What's killing intimacy in new-age sex?

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Illustration/Uday Mohite

It had, at any rate, been hurried. One minute we were kissing and the next we were on bed, and with very little foreplay he had begun penetrating. And, then, in the middle of it all, he asks, 'Yeah baby, do you like my f***?' I could only mutter a yes," says a young Mumbai resident of a hook-up she had last year. Both she and her partner are in their late 20s. Much later, while paying attention to what people were saying in the porn she watched, did she realise where the dialogues for that encounter had been written.

While much research and time has been spent delving into the sex life of milennials across the globe — they are having more sex than previous generations, say some reports, while others insist that's not true — the quality of this is becoming a cause of concern.

Fed on a diet of porn that's far more easily accessible than it was even a decade ago, and for sure with far less taboo, ideas of how sex should look like and sound are far more pervading today. So, when Indian website Agents of Ishq (AOI) published an article earlier this month titled Weird Ideas Porn Gave Me About Sex, there were more points listed in it than the usual complaints of partners looking for the perfect anatomy.

Squirting — when a woman ejaculates during an orgasm — for instance, is a big myth. And, equally high in demand. The writer of the piece quotes a woman named Tanvi as saying, "Once I did squirt by mistake, but it wasn't sexy at all. It was like my vagina was farting. I started laughing really hard. My boyfriend said 'Don't laugh, this is supposed to be hot', and tried to make me do it again because he'd seen it on porn and found it sexy. But I couldn't."

The argument that milennials, who have more access to online sex education, and so should have a better grip on the subject is flawed says writer, filmmaker and founder of AOI, Paromita Vora. "While we may have moved on from keeping sex a taboo to creating a peer pressure where everyone is talking about it, there's not much conversation about the experience of sex. There's a peer pressure to have sex and experiment — whether or not you like it. It's like having to tick off from a catalogue." Human intimacy, says Vora, has fallen sharply. Casual sex has become necessary and love, in fact, a taboo.

And what falls in the gap that this creates is any real connection that two partners may feel.

A 26-year-old from Delhi, who recently hooked up with an ex-boyfriend — someone she enjoyed 'connected sex' with — says, "I don't know what he watched or read in the gap, but when we got together, he tried all sorts of antics in bed, which was just not like him. And it wasn't any fun for me either." While she won't get into the details, she adds that it's not the antics, per se, that posed the problem. It was that it was completely untrue to the man. And, sometimes the problem manifests itself the other way around as well.

Suprateek Chatterjee, freelance journalist, reacted with a hilarious tweet to the AOI copy. "Also, can we address how, because of so much porn being American, many of our sex noises have... an accent?"

He gives context. Imagine someone who has grown up in Mumbai, who in the middle of the act goes 'oh yeah baby', and in an American accent. "It's something guy friends and I have spoken about. It happens with everyone. The unwritten rule is 'soldier on'. Don't point it out and definitely don't laugh."

But, these might be some of the less complicated aspects facing this generation.

Vora fears that younger girls may be agreeing to things in bed simply to please the man. She isn't alone in her fears. A national survey in Australia, the findings of which were reported in 2016, found that "Three-quarters of young women believe sex education in schools left them unprepared for sex and dealing with relationships." It quoted a 19-year-old from Narrabundah College Lyndsay Bassett: "I think a lot of young girls just assume the guy definitely wants sex and it's about his pleasure, and even if a girl doesn't want it for herself she'll say 'yes'."

And so, there are young women who have indulged in oral sex when they didn't want to. Not really being able to show their displeasure.

Kissing has fallen off the radar too. "The problem is not that there isn't much kissing, it's that it's no longer considered part of real sex," says Dr Lauri Betito, director of the sex education portal of porn site pornhub. "That's part of the problem and it's happening everywhere. In a country where there's little sex education — I have to say many of the questions I get are from India — the only access to sex education is pornography which is not a real representation."

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