“If your partner is drunk and says yes to sex, but then passes out while you’re about to have sex– is it okay to proceed to have sex with them?”
2 journalists from the popular media house ‘The Quint’ were posing questions such as this to the students of DU on Wednesday as a part of their media house’s #MakeOutInIndia campaign. While two students got ready to answer their questions, a third party came in to raise doubts on the appropriateness of the topic and started falsely alleging the two journalists of instigating ‘innocent’ girls to answer their ‘immoral’ questions.
Yes, the third party was literally the party which won all the seats in the DUSU elections this time. Led by Satender Awana, DUSU president, supporters of ABVP (almost 20 in number) walked in and gheraoed the two female journalists and started asking them why they were asking ‘sex waale’ questions to ‘innocent by-standers’. ‘If these recordings are opened in public, no one will marry these girls’, one of the ABVP members proclaimed.
It would be a disgrace to even wonder whether what the journalists were doing was appropriate or not (the SHO of a police station in North Campus stated that the journalists were not committing any crime). The fundamental question that arises in this country every day, be it in this case or for the Dadri case or other matters of moral policing, is this: Is the opinion of the powerful equivalent to the law of the land? The occurrence raises a larger question and highlights the still naïve average mindset of our patriarchal country. At a time when we are seeing a sexual revolution which has grasped the young of this country to come out and talk about the subject, there are those who still want to hide this so called ‘taboo’ subject behind a pall.People still consider talking about sex in public as a sin and believe that it infringes upon their ‘traditional’ value structure.
According to several researches done in both India and abroad, it has been found out that the less we talk about sex, the more rampant are the crimes related to it, and that the more we educate people on sex, the rate of crime falls down significantly. Such scientifically-driven researches suffice to end the argument if it ever actually existed.
Another aspect which is appalling here is the fact that our country still shows abhorrent signs of a patriarchal mindset, highlighted by the recent incident mentioned above. While the ABVP members were not concerned about the marriage of the boy who answered the question, they felt ‘infuriated’ by the fact that such questions if let out in the open will hamper the marriage concerns of the girl who was answering them. How agonising is the fact that 15 years into the 21st century, some of us still think that a girl’s marriage depends on how ‘moral’ she has been in her life?
Brij Pahwa