The film story of ‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’ is about four women – a burqa-clad college girl, a young beautician, a mother of three and a 55-year-old widow who rediscovers her sexuality. The movie won accolades at film festivals including the Oxfam Award for Best Film on Gender Equality but who cared? Certainly not the Central Board of Film Certification that, even in these modern times (January 2017), refused to certify it, objecting to female fantasies, sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography. . .
Yet again the matter of female sexuality has been brought to the fore. Yet again, it has been reiterated that men refuse to acknowledge or accept female sexuality. It suits them to either pretend that it does not exist or to curb it by various means ranging from forbidding interaction with the opposite to sex to female genital mutilation. Till recently, some Arab States did not allow women to drive cars for the vibrations (?) of the car seat could lead to sexual excitement! Women with overt sexual tendencies are considered loose while men with similar traits are called studs! What is it that men fear? Do they think that, if given free rein these nymphomanias would run amok? What they conveniently forget is that they use women as sexual toilets to satisfy their lust without bothering to arouse/satisfy her.
When I rebelled at not being allowed the freedom my brothers were given, my mother shut me up by saying that a female’s reputation has to be spotless for there were no takers for soiled goods in the marriage mart. I would grit my teeth in frustration and wonder, what about sexual transmitted diseases that a man can give to his virgin bride or the sexual trauma she will endure all her life if, married to a philanderer? Who cared, as long as she was pure?
The protagonist Amrita in my novel ‘For the Love of a Man’ is a virgin at the time of her marriage but with the passage of time, amongst other incompatibilities, she realizes that their libidos are as ill matched as fire and ice. Eventually she become emotionally and physically enslaved to a man who has nothing to recommend him but his sexuality. Her wonder at the pleasure her body could give her (a pleasure that had been denied to her in the 13 years of marriage) gave birth to this poem.
A soaring of passions, like powerful winged birds
A cataract of pleasure cascading over flesh,
Grim determined pursuits without civilized graces.
The grappling and groping as if battling for life,
Like two wild animals in lethal combat.
Faces contorted as if in pain.
The exquisite torture, the tormenting clasp,
The building of pressures, the straining the striving,
The shuddering release of rapturous convulsions;
The uncoiling of tension, the languorous stupor,
A bounty greater than this can nature bestow?