Asexual India?

“You, very beautiful. Very beautiful face,” one of the five girls tells me, as she excitedly giggles along with her friends. 13 or 14 year old girls on the train back from school in Kerala had asked me to come sit next to them. Of course, I obliged.

I asked them their names, and they nervously responded, adding a few more words in English to try and impress me. The girls laughed, all trying to capture my attention.

Like 13 or 14 year old girls do. Seemed normal to me. Endearing.

But it seemed very unusual to me in India. Girls approaching men and flirting. Sure nothing was going to happen between us, but you could sense the anxious sexuality of the situation.

Rarely in India did I notice public displays of affection—the way us Westerners define the phrase. Kissing, hugging, petting, holding hands; amongst lovers. But even the subtle flirtations are rare—at least in the way of smiles and eye contact. The flirtatiousness of a big smile is almost nonexistent.

But sex clearly runs rampant. The population tells it all—more than 1 billion people. That’s a lot of sex.

Muketu Sehtu in his book Maximum City calls Bombay “a city in heat.” He describes a sexual culture, albeit underground, which is dominated by sex—the money, power, and excitement that both drives and accompanies it. Sexual pleasure runs rampant.

But to the visual eye, India feels like the awkward middle school boy who wants to make out with his crush behind the baseball bleachers, but doesn’t know how to drag her out there. The sexual desire is there, but he is still uncomfortable with displaying these desires publicly.

I once joked with a friend of mine in college that the Indian girls in our class were “asexual porn.” Beautiful to look at, but for a white, college boy like me, nothing more. She slapped me. But there was some truth to the statement: in India, the subject of sex didn’t even cross into this public discussion, and I wouldn’t even know how to approach the subject. Asexual porn.

The girls on the train displayed the sexual innocence that seemed so lacking in the rest of my experience there. Perhaps it was their age: too young to have to worry about the prospects of marriage (and definitely too young to already feel the burden of it), but old enough to have gone through puberty and feel real sexual desires. They could display these emotions by flirting with me.

Perhaps not so asexual after all.