if nothing else. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Either we have long-term stable relationships, or we have incredible sexual peaks and troughs. The time-honoured way to have both is to fake replacing your partner, by means of sexual exploration. You may notice how people always use terms like 'reinvent' or 'rediscover.' It's change, but you're tricking your brain - instead of a new partner, you're simply using new techniques to keep dopamine levels consistent.

Another possibility, to be used alongside, is to reassess the importance of sex. To put sex back in its rightful place (AT LAST! I hear you cry). No sex vs love. No more of this 'I love my husband, but I have great sex with the plumber.' No more of this 'I love my wife, but my secretary is so naughty and dirty.' Actions have repercussions. That's the shittest and most important bit of being an adult. Especially when there's children or friends involved, and Lord knows, there so often are. It's almost embarrassing.

Be slow. Be messy. Be fumbling. Learn, gradually and carefully, how to turn each other on. Think of your sex life as a book, which you chop into bits and put back together again. Does the end HAVE to be the end? How final was the end, anyway? In so many cases, you probably read to the end and then thoughts lingered in your head. You thought 'I wonder what happened next to so-and-so?' Even if there was a sequel, the likelihood of it carrying on right where the last left off was unlikely. In cases where that DOES happen, the first media I can think of are soap operas and comic-book series - and what are they? Long-running.

Penetration is not the end, nor should it be. It's been established that many women don't come through penetration alone; evidently it's not the key to orgasm in itself. Yet we persist in elevating it to such ridiculous levels of importance. Teens are all so interested in 'going all the way' and 'doing it.' Very few people's first time is about learning how to enjoy sex; it seems more to be about 'getting it out of the way.' How depressing! That's life, though. Social conformity exerts such horrible, crushing pressure on us that people have sex - or pretend to have - before they're even really ready for it.

I think the common attitude of 'lose virginity drunkenly, so as to ease fear, then have sex whenever I feel like' is fair enough, but watch out, people. If that's how you want to do, then you have to do it right. Go all the way. Don't think about love. Where sex leads, love does not necessarily follow - and you know what? That's not because men want sex and women want love. It's not because love and sex are opposed. It's because reproduction and monogamy are opposed. Yeah, that's right! How hilarious it feels to read that, when religion has been advocating socially/religiously/legally-enforced monogamy as the prerequisite for reproduction for years.

Sex needs to be rethought, and not just by feminists. Enough of the turgid meatstick in the quivering lower-lips. Enough of tits, asses and cock. Have you ever found somebody's eyelashes sexy? No? I sure as hell have (The Libertarian's thick, charcoal-dusting caught my eye even before his green-and-gold eyes). I like lips, in a man. The Libertarian has very rosy cheeks and lips, a freckled nose and unexpectedly dark, thick upper lashes. Half the time, I don't know whether to frame-and-display him, or kiss as usual.

I think I'm lucky, because I grew up with an awareness of classic Bollywood cinema, where filmi courtesans redefined the markers of sexuality. Between the sashaying of hips and the thrusting of abdominal muscles that we know so well, alongside wet saris, there was something new. I'm thinking of Madhuri Dixit as the courtesan Chandramukhi in Devdas, of the song 'Kaahe Chhed Chhed Mohe.' One of her most fervent admirers sings (roughly translated from memory):

'Jasmine makes fragrant her lovely dark tresses... Radha's face is aglow, electric... Her gait, seductive.'

In Sanskrit poetry, as well as old Bollywood, eyes, eyelashes, hair and faces are most often described as alluring. The face and hands are most often employed by filmi courtesans to seduce. It's still objectification, you might argue - but at least it's not quite as violent a form of objectification. It's not the same as when: 'you talk about getting laid, you never say a woman, you say a broad, a lay, a baby, a doll, a bird, you talk about butts and boobs, every time you mention a woman I see her either as a sort of window-dresser’s dummy or as a heap of dismembered parts, breasts, or legs or buttocks.’

