Let’s Talk about Sex
27–07–2018, Mumbai, India: Don’t bother discussing sex with adults. They rarely have anything to add.
Good Morning Everyone. It’s The Friday Post on a pleasant Friday Morning. Last week we talked about marriage. Today, let’s talk about sex. Rather, let’s talk about why Indian Muslim families need to talk about sex.
Indian Muslim families are notoriously conservative about this topic — choosing to ignore the same and expecting their children to understand all of this on their own. As is the case around the world, children growing up end up with the “wrong” sources which teach them very twisted concepts of love and sex. They end up thinking of behavioural tendencies like obsession and violence to be normal in love and sex.
With the increase in cases of sexual violence against women and also men, it becomes all the more important for families to take extra care in educating their next generations about sex. To understand what behaviour is normal and what is not, what indicates risk and what doesn’t, and to learn and react to such stimulus in the environment, one needs maturity and needs to overcome shyness. This cannot be achieved in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink environment.
Children need to be able to talk to someone in case there are problems they are facing. If they have been harassed or feel threatened, they need people close to them who they can trust. There is an upward trend in cases of child abuse in our country and we can’t bury our heads in the sand of ignorance and claim all is good. If parents and elders adopt a “we-don’t-talk-of-sex” attitude, we are only endangering our children.
We need to understand that the world is opening up and social mores are changing. Social media is opening up a new world of myriad experiences for our future generations. We don’t want to be in a position where our youth are exposed to sex by some stranger over the internet. Without any knowledge of what love, relationships, and physical proximity are, our elders are letting the youth loose in a world that they themselves don’t understand. With more and more Muslim youth pushing to take their rightful place in a world with modern thought processes, an understanding of how to behave with the opposite gender becomes all the more important.
What is tough to understand is our reluctance to talk about sex. Our religion gives a lot of importance on sexual education. There is a hadith which commends women who overcome their shyness to understand the Islamic rulings on sex. Islam puts a lot of stress on education. The Islamic ruling on any education is that one should seek knowledge once one is approaching its usage. Clearly, delaying sex education till after the hormones have already taken over is not the right approach.
There are multiple ways to do it — through books or personal one-on-one sessions. What is very important, no matter what the medium chosen is, is that the child has to trust the person. People will have curiosity — it’s better someone they trust should resolve it. One can follow a structured approach, one where we talk to our children about what they will need over time. Younger children should learn what violence or harassment constitutes even if they are not sure what sex constitutes. Howsoever one proceeds, one needs to remember that sex is not taboo. Our children must feel comfortable enough to approach us in case of any difficulty.
Sigmund Freud theorised the presence of two drives — Eros and Thanatos. They are both instinctive drives that affect human behaviour over time. Eros is the life force, also the sex drive, which is the will to live while Thanatos is a destructive force. The death drive fuels aggression and the external manifestation of this drive is the aggression we see in society. The aggressive drive is when the life force is repressed. This is believed to lead to displays of violent behaviour in sexually frustrated people. Societies to tend to adopt this pattern — a sexually closed society can tend to be aggressive.
All of this is theoretical psychoanalysis and hence there is a chance it can be proven wrong in light of fresher evidence. Also, the way we understand a sexually open society is one where anyone can have sex with anyone else, with caveats. In psychoanalysis, the concept is different. It is more to do with the fulfilment of emotional needs and getting affection throughout all stages of life. A sexually open society which understands itself from an emotional perspective and understands the needs of others in this regard.
It is one of the reasons why we need to be open about sex. Indian Muslims often ignore the emotional needs they have — choosing to be “strong” and fulfilling their tangible duties. We take pride in the absence of an Urdu word for depression — implying that depression is a Western problem. We do not realise that this might, on the contrary, imply that we have never acknowledged the emotional needs the lack of fulfilment of which can lead to depression.
The tendency to sweep all emotional cravings and need for love and affection under the carpet can lead to other problems too — one of them being the lack of empathy and sympathy. The foundations of the society are not raised on just transactional grounds. We need to connect with our fellow beings on an emotional level too. Getting people to talk about themselves as an embodiment of feelings and not just a collection of achievements and failures can go a long way toward achieving this goal. Till then, live long and prosper!
The author is a routine Engineer-MBA with a nine-to-undefined job and lives under the illusion that he can write. He also blogs here.
