Just listened to an NPR radio commentary by a woman living in India about the inability of household servant class Indians to connect having babies with having sex. This had to do with her gay house servant cook and his wife. They had no children despite a 6 year marriage. They each went to the doctor to get tested and the correspondent said that the Indian fertility specialist would probably not even broach the subject that they needed to have sex to conceive children in a sort of “Don’t ask - Don’t tell” conspiracy of silence. She ended the commentary with the note that gays are not socially acknowledged to exist in India and that this caused all sorts of other problems like the ignorance about conception quagmire she described.
Now maybe we’ve got only the brightest Indians here in the U.S. but I haven’t met too many stupid Indians (at least business wise). I find it hard to believe that in a nation of one billion people the concept that sex needs to happen for babies to be conceived is a real brain teaser. Was this report nonsense or is this really true about lower economic class Indians being this ignorant?
It doesn’t sound to me like a “lower socio-economic class” thing, rather a “gay” thing. It sounds to me like she was saying, “My gay cook is so ignorant that he didn’t know where babies come from, ha ha.”
You could make the counterargument that a nation of a billion people probably has the whole conception thing pretty well figured out by now, based on sheer experience.
Well,being from India,I can attest to the fact that many in the economically lower classes indeed don’t know how babies are concieved or even how sex is ‘done’.Not all of them,just ‘many’.As for the whole population thing,well if they’ve been existing for so many thousand years,(like China)there naturally would be overpopulation,especially with the lack of education.Probably half of them don’t know about eggs and sperm but once they’re aroused,nature can do it all.Society there shuns sex so getting aroused is viewed with a lot of discomfort.
I got the impression that the cook and his wife were “in denial”. That is, they went to the doctor to find a physical reason they have not had children rather than to face the fact that the guy is gay. It sounded from the story that being gay in India is not a good thing, and 80% of the gay men there are married to keep up appearances. I thought the woman’s comment (that she thought the cook’s sister would not understand, ans she said it under her breath in English) that “maybe they should try having sex” was sarcastic and not literal.
I don’t think the man in question was clueless…he was gay. As such he had zero desire for sex with his wife.
To those that didn’t listen to the story that may sound odd but, also as JohnnyL.A. mentioned, it is all about appearances over there. Homosexuality doesn’t ‘exist’ in India (of course it does but it is never out in the open). The man only met his wife on their actual wedding day so she had no way of knowing he was gay and neither he nor she had any choice about getting married anyway.
When it comes to sex it sounds as if the entire populace collectively ignores reality in favor of niceties (i.e. don’t talk about sex at ALL and don’t recognize anything beyond what is ‘normal’). Apparently men and women don’t even hold hands or kiss over there…at least not in public.
As to the man not talking it was about the separation between servant and boss that kept the man silent as he would not dare to cross that line.
Well,people do hold hands,hug and kiss in India,as in almost any country.Everyone is human!And it’s not Afghanistan.At the same time however,it is relatively subdued,there aren’t protracted french kisses like what Kirk would do in Star Trek…
We often hear of sacred sex in Hinduism. Westerners read Western adaptations of Tantric texts and imagine it was an erotic funfest. Well, guess what. The actual reality for people in India for the past couple centuries has been an awfully drab, dreary period of sexual repression, the result of decaying Hinduism. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism isn’t helping, in fact making it worse. When Joseph Campbell toured India in the 1950s he was dismayed at the sexual “infantilism,” as he called it, imposed on adults. Men and women were supposed to be ignorant of each other’s existence as sexual beings. What a drastic decline for a people with such a sublime heritage of sacred sex. Pakistanis are no better off.
Islam and Hinduism are in the same situation. Both have sacred sex as part of their heritage (Classical Hindu sacred sex was not an erotic free-for-all, but was regulated as part of a healthy social order, just as in Islam). But both in their decline have been subjected to unhealthy puritanism, reinforced by Victorian attitudes of British colonialists that Indians and Pakistanis still have not shaken off. It’s a cultural, spiritual decrepitude. When the civilization has been under severe stress, the natural healthy human life retreats and hides and shrivels up.
I don’t understand why the doctor can’t approach the problem diplomatically. It’s not like his only choice is to say “hey, you know you gotta have sex, right?” He can, for example, ask, “how often do you have sex?”
