Sex sells

The DPS MMS debauchery is the tip of a wave of permissiveness that is inundating Indian society

India is on the cusp of a revolution in attitudes, mores and morals relating to sex. This is the sort of revolution that France went through in the late 1920s with the opening of Alain Bernardine's Le Crazy Horse Saloon, where girls strutted about with nothing on except sexy black boots and bearskin hats, compared to the older Folies Bergere, which served up just bare breasts. Picture postcards of Crazy Horse girls (or of girls claimed in the picture captions to be from the Crazy Horse) brought home from the Paris streets by the rajas, zamindars and talukdars of those days occasionally turn up at the kabaadi bazaars in Delhi, Lucknow and Ahmedabad even today.

America went through a similar revolution starting in the 1950s, especially after the launch of Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine in 1953.

In Britain, the age of sexual freedom was heralded by D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and went on beyond the Regina-vs-the Penguin Books case verdict, which went in Penguin's favour in 1960. Then, once the floodgates of moral and legal resistance were breached, a huge rush of sex sizzlers overwhelmed these societies.

One thing followed another. People living on the frontiers of society, the Page 3 celebs, began experimenting, defending, practicing, preaching and promoting a new socially insurgent lifestyle, new sexual and marital values in the name of individual freedom, all under the garb of avant garde art and culture. Zipless sex, guiltless en masse copulation, swapping of partners, collective living and acid orgies became the new in things. All this was accompanied by the masturbatory journalism of magazines like Playmate and Hustler. Then came new-style brothels, now called massage parlours, reinvented streetwalkers, now called call girls and female escorts, new type of cabarets, now called strip joints and striptease bars, and so on. Then came explicit "blue" pornographic magazines, and XXX-rated films. Eventually, there was Howard Stern, the New York shock-jock, who interviewed his mother on the WNBS radio station about her sex life, both using four-letter words.

The latest DPS SMS scandal is not a solitary happening. Many sex scandals that have broken out from Kerala and Tamil Nadu to Agra and Jammu are versions of the same episode, manifestations of the same changes in our society, polity and economy. It is no use crying down the West for these transgressions. Those who blame the West for spoiling the minds of our young have little idea of what has happened there during the intervening years. The West of the 1960s and 1970s no longer exists. It has travelled far from the age of zipless and guiltless sex.

There is much less sex in the streets of Paris, London and New York today than there was two or three decades ago. The AIDS scare has driven men and women of all age groups into abstemiousness. While our television channels have been busy pouring prurient and pornographic material into our bedrooms, much of the explicit sex in the West has shifted from mainline channels to restricted and special-request high-fee channels. In the big cities, prostitution, streetwalking, curb-crawling, sex parlours, XXX-rated cinemas and strip bars have mostly been isolated to clearly-marked localities. Pigalle in Paris, Soho in London and Hauptbahnhoft in Frankfurt are still doing business but nowhere as uproariously as they did in the 1970s and the early 1980s.

The free-sex proponents in America's big cities are facing a backlash from the smalltown puritan majority for unleashing diseases like AIDS and for subverting the puritanical values of the majority. It was one factor that worked in President George W Bush's favour during his recent reelection. Apart from the conservative backlash, another reason why the sleaze scene is slowly but steadily disappearing from the streets might be the relocation of XXX-rated material from public promenades to private boudoirs courtesy the Internet.

In India, the new age of permissiveness is being ushered in by an array of vested interests: showbiz bosses, filmmakers, cinestars and starlets, TV channel owners, beauty show organisers, liquor barons, business promo wizards, restaurateurs, all sort of big- and small-town mafia, smugglers, hustlers, and numerous bribe-seekers, bribe-takers and bribe-givers. They all know that there is big money to be made from debauchery.

Why, then, blame the young? With so much explicit sex about and around them, how can they hold on to celibacy for so long — particularly when the age of marriage has been fixed so late for both sexes?