I believe almost every teen in India knows roughly what sex is, of course with all the age old myths. We neither have proper sex education in schools nor talk about it openly.But surprisingly every census shows tremendous amount of population growth. And not to forget the sex crimes and recent high profile sex scandals. We never had problem with Indian cinema when women dance in rain wearing white saree which covers everything but what should be covered. And not to forget the sexual puns which are very obvious and gross at times even in the so called family movies. When we read news about China’s internet censorship, almost everyone in India said this wouldn’t happen in India. But Yahoo, Flickr, and Bing have secretly implemented censorship. Yahoo and Flickr prevents users from India to switch off the safe search facility. And Bing goes one step further and even blocks the word sex. And one consolation is we are not alone Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea have joined the club.
It is said that this move was taken after the Information Technology act, 2000 was widened to take action on everyone from the ISP to the search engine and even the internet cafes. And as usual this law is based on the age old Victorian law, section 292 of IPC. What is more surprising is that even the word sex is blocked in Bing. This reminds me of this famous joke where a little boy goes to his father and asks,
“Dad what is sex?”
The father is taken aback, but since his son asked him he thinks that he should not lie to him. So he tries hard to explain about sex (intercourse).
The boy interrupts his father asks ”But dad, the box for ‘sex’ in this application form is small, how can I write everything you just told?”
I hope the sex column in the application forms, ID cards etc are not going to be removed in future. When I was in ninth grade there was a chapter called ‘Love and sex’ in moral science. My moral science teacher said that he would skip the chapter and no questions will be asked in exams from that chapter. When the students laughed, he said that we were not old enough to know what is in the book. But every one in the class had already read the chapter even before the term and it neither talked about physical intimacy nor reproduction. All it had was about human sexuality and love. The reason why he skipped the chapter was (i) he was shy to say the word sex or (ii) the same old hypocrisy. Instead of shying away and hiding stuff that cannot be hidden it is better to talk about it and create awareness.
When it comes to internet, it is true that even a 10 year old can have access to almost everything that is present in the cyber space. But isn’t it the parents responsibility to monitor the child and have some kind of parental control on the computer? I wonder how many Indian parents know about parental control. Blocking the entire content even for the adults makes me feel like we are soon going to be in PG13 India. It doesn’t mean that we should support pornography, but at the same time let us not decide for an adult. There are high chances of many educative contents that will be blocked. And even if there is some content filtering it should be done sensibly.
I have friends in India and have never asked them directly about this, but I inferred from things they’ve said that sex is pretty much a hidden topic. I lived in Korea for a year, and yeah, it’s pretty conservative there, too. I was interested to read this article and learn more about it. I definitely agree with what you write here… not addressing an issue does not make it go away. And it is funny that even those who manage not to discuss it still manage to have children.
It’s kind of like the atom bomb. People say “Oh, if only we hadn’t discovered it…” But it’s now impossible to forget and not know. Since we know, it’s better to find out as much as we can in order to deal responsibly with the issue. Ignorance of a law does not prevent one from breaking it.
Especially with sex, more knowledge is always better. Nobody benefits from being ignorant about pregnancy or disease. I can sometimes understand the impulse to avoid the topic, though. My girlfriend and I discussed methods of birth control, etc. She is mildly superstitious at times, and semi-seriously said something like “If we worry and talk too much about us getting, we’ll probably get pregnant.” I kind of understood the logic at the time, sometimes your subconscious thoughts imperceptibly influence how something happens. But really, as she and I agreed, the more careful you are and the more you know, the less chances you have of getting pregnant or spreading disease. Plus, the more comfortable you feel with sex and the more you know about it, the more fun you can have
If you know that, as a male or female, it is perfectly normal to desire and enjoy sex, you feel more confident and powerful. Nobody should feel guilty about their sexuality.
Ah, one more analogy. My dad manages forests and had to go to a seminar about wildfires and disaster management. In the seminar they defined “accident” and “disaster.” They said “An accident is when, although you account for known risks, something unexpected goes wrong. A disaster occurs when you do something risky without addressing or planning for the known risks and something expected, but not planned for, goes wrong.” In other words: accidents happen, but disasters can be avoided.
@ Ben, well said