S.Kalidas' Archive

Female Sexual Fantasies

By S. Kalidas

The male establishment, having effectively controlled the woman's imagination for centuries, has shaped her fantasies to conform to its own rigid parameters

No, they do not surf porn sites, 29 per cent hold that pornography is morally wrong, 82 per cent have never masturbated and only 24 per cent admit to having sex. Thirty-five years after feminists burnt their bras in the western world, the single Indian woman could well be the prototype for Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch looking back in anger. Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden is still something that adolescent boys and perverse men furtively peruse in the secrecy of bathrooms and Women On Top is understood to be the nice lady neighbours living on the floor above. Bipasha Basu and Mallika Sherawat notwithstanding, our seductive Menakas and Urvashis are definitely not wannabe Madonnas. The latest readings of sexual iconographies show that even in the West, the "new woman" by proclaiming sexual autonomy has only fuelled male fears by becoming an emasculating temptress or, as veteran art historian Bram Dijkstra puts it in his Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil, "the femme fatale in search of the perpetually tumescent male". So trying to map the single Indian woman's realm of sexual fantasy is probably like chasing a chimera created mainly by a masochistic male mindset out to beguile or punish his own penis. After all, we keep hearing that it has a mind of its own. Oh yeah, the consort-killing Alpha Female is a concept deeply denied in any patriarchal paradise. In India, too, history saw Razia Sultan murdered for wanting to be sultan and Rani Jhansi is eulogised only because she fought for the rights of her male heir, not herself. There are more luscious mythologies, like those of the Devi creating a male son/bodyguard (Ganesha) by rubbing into shape the soil from the skin of her sakhis (female companions) mainly to keep her husband (Shiva) out of her pleasure pool while she bathed and frolicked with her female friends and attendants. Or of Kali as Chhinnamasta, who sits astride her passive male consort in an unending act of sexual conquest, while lopping off her own head and drinking her own blood. Middle-class urban India does not easily recall such macabre in-your-face images even in its most private mindspace. They remain buried, deep under layers of comforting, colonial legacies.