There is some sense that a woman has some power, something concealed which is hers and which she can choose to give. Granted, this is somewhat illusory with a courtesan (a bought woman) - but I'm not telling anyone to be a courtesan! Nor am I saying 'cover up' or 'behave like a man/lady.' Sexual problems in a relationship are so often merely the most visible element of a larger underlying problem. Fluffy handcuffs, toys and dressing up are all very well. Just make sure it's not all one-way - and just make sure you're realistic about the relationship of sex to love for you. Does sex really = love? For a lot of us middle-class kudia, raised as respectably as we are, I don't really think so. Intercourse - especially penetrative - is not the apogee of desire. Standing close to someone, denying yourself, a loaded glance, a telling kiss - give it a try sometime if you haven't already, o no-doubt-horrified readers...

Giving Up, Giving In

Oh dear sweet blog, what an utter, utter relief it is to be tappin' away on you again! I have had a seriously bad week (things really kicked up on Sunday morning, but I will only talk about that once I have the strength/anyone asks).

I read this article which got my mental cogs whirring rustily. Maybe I'll even write on it like I used to, who knows??! Lack of sleep, serious emotional stress and general need-to-cry have left me clogged and murky upstairs. What I really need is some sort of anonymous guardian angel figure who will kidnap me, appease the various people who are baying for my blood asking me to do the bare minimum expected of me when I signed on to take a chunk of Governmental money to be educated. I get told that I am a good person, who makes people happy (chiefly by The Libertarian, bless him) but I do feel like a tremendous failure when things pile up on me. The knotted narrative of my life so far, in which all the events connect and nothing can be left out to fully understand the enormity of current problems, makes it that much harder.

After handing in an essay two days late by accident, after having spent all day writing another which WAS due today, I almost fell to pieces. Never had my skin felt thinner in recent memory, as I stood in front of the office of the somewhat perplexed Administrative Director of the School of English and Drama! I could feel heat creeping upon me; I knew how it might look to them, and I was ashamed. 'I'm not your common or garden layabout!' I wanted to shout with some sort of perverse pride. 'No; I'm in this situation because I'm pathetic enough to be deeply affected by the suffering of others! GO ON! PUNISH ME!'

Defeatist, much? I managed to recover 'Fight Mode' once they, very kindly, gave it an on-time stamp after all, but I was afraid. I knew that my memory, taxed with misery and fatigue, would probably fail me. Sure enough, it did - the essay was of course due in two days ago. Everyone else isn't always wrong, my mother used to say to me. It's YOU. I went to see my course organiser, quivering on the brink. She was very considerate and my skin thinned further, dangerously. She had misunderstood things slightly. I clarified. She went to recover my essay, and my skin collapsed altogether. Sat right there in her office, I cried. Oh, how much I wanted to cry my eyes out! How I wanted to slide to the floor, pull my coat over my face and cry pathetically in great, big, bursting sobs! Embarrassingly enough, my eyes are filling with tears in my university library as I type this.

Instead, I hyperventilated my way back to some semblance of composure. I could not embroil this poor woman - who had once asked me if I was alright after the seminar, because I hadn't contributed - in my personal failure to handle emotion. So, head dipped and shoulders shaking, I 'sucked it up'. A vague numbness settled over me and when she returned, I could occasionally flick glances towards her. There was an awful, genuine kindness in her eyes when she (repeatedly) apologised. She could probably tell from my shrivelled eyes that I had problems. Hence my inability to meet her eye. She advised me to speak to my advisor and submit an Extenuating Circumstances form. I comically imagined entering his office to meet with him and descending into a disastrous, weeping wreck.

A fear and pride held me back, just like it does. I want to resolve my feelings somehow. The urge to live, to be something is strong in me - but so too is the urge for destruction. Why? Why do I want to lie across a stranger's table and cry out my whole life? Why do I want to invite them to stamp over my feelings? Deep down, I know they probably won't. They'll just be appalled. They will probably, as many already have, give me credit for coping with the amount of familal bullying that I took.

I am a hypocrite though. I usually like grey areas, I like things to be complicated. Yet when it comes to the whole 'I need to get away from my family, but they have made more vocal expressions of love towards me recently than ever before and I feel horribly guilty. Plus, I'm the only real adult in the house emotionally' - I wish I could pass. I really do.

