Sex on The Streets

If anything is confusing to the long-term visitor in Mumbai, it’s the question of sex.

Within weeks of my arriving here, it became clear that, in public, Mumbaikers generally like to behave modestly. Women wear pants, very rarely skirts; they wear sleeved blouses, rarely showing bare shoulders; very few couples hold hands or kiss when out strolling (though men-friends do hold hands – but that’s another story).
What’s more, those who break these norms get stared at quite hard.

In this atmosphere, it seemed almost predictable when a newspaper reported that one young actress had turned down a film role because she would have had to do a kissing scene (yes, not a lovemaking scene, or semi-nude scene, but a kissing scene...). Indeed, the Bollywood movies I have seen are almost brilliantly imaginative in the way they manage to be about love and love affairs, and remain virtually sexless!

My impression is that in India generally, sex seems only to be appropriate in private. (Let’s not get into the ancient-erotic-temple-sculptures discussion. The Indians I speak to seem faintly embarrassed by their forebears’ enthusiasm for erotica, and by foreigners' rather obvious and salacious interest in such).

And yet… here in Mumbai, India’s most modern city, things seem to be different – at least somewhat. A different kind of attitude to Sex (or the temptation of it) seems openly omnipresent in this city.

The most obvious example is that Mumbai’s red-light area, in the Falkland Road & Kamathipura districts, slap bang in the centre of the city, is (I’m told) the largest in Asia. From their doorways, the girls are even more blatant in their gaze than those in Amsterdam.

It’s also true that western attitudes toward sex are inexorably finding their own comfort zones in this, India’s most cosmopolitan city.
Inside the walls of expensive nightclubs and luxury hotels, starlets and fashionistas will flash arms, shoulders, legs and cleavage. (The local newspapers are often on hand to make sure their flesh gets extra exposure, in their party pages).
Quite a few brave young students will even experiment out of doors - with tight jeans and bare-shoulder halter-tops.

As for the media, well, the promise of glamorous, if less accessible sex, is given lots of space in, oddly, the leading liberal newspapers.
These papers contrive to get a dozen or so pictures of pretty girls (a good percentage of them being American film stars in bikinis or other revealing clothes), into their “Entertainment Sections” every day.

Incidentally, it strikes me as very odd indeed that it is the liberal newspapers (which in this country are the heavyweight English-language dailies) that are the ones to be peddling girlie pix of the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears in pouting poses. It’s as though the British Guardian had a special section called “Half-Naked Girls!”; and it’s just one of the contradictions in this city that the thoughtful papers should want to display their liberal attitudes in this way…
What’s more ‘The Doctor Says’ sex-advice pages in these papers are almost as blush-makingly frank as anything in European women’s mags.

Meanwhile, in the city’s main art gallery, the Jehangir, sexual images are quite openly part of nearly every show (though there was one arrest a few months ago when one objector thought things had Gone Too Far).

Well? You say. So what? Not so different to Manchester!
Well, not quite.
You see, it’s that the contrast between what happens in public life and what happens in private life that is so wide here. Sex is everywhere, but under constraint.


One instance should serve to illustrate this contradiction. Openly sold on the newsstands (see pic above), there are lots of magazines with misleadingly inviting young women (wearing just bra and pants) on their covers. However these fleshy and raunchy covers are just teases: the images in their inside pages are as innocent as spring lambs.
(… more on girlie magazines below.)

For in fact there is great sexual conservatism here in what is said and done publicly.

For example…
For the most part even very educated young men and women are disturbingly giggly about sex; it is clear that many have little experience of close relationships before they are married or the significance of sex in life.
The kinds of adverts and posters we are used to in say London or Rome, which use alluring women as objects to sell products, are much fewer here. (One of the few exceptions to this rule is the kind of poster used for Bollywood B-movies, which uses the same kind of kitsch sex appeal as did the Hollywood posters in the fifties. No one seems to object to those though!)
Bars and clubs and resto-bars hardly ever employ the pretty women that they would do if they were in Britain. Most waiters and bar-staff are men. “Dance-bars”, which were banned from the city last year, did have women dancers – but they were modestly clad in full dress. (These bars were only banned because men were spending too much money in them).
Public art, which in Europe would feature lots of nakedness, is stylistically much more monumental here. I can only think of two public statue groups featuring nudity, and they are over a century old, and from the British Victorian “classical” tradition.

