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IT-Indian Sex Survey-2008

India Today Group Digital
December 1, 2008
33 Pages - SKU: ITGD2065195

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Countries covered: India

India Today’s sixth sex survey shows a more sexually carnivorous urban Indian willing to break taboos and batter boundaries. But the appetite is clearly greater than the menu.

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Executive Summary:

It’s perhaps appropriate. In the age of universal meltdown, India seems to be a nation in heat. Take what just happened in Meerut. A young woman, Priyanka Singh a former beauty queen, well-spoken, smart, goes on camera to plead her case after being accused of killing her parents. She and her friend, Anju Singh, hint at a murky saga of sexual exploitation by their relatives and talk of being driven to the edge of a breakdown. Prise the lid off India’s gleaming globalised façade and a welter of images comes forth. There’s a woman in Mumbai chopping her boyfriend into pieces with her former lover. There’s a teenager mysteriously murdered in her Noida home amidst murmurs of her parents’ swinging sexual lifestyle. If social norms are changing, with the touchstones of modern life under siege, then sexual mores are in a state of confusion.

What was considered a perversion earlier is a guiltless pleasure now. What was thought of a taboo is now believed to be an all access VIP pass. Even the terminology, loaded with the prudishness of the past, is being reinvented.

The India Today-AC Nielsen-ORG MARG sex survey 2008 of 5,353 men and women between 18 and 40, the sixth consecutive time we are studying the intimate life of urban Indians, seems to suggest all this and more…

1. Sexy Publics: Such surveys identify and create not sexy secrets but ‘sexy publics’. They take the mundane and secret aspects of sexuality and propel them before our gaze in a very public forum.
2. Creative Pursuits: The days of staid sex are over. Kink is the new sexual think as urban Indians find that the bedroom can become an arena for role-playing, with almost 20 per cent giving it a thumbs up.
3. Calmasutra: Women have a knack of keeping their sexuality a secret; Whoever said that India was a nation of prudes needs to go through the India Today-AC Nielsen ORG MARG sex survey to realise that the modern woman’s sexuality is now almost completely released from the Victorian prudery that dogged the post-Independence generation. Women now figure that they can do just anything they want, out of bed or in it. Sex in the city is curiously liberated, and if you thought you knew what women were thinking, you probably got it wrong.
4. Straight from the heart: Men are moving out of the closet they had hidden in. A surprising 16 per cent admit they have had sex with men, mostly friends. Clearly, heterosexuality is not the only lifestyle choice.
5. Alternative destination: Hyderabad is the least homophobic and most sexually tolerant of Indian cities, partly because of its multicultural heritage; Hyderabad, India’s second largest city, has won more than 15 firsts in the INDIA TODAY-AC Nielsen-ORG MARG sex survey, 2008, thus confirming that it is unarguably the sex capital of India.; During the reign of the Nizams (1724-1948), Hyderabad was prosperous. Sex was celebrated in this time, and polygamy and alternative sexuality, including homosexuality and paedophilia were accepted as a part of life.
6. Those close encounters: Conjugal exclusivity has long been the Indian’s sole mode of sexual expression. Clearly though, it’s not a natural choice with as many as 41 per cent of men admitting they were unfaithful.; Icons of romance in India are rarely monogamous and married: the Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan for a favoured wife though he had two others; Krishna’s vehicle of ultimate love was his uncle’s wife, Radha. In contrast to multiple systems of organising marriage and sexuality that were (and still are) prevalent in India, adultery as a marital offence is a relatively new experiment whose boundaries are being tried.
7. Priced pleasure: In a country where sex is still talked about in hushed tones, sex at a cost is rampant, with nearly one in every five men having visited a prostitute at least once
8. Silence of the lambs: Incest and other forms of sexual abuse of a child are far more common than we assume. But it is also a shame that dares not speak its name.; Throughout history and everywhere in the world, societies have struggled with the issue of incest. I know of no society that does not prohibit sexual activity between family members, although the definition of “relative” varies.
9. Minority report: Sweet 16 and never been kissed? That was yesterday. Today’s adolescents are forging beyond foreplay.; Sweet 16 and never been kissed? That was yesterday. The shifting contours of the post-globalisation family has created the New Teen. Brought up on an untested diet of western soap operas, cable TV and increasingly globalised values, those under 18, the age of consent, are defying every norm that has bound them for thousands of years.
10. Boogie nights: Indian women discover triple X technology usually in their 20s but make up for lost time with one in 10 wanting to star in her very own dirty movie. Say hello to the domestic sex goddess.
11. Methodology

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