The source of much of this angst is that, when I returned innocently home last weekend to work on the essay I handed in today, I was served up the information that my elder sister (who was there, as I complained in my last post) is there for good because she has left her husband. He has always been abusive (not physically, thankfully for him). Much to my amazement, it was my parents who had told her to come back. A giant psychological shift has taken place - both my parents and my sister are being forced to reassess the way they see the world. My sister, at the age of 31, is being forced to consider life without a partner and children. I know that sounds dramatic; but that's how it is in her head. Remember that as a card-carrying member of the community we live in (unlike me), she subscribed fully to all the bullshit dictated to us by my parents, and especially my mother.

My mother, in a manner which really shouldn't surprise me, obviously feels both relief and guilt in great measure. I don't think she's quite emotionally developed enough to realise that, but as somebody who has borne the brunt of her tactlessness my whole life, I can see it. She keeps talking about how glad she is my sister is back, bringing up family skeletons and saying in an accusatory way 'I don't know how you stayed with him!'

GREAT, Mother. Just great. She's already feeling guilty of betraying him, as the abusee often feels upon escaping their abuser, and trying to make sense of why he married her in the first place when he obviously didn't love her. Make it worse, why don't you? Truly, we can do no right. We actually pointed this out to my mum ('If she had come back sooner, you would have accused her of not working at it') but my mum seemed rather oblivious. I don't hate my mum like I came close to in the past - I despair of her. She had the sheer presence of mind to bring up my sister's ex-fiance the other day (who broke off the engagement unexpectedly and without contact, and then tried to hide from her afterwards, fucking asshole) and say of her soon-to-be ex: 'It must have been something you did that really irritated him.'

Fucking hell! Though I know it really doesn't sound like it, she meant well in her completely cack-handed way. As my sister sobbed into her fleece, I turned and refashioned my mum's bald statement into what it was probably intended to be. 'You see? You see?' my mum leapt in eagerly, as she often does when I comment on the sorry affair. She flags up the evident sense in what I'm saying, I think with some relief, because Mater REALLY doesn't know how to do emotion.

So yes - at a time when I was already under hideous levels of pressure (two essays, Master's applications, a French presentation which should have been done LAST YEAR, behind on general French work and barely keeping up with my reading), this landed slap on me like a big, fat, fucking turd. This kind of shit makes me angry enough as it is, but the fact of it happening to my sister, my mum bringing up similar family history and meeting an old friend who had put her daughter's in-laws behind bars after a long fight increased my sense of despondent rage. At the very least, I wanted to be at home to look after my sister for the short period of time she has off, but nuuuuuu, I have to keep going and do fucking shit. Well, I am only human. I fail. I failed today. By a miracle (i.e. making it probably quite obvious that I would not refrain, if pushed, from crying in the English office), I was saved - but this is bullshit, yo.

I shouldn't have to be in this position. Maybe I sound like an ingrate for saying that, but that's how I feel, I'm afraid. I have no bitterness about all the time I lost looking after my sister (why the fuck should I?) but it just seems so very fucking unfair that this kind of bollocks happens to me. Furthermore, when I grovel before my advisor and the evaluatory board that may or may not condemn me for my failure of memory, I must reduce this all to one paragraph. How shittily pathetic is it going to sound, do you think? 'Sorry, I think I'm developing a stomach ulcer because my sister's getting divorced.' I know it's not right - but good God, part of me almost feels like I deserve it. Maybe I do. Maybe I should have been professional to the end, as my mother no doubt would have been.

Ah well, fucking bullshit essays handed in, still not had a shower and the French presentation looms over me like an executioner. Time I went back to the flat, had dinner and leapt out of the window forced myself to read until I fall asleep with exhaustion and then stay up later than necessary for no good reason because I can't relax and the fridge is too loud.

