When I was a young reporter and in Bangladesh for a reporting assignment, a middle class Bangladeshi woman told me about her arranged marriage at the age of 14 and her first night as a wife:
“He came at me like a bull, I was so afraid, and it hurt…it took me years to learn that sex could be like a dance and make both of us happy.”
Then I heard about her first pregnancy. She was 16 and half way through her term when her husband announced that he had to go away on business. She was devastated.
“I thought he had to have sex with me every night to create a new part of the baby…when he told me he was going away for weeks, I thought I was going to give birth to a monster who would be missing the full set of eyes, ears, arms and legs.”
She finally mustered up the courage to go to her sisters-in-law. They simply laughed, and didn’t bother to enlighten her about how a baby is formed in the womb. So she remained in a state of distress until her son was born and she could see that he was perfect.
It’s a story that I never forgot, and on return trips to India during the 80’s and 90’s I took it upon myself as a personal mission to tell anyone in my conservative middle class milieu everything they ever wanted to know but didn’t know who to ask about sex, babies, homosexuality, condoms, S&M, you name it. And once we got over the initial “chee, sooo dirty yaar” kind of reactions, there was a lot of interest.
I became a veritable Indian Dr Ruth, and many of these discourses ended up as informal counselling sessions with people pouring out a litany of private sex and marital problems they’d never dared to articulate before.
I carried on with my “sex information mission” with desi visitors to Amsterdam. I’ve taken various contingents of sweet Indian aunties, and other sundry middle aged ladies and even gentlemen on “Dheera’s tour of the Red Light District”, parking them in front of sex shop windows and proceeding in my best lecturing tone to give them the ins and outs (so to speak) of the various gadgets on display. A little heavy handed perhaps, but I saw it as my evangelical mission to cut through the embarrassment, the taboos, the shame, to the many faces and forms of the sexual act.
I mean - here’s this act, fundamental to our functioning as human beings, as natural as breathing, eating, defacating, and yet, there are cultures that refuse to bring it out into the open. And this deliberate ignorance of it, is I believe the original cause of some of our world’s greatest problems - from mental anguish to the propagation of disease.
When I was a teenager, no way was my mum going to tell me about any of this stuff: menstruation, masturbation, sex, conception, kissing - whoah. She probably never even said those words to herself in her own head and eeeeeuwwww, no way did I want to hear them from her.
But in those days, there was no internet, I didn’t know about the existence of porn films and the closest I got to any kind of sex knowlege was furtively going through the couple of Harold Robbins books I found in the back of an uncle’s bookcase.
Now of course, things are different. Young kids even in South Asia, are dating, necking when they get the chance, and occasionally going further. But there’s still so much silence and taboo surrounding the S word. So I’m happy to announce the new Radio Netherlands initiative that’s aiming to cut through to the nitty gritty and in a very matter of fact way, provide answers to the questions that many people in this region don’t dare to ask.
It’s a new website called Love Matters and its got, if not all the answers, then a whole truckload of them. When’s the right age to have sex for the first time, how to use a condom, pregnancy and how it works, the list is endless. And if you have a question that’s not on there, send it in and the Love Matters team will answer it.
So check out the site, send it on to all your young siblings and cousins, write in and particpate. And for heaven’s sake, let’s eradicate the shame.
