With a new advertisement that has come out, where a married couple openly discusses their sex life in front of the whole family, in the middle of a courtyard, we might just have to broaden our perspectives regarding sex and the typical Indian joint family.
The traditionally coy bahu has taken a bold avatar, daring to sing and seduce her husband right in front of the children and parents. The son is shy, but ultimately gives in to the irresistible charms of his wife.
The watching family gets a happy dose of voyeuristic pleasures, as well as the satisfaction that the couple’s sex life is intact, despite the cola sipping kid in the tricycle. Wow, surely, hopes of another grandchild are on the cards!
The secret is that she is using a new vagina tightening cream to please her hubby in the bedroom. So what, if all the effort is going to go waste when she has her next child!
The advertising strategy of these products is very clever and the side effects are not widely known.
Only recently did studies draw a direct proportion between fairness creams and low bone density in women. There can also be thinning of the skin, rashes and reduction in the body’s immunity.
If you really want to heighten your sexual experience, there is always Kegels.
What is the fascination with youth and fairness, I can’t understand. Ageing is inevitable, like death. It cannot be fought; you can win battles to delay your body’s natural ageing process, but ultimately, the war cannot be won.
Having a tightening cream for your vagina is the fairness cream story all over again. How can you expect to undo what has naturally occurred? It is simply capitalising on the silly and baseless insecurities of women.
If skin-lightening, anti-ageing, breast-enhancing and spots-removing creams are effective, there is no reason why this one couldn’t be. If women in our fair land can secure self-confidence by applying products, our ayurvedic ancestors were missing out on such a crucial component of women’s empowerment. Had that science been discovered earlier, our womenfolk might not have been oppressed for so long.
But if one does a little introspection; Indian women belonged to a world completely different from the west. Their insecurities and fears were never ageing, for ours was a culture more in cohesion with nature than the west has ever been.
In the west, man has long been trying to overcome natural “hindrances” in the course of life: diseases, disasters and death. His ultimate victory would be to defeat death (something which you would be well aware of if you’ve seen holiday movies).
In India, on the other hand, death is not the end; it is a means to the end, which is moksha or liberation (a concept popular in Indian religious texts).
That is why, in India, ageing was never seen as a challenge to overcome. People aged gracefully, accepting the changing roles that come with age, more easily than the west.
Thus, the market for all these products that challenge the natural course of life was virtually non-existent in India until the economy was liberalised and very soon, Indian women bagged the big beauty pageant titles.
This is when Indian women ditched their natural voluptuousness to pursue lean and mean figures; change their skin tone to those appreciated and benefitted by the ‘ideal’ west, and now, even the most intimate, private of body parts have not been spared from keeping up with unreasonably high standards.
One would think that with such products out in the mainstream markets, at least women are not shy and covert about their sexuality any more. But, it would have been empowering, if such products were meant for the satisfaction of women, not men.
After all, not many women have pleasant memories of losing their virginity. And many who have had arranged marriages have lost it to almost perfect strangers, if the intimacy of the situation be taken into account. Why should they satisfy their partners’ fantasy, based on the societal prestige attached to virginity and chastity? It is like selling these age-old perceptions with a glossy new packaging, which the target themselves will fall prey to.
The bottom line is that men were and will be attracted to women, whether or not they apply “beauty” products. Women should appreciate that fact and feel satisfied and confident about themselves and their bodies.
Abhiruchi Chatterjee