Well, I'm a regular bundle of joy - but so run the joys of blogging. It's like offloading on people without actually doing so. No need to make small talk, no need to force myself to be suitably smiley. I am free of social convention's oppression and I can wallow in my mounting unhappiness. Not a joke, not a hint of a smile. Sometimes even krazy jelly beans lose all their colour.

Tradition: The Skinny

In keeping with my entirely non-existent claim to be an expert on well, pretty much everything, I am going to publish another rant (hopefully briefer than my previous ones, I hear you pant. We just can't keep up with these marathon spewings! Why, my pretties, I do apologise. I've been staying up too late and eating badly, and these are the pungent results... :-D).

So, here's the deal, as the Genie says in Disney's Aladdin while dressed as a sort of weird blue teddy-boy. Tradition is something I militate against quite frequently. Not in the fashion of a D.H. Lawrence or a Marinetti. I do go off on one about the importance of art to life, but I'm not kidding myself. I am more in line with the likes of Forster and Proust, as already stated, in that I believe we can't just break off from the past.

However, we really mustn't enshrine it either. LESSON NUMBER ONE!

We have our individual pasts, and then there is also the 'collective' past, generally expressed (or seen to be) through popular culture. We tend to see our individual pasts as branching off from the 'collective' past, often through our experiences of popular culture. In short, everyone often feels a need to watch the 'It' programme, or listen to the 'It' band of the moment, even though they might not be aware of what this entails. (I always felt very left out for not being able to watch Trigger Happy TV, but now it doesn't seem to me that I really missed out...).

Humans are social beings, innit, and that's why the collective past is important to us. It gives our lives meaning in a small way, and it gives them meaning in a much easier way than the painfully grown-up notion of our responsibility to the world as inhabitants of it that we get slapped with later on.

I mean, think of how beautifully simple it is when you can discuss Eastenders with somebody. For that brief period of time, you exist fully and purely in your satisfying and simple interaction with another person. Nothing tangible has been created, but a connection has flared, flickered and thrown the whole, creaking framework of your drudging life into a sort of glorious perspective for a while. Equally, this is a moment of real freedom, because you are not being forced to produce, nor are you at the mercy of a biological drive which demands that you compare yourself to another being, or procreate with them. 'Survival of the fittest,' 'the rat race' and 'the daily grind' all fall away for a minute and do you know what the best thing is? It's a secular connection. This is not some out-of-yourself moment of transcendance; you are fully conscious of what occurs. Now, ain't that almost spiritual?

We need to stop behaving as if this disappears altogether when we grow up, because it doesn't. Life is undoubtedly harder in adulthood than it is in childhood, but at least now we can appreciate these little moments of connection. People forget how much time you spend being bored and whiny when you're a kid... because you take all that shit for granted. Everything is easy, we are taught to expect... and therein lies the key-phrase. Taught to expect. We are also taught to expect adulthood a certain way. Can we not just get a grip, please? Not everyone's past is that amazing. I loved the books I read, but I'm pretty happy to be who I am now.

These days, because people limply accept that they will have to work forever to afford all the things they want and the lifestyle they think they deserve, we seem to be losing sight more and more of that very infantile luxury: the luxury of taking stock. That poem about how we don't have time to just exist, sums it up for me. Why on Earth can people not just drop their standards a little? You don't HAVE to have a 36-inch TV. If need be, surely you could just use your laptop instead of buying a DVD player. And just how many sofas do you need, really?

I hate to sound all poncey and spiritual, but it's true - those things won't go with you when you die. Knowing that you finally managed to get that Mercedes-Benz is REALLY going to make that passage to the Other Side so much easier, isn't it? What the fuck is wrong with people?

This is where people go badly wrong. In the hopes of having something which will defy human mortality, they cling to tradition. The idea, if you think about it, being that traditions are passed down from generation to generation. In short, they are another manifestation of the human ego's frantic need to circumvent death.

Let me put it to you people straight: YOU WILL DIE AND STOP EXISTING. Unappealing as that sounds, that's just how it is. Get it through your heads. God may or may not exist, who fuckin' KNOWS if we have an afterlife, but we are born and we die. Clinging to tradition does NOT mean you escape.

