Three months ago, while I was speaking at a conference on adolescence held at a university in Bengaluru, one female audience member raised her hand to ask me this: Women are sexually repressed: so, what? While it might sound absurd to liberal ears, the question carries — as absurdity so often does — a nugget of wisdom. Nothing is self-evident about the problem of sexual repression amongst women except perhaps “who” represses sexuality. Who and what represses women’s sexuality is known via the widely recognised empirical research of the psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge, who found “a pattern of cultural influence by which girls and women are induced to avoid feeling sexual desire and to refrain from sexual behaviour.”
The suppressors
The mechanism of action for this pattern of cultural influence, the researchers said, was threefold: gossip, reputation, and maternal socialisation — the experience and memory of what mothers have conveyed to their daughters about sex. These factors, calculated by Baumeister and Twenge to be the chief suppressing factors in female sexuality, are culturally universal. But, the researchers add, women who come from countries that had had a sexual revolution have a comparative advantage when it comes to sexuality: if a country has had a sexual revolution, then women feel free to acknowledge wanting more sex. But is this freedom — the freedom to desire sexually and to declare that desire — what women want? Particularly in sexuality, there is never one thing that “women” (in the plural) want. Women vary in their interest in sex and therefore have different stakes in cultural standards that promote or discourage sexuality. Likewise, women who have adapted to more stringent sexual norms may have no incentive to push for more liberal norms: they like what they are used to. Whether or to what extent repressive sexual cultural norms are experienced as unpleasant depends upon many factors including biology, psychology, generation, and aesthetics.
Keeping this diversity of wishes in mind, it is still worth thinking about the question: Women are sexually repressed: so, what? Another way to phrase this question would be to ask if there is a consequence to patriarchal sexual politics — the political system in which women’s sexual desires are delimited and de-emphasised relative to men’s sexual desires. Under the sexual politics of patriarchy, the social group extends support to women in all domains except as sexual subjects. Writing in 1996, the psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakar, wrote about how women in India are generally praised and idealised: “It is only as a female sexual being, that the patriarchal culture’s horror and scorn are heaped.”
Differentiating factors
What is the impact of an environment in which women’s sexual desire is publicly disliked (even if it is privately celebrated)? A restriction on sexuality means women must control themselves (body, mind and speech) such that they never appear sexually excited (except in the presence of the men who own them). But since sexual excitement is evidenced by subtle vectors such as physiological arousal and change in tone of voice, how would sexual excitement be differentiated from other kinds of excitement?
Psychoanalysts happen to think that there is no difference between sexual desire and other kinds of desire. Desire is life’s motivator, it’s what gets the job done whether it is in the bedroom or the board room. When there is a taboo on public female excitement, women will tend to cut themselves off from these motivating excitements, experiencing unease where they should experience desire.
We know that Indian women feel the effect of this taboo on female excitement via a palpable body tension in public places. As the social scientist team Phadke, Ranade, and Khan ably argued in Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, Indian women control their physical posture and movement in public spaces to signal themselves as hardworking and goal-oriented in order to avoid the rapaciousness of male desire.
Patriarchal sexual politics are perhaps most tyrannical on the subject of women’s memories: women must never forget the demands of male desire. A compulsory man-fearing — is it akin to God-fearing? — inhibits women’s experience of their own desire. Man-fearing keeps women safe — including from their own desires — but it also cuts them off from their excitements. Under these political conditions, sexual and ambitious desires which could be felt as mobilising (‘get the job done’) can get experienced as dangerous (‘I can’t possibly do this’) and eventually draining (‘this is too exhausting’). Women’s physiological arousal — what women could use to win battles in the classroom and the boardroom — becomes inhibited by the self-scrutiny that is a womanly virtue in patriarchal sexual politics.
For some freedom
Patriarchal sexual politics are of course not the only group stakeholders in female bodies. Women also live within capitalism, under whose politics sexuality can be consumed democratically, regardless of gender (women of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your wallets). As political systems, both patriarchy and capitalism promote fictions that shape desire but they also confer their own sorts of pleasure and belonging. Even if a revolution could free us from patriarchy — which it couldn’t because we are into patriarchy born — it could probably not free us from capitalism.
So, what other radical collective change could allow women to recover agency over their own excitements? Phadke, Ranade, and Khan are certainly on to something when they imagine women in droves in public spaces: loitering on the streets, breastfeeding, laughing, walking, and talking. What would happen socially in that vision is akin to what psychologists call exposure therapy — where a repeated exposure lowers anxiety. In an extension of this vision, we could offer public affirmation for women who speak, eat, think and love as they desire. Collective affirmation — think of it as positive gossip — for women who are taking back what anyway should belong to them could support the return of women’s lost freedoms, at least to those of them who still want it back.
(Amrita Narayanan is a clinical psychologist & psychoanalyst. She is the author of Women’s Sexuality and Modern India: In A Rapture of Distress, published by Oxford University Press, 2023.)
Let’s keep the conversation going...
Do you think India has already had a sexual revolution? Or does it need one? Why or why not? And what should it consist of?
(Share your comments with us at dhonsunday@deccanherald.co.in)