Yet, in contrast, as I’ve said, a very vocal combination of the intelligentsia and the “filmy”/arty classes is calling for more openness, and seems to be challenging those conventions, though also while paying a degree of lip-service to them at the same time.
Mumbai leads London in the size of this kind of gap between fantasy and reality.
The oddest thing of all is that when a model in next-to-nothing is used in magazines and papers here, she is, nine times out of ten… a blonde European. How schizophrenic is that?

Incidentally, before you ask, I have never, except once, seen a nude-girls magazine on sale here, even on the street-stalls.
The one exception occurred when I glimpsed the edge of what looked like a film magazine at a newsstand. I was quite surprised to realize it was an effort at pornography, albeit fairly tame and confused, with its combination of juvenile smutty jokes, topless European models gazing out of windows (not fully nude of course) and, strangely, health advice.
What was clear right away was that, in England, it would have barely raised a few snickers even among fourteen-year-old boys. Yet, as the newsvendor embarrassedly took it from my hand (and offered me The Economist instead!), I realised that it was quite a risqué magazine for Mumbai.
I never saw poor pathetic ‘Temptation’ (I noticed that that issue was Volume 1, Number 1) ever again.

Meanwhile, in the expensive bookshops in the city, where the middle-class men go, there is a new trend in trying to supply this thirst for soft-porn.
First, bizarrely, is the number of glossy, up-market lingerie magazines! This presumably is a supposedly “legitimate” way to sell images of half-dressed women.
Secondly, I’m afraid I do have to report that imported Brit "men's mags" such as FHM, which are now on sale in these expensive bookshops, are supplying the adolescent male’s desire for provocative women. The panting teenager will have to pay the price though – at a hefty Rs 450, these Brit mags cost ten times what the ordinary Indian mag costs – so this recourse is only open to the very well-off.

(Yes, yes, I’m sure there must be lots of under-the-counter pornography that I have not come across. Apparently internet porn is very popular here too. But I’m only reporting what I can see on the public surface of Mumbai society).

**

Where there are people testing the boundaries, there must be a conflict and then resolution, right?

A certain tension certainly seems present in Mumbai, though quite how serious the city’s “moral guardians” are in forcing their point across is actually now open to doubt.

(In the rest of the country, the moral guardians seem to be able to raise quite a lot of heat whenever they see matters that they regard as offensive to Indian standards.
In fact, recently the government turned against the idea of sex education for 10-12 year-olds in school and has banned it. And, although cable TV recently expanded hugely, there is already a crackdown on channels that concentrate on broadcasting shows with models in skimpy clothes – one such has even been banned.)

But, in Mumbai, generally, no one (as far as I can tell) is getting too upset. Even the leading political party in the city, the Shiv Sena, once a byword for strict standards, appears (for now) to be making a kind of peace with the liberal pacesetters here. It would be interesting to try to figure out why.
Perhaps the way in which young people have such a stake in this city – with their thriving music and clubbing scenes, their involvement in Bollywood and in the financial markets, their vigorous artistic life, as well as their openness to the idea of sex (if not always the practice of sex) – is holding the balance? Perhaps.
The city’s future too, with its yearning for riches, glossy status symbols and internationalism in its dealings, appears to mean a drive toward liberalism is likely – at least for now.

It’s odd how this city does so often remind one of Victorian London. Not just in the contrast of rich and poor, and between great beauty and terrible ugliness, but also in this ambivalent relationship with sex.
How will Mumbai move on this issue? It will be interesting to watch how the game goes.

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ADDENDUM (Later)
Some people have said they don't get what my standpoint on sex in this article is. They try to make me strike an attitude. Do I approve of the fact that sex is only appropriate in private in Mumbai? Do I think women in the West are exploited - but respected in India? Do I think girlie mags are a Bad Thing? Am I a liberal or a conservative? Do I support or want to discourage sex before marriage?
Well, I'm quite pleased people should be confused.
The idea of the blog is to report (hopefully without prejudice or favour) what I see, and try ot make some thoughtful guesses (it's up to you to say if I have plumped for the right answers). Then, try to compare what I see with my own culture back home so that my target readers (both European and Indian people who travel) can understand what I'm trying to describe.

So, the answer is: I hope I have no standpoint but that of the interested observer.


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