A lot of diasporans have this real anxiety about mortality, you will notice, if you speak to them about their children becoming 'Westernised' and 'losing their culture.'

Permit me to be outrageous. Mummy, Daddy, I'm afraid that Indian culture is NOT MY CULTURE. I do enjoy elements of it, but I grew up in this country. I have internalised a different set of norms, I plan on living within the social mores which I am used to, and your grief, while understandable and upsetting, is entirely deluded. I personally believe that many 1st-generation Asians are actually projecting their own insecurities onto their children. Many of them are well aware of the fact that their 'homeland' has changed almost beyond belief and that even if they were to return, they wouldn't be able to hack it. To put it bluntly, the India they knew is long dead and they have not been able to grieve and move on because they are stuck in the denial stage.

That's why I consider patriotism - the full-blown emotional strain of it that borders on chauvinism and nationalism - to be really fucking dumb. Nations are composed of people, and people change. Pretty simple, I'd think. And yet, when it's only when talking to family friends, that my mum remarks how 'They have become modern and we are old-fashioned now.' Yes. Well done. Now write it down and learn it by heart.

To return to what I was saying: Indian culture is not 'mine' and it never was. That's tantamount to throwing a book at somebody and shouting 'Why haven't you read it? It's yours!' What utter cack. If you value the dissemination of tradition above all, if the mortality of your memories and the loss of your emotional world is something that you are not adult enough to handle, then please do everyone a favour and fuck off back to where you came from. I would say, in fatalistic fashion 'Raise your kids there if it bothers you that much!' but that would contravene my beliefs about parenthood being a process of nurturing rather than of ownership.

Traditions are a big lie, because, like everything else in the world spawned of humanity, they are subject to perversion and misinterpretation. Bitch please, they do not all carry on being the same after you die. I mean, is child-marriage as common in India as it used to be? Thank Gawd, no! I am stressing this because the lie of tradition is that you are 'investing' in something that you consider to be yours, and effectively trying to overcome death in the process.

I find it really funny that people give so much prominence to tradition when all it is, is habit. I could make a 'tradition' out of only bathing once a week if I wanted to... but I don't because it would be disgusting. That's why, similarly, 'traditions' based around, for example, the wearing of a certain religious symbol, or dressing in a particular manner, are often pretty stupid. Most people won't be aware of the original meaning, and many of them won't necessarily even agree, but the force of habit will hold them tight nonetheless.

Sometimes I wonder why we humans are so desperately keen to latch onto abstract notions when, much of the time, we can't be arsed to invest the time and effort to fully comprehend those abstract notions. Fucking idiots, so we are. Or are we geniuses? The whole point of making something that is so utterly abstract as to be verging on incomprehensible, is that people find it that much harder to question!

I'll finish by fielding a perhaps scandalous suggestion: maybe, oh 1st-gens, maybe your cultures are 'dying' (or so it seems to you) because you yourselves do not have sufficient awareness to teach the yoot about them properly. Or maybe they are dying because that is the natural order of things? Did I not speak earlier of 'survival of the fittest'? It can apply to the world of culture too, you know.

Personally, I believe that saying cultures are 'dying' is bullshit, especially if a lot of people are aware of their existence. A tiny mountain tribe which goes unchronicled and whose inhabitants all move away and convert to Christianity - perhaps that could be called a 'death,' but c'mon, how often does that really happen?

Another reason why I think clinging fervently to traditions is to be avoided at best is because it leads to things like the Partition of India, which involved horrific behaviour by people of all religions in the name of religion and tradition (oh, how cosily synonymous are the two on most occasions! *grimaces*). People can level all sorts of names and accusations at me, but I kind of agree with Nietzsche on this one: the world needs to indulge in a little more 'active forgetting' at times. (OBVIOUSLY some things, like the Holocaust, and indeed Partition, must never be forgotten, but they must also be remembered for the right reasons). We need to learn to let the tide of change come sweeping in, because it's always going to, whether we like it or not. Don't be making yourself look as foolish as ol' Canute did (although he did it intentionally...)!