I met a very interesting person yesterday. She made two very interesting statements. First, that she was open to the idea of having one-night stands with attractive strangers, for mutual pleasure. Second, that if she were to get married someday, she would never grudge her husband for having a one-off sexual escapade with "another woman", so long as he was emotionally committed to her (i.e the wife) . Women who have such thoughts are not non-existent in metropolitan India today, but they constitute one of the most marginalised and misunderstood minorities.
Somehow, I feel that Indian society and the unwritten code of morals that weighs heavy on our collective shoulders is obsessed with women and their sexual behaviour. Any woman who has thoughts as my friend does is described as a whore or a woman of loose character and literally becomes an object in the eyes of Indian men. Men harbouring adulterous thoughts and desire to bed several women are forgiven by the same code of morals. Even highly educated men in great jobs are not spared.
Which brings me to the plight of another friend. She had been in a couple of relationships during her college days. Whether she had partaken of the forbidden fruit of sexual pleasure or not is a matter of speculation and no more (without asking privacy-intrusive questions, that is). Based just on the material that she had dated two guys, a family "carefully selected" by her parents to marry her into not only rejected her hand in marriage, but also broadcast their speculation (and there are no points for guessing what they speculated) to the larger community. The friend in question was transformed from a brilliant, ambitious and extremely eligible lawyer into a common street whore sans morals. And this is a family (the boy's, that is) where everyone was a "gold medallist" in all their academic glory.
The point here is not about questioning the morals of society, but delving into why one cannot embrace a common, consistent school of thought. The market-based capitalist economic model adopted and embraced so passionately by the businessmen, software engineers and management graduates (who, incidentally, are the hottest property on the marriage market) in urban India today necessarily demands the freedom of the individual and a respectful acceptance of the competence of every person to make decisions that suit them best. If investing in risky stocks was a decision a female took and gained success by, she must equally have the right to make a sexual choice. If a man and a woman are judged by their boss on the same criteria, then society must judge them against similar moral benchmarks.
I feel somewhat sorry for my friend who had the "deviant" thoughts on her sexual choices. Being a man, my agreement with her views means little because I apparently have the right to think that way. Will I marry a girl who admits to having had sexual relations with other men in the past, but who will assure me of lifelong commitment in an emotional and temporal sense? My simple answer is yes. But will I be marrying a whore? The simpler answer is no.
