Wanted by Men, Forbidden to Want

By : Dr. Aniruddha Babar

(Dr. Aniruddha Babar is a Senior Academician, Public Policy Expert & Social Development Specialist, Writer, and Researcher currently serving in the Department of Political Science, St. Joseph College, Ukhrul, Manipur. He is also the Co-Founder and Deputy Director of the Centre for North-East Development and Policy Research (CNEDPR), St. Joseph College, Manipur.)

“Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women.”

— Catharine A. MacKinnon

The most dangerous thing a woman can admit in a male dominated society is that she wanted sex. A woman who is desired can still fit comfortably within familiar ideas of femininity. A woman who acknowledges her own desire becomes more difficult to place. She has an appetite, curiosity, imagination and a will of her own. That is where the discomfort begins. Indian society has spent generations teaching women how to be attractive, desirable and presentable while giving them remarkably little space to understand their own sexuality without shame. A woman may be expected to look beautiful, dress attractively and remain desirable to her husband, while a confident admission of sexual desire can bring questions about character, respectability and morality. Men have often been given greater social freedom to speak about sexual experience. Women have carried a heavier burden of judgement. The double standard has become so familiar that many people barely notice it.

There is something revealing about the way society looks at a woman’s body. The female body appears everywhere as an object of beauty, advertising, fantasy and desire. Cinema, fashion, advertising and social media have created increasingly polished versions of femininity. Skin is smoothed, bodies are shaped, lighting is perfected and imperfections disappear. A woman can spend years looking at images of women who appear permanently young, perfectly proportioned and effortlessly beautiful. Her own body becomes something she is expected to manage, improve and monitor. The pressure begins early and follows her through adulthood. The body becomes public territory in the imagination of strangers while the woman herself is expected to remain modest about the body she actually inhabits.

This is where the fantasy of the perfect woman meets the reality of an actual woman. A real woman carries the years on her body. The struggle of work, family, motherhood for some, illness, exhaustion, grief, responsibility, heat, travel and countless ordinary days can leave their marks. She sweats. Dust settles on her skin. Her body has a natural smell. After walking in the heat, sweat gathers at her neck, beneath her breasts, across her back, around her waist and between her thighs. Her hair becomes damp. Her skin becomes sticky. Her face becomes flushed. Her underarms grow hair. Her breasts have their own shape and size. Her stomach rises and falls with every breath, expands after food and changes with age. Her thighs touch. Her body has folds, creases, pores, fine hair, scars, stretch marks and areas of darker skin. With age, her abdomen can develop loose skin and deeper folds. Her breasts can change shape. Her waist can become softer. Her skin can wrinkle. Her palms can become dry, rough and calloused from years of cooking, farming, cleaning, teaching, writing, carrying, caring and working. Her feet can become hard from walking. Her face can carry lines formed by laughter, worry, sunlight, sleepless nights and years of responsibility. The body remembers. It carries evidence of labour, survival, love, loss, childbirth for some women, recovery and ageing. Every mark can belong to a story that nobody looking at a photograph will ever know. This is the body in which a woman experiences her life and, when she chooses, her sexuality. Desire lives inside real bodies with warmth, sweat, smell, softness, strength, fatigue and sensation. A woman does not need to erase the evidence of her life before she can be considered beautiful or desirable. She deserves to look at her own body and see a life lived. And here is the question men should ask themselves: when you say you desire a woman, are you prepared to desire the real woman who sweats, ages, changes, carries scars, grows softer, becomes tired and carries the visible history of her life?

That question matters because female sexuality is often shaped by manufactured expectations. Women are encouraged to remain desirable while their bodies are subjected to constant scrutiny. Youth, fitness, beauty and sexual attractiveness become things to maintain even as the body naturally changes through age, pregnancy, childbirth, illness, work and ordinary life. A woman can spend enormous energy negotiating these expectations while trying to understand what she herself wants.

Pornography intensifies this problem. It presents carefully manufactured images of sexuality and turns performance into a fantasy of intimacy. Real women sweat. They smell. They become tired. They become self conscious. They laugh at inconvenient moments. Their bodies change with age, pregnancy, exercise, stress and ordinary life. A woman may experience intense desire one day and very little the next. She may want affection, conversation, closeness or sleep. Human sexuality carries the unpredictability of human personality. Pornography is performance created for an audience. It cannot provide a manual for intimacy. When its imagery becomes a substitute for sexual education, expectations can become distorted and genuine communication can disappear beneath performance. A screen can show an image of a woman while telling a viewer very little about the woman herself.

A woman saying that she wants sex still has the extraordinary power to make respectable society uncomfortable. Women have traditionally been given a different vocabulary for desire. They are encouraged to speak about love, romance, marriage, motherhood and emotional attachment. Sexual desire becomes socially acceptable more easily when it appears inside those familiar categories. A woman can desire her husband and remain respectable. She can desire a man she loves and remain understandable. A woman who speaks openly about physical desire, with confidence and without embarrassment, can still provoke suspicion. Her desire becomes something other people feel entitled to interpret.

The double standard becomes especially harsh when sexual history enters the conversation. A man’s past can be described as experience. A woman’s past can become material for moral examination. Men are often encouraged to acquire experience while women are encouraged to conceal it. Women therefore learn to manage both sexuality and its appearance. They are expected to be attractive, sensual, confident and knowledgeable while carefully controlling how those qualities are displayed. A lifetime can be spent monitoring how other people might interpret the female body.

India has never been completely silent about these questions. Maharashtra, in particular, produced reformers who were willing to bring difficult subjects concerning women’s bodies, sexuality, marriage and social morality into public discussion. Raghunath Dhondo Karve was one of the most unusual among them. Through Samaj Swasthya, he wrote about contraception, sexual health and sexual education at a time when even mentioning such subjects could invite ridicule and condemnation. His approach was remarkably straightforward. He believed people needed knowledge about their bodies rather than silence around them, and described the purpose of his journal as discussing “the physical and mental health of individuals and society and the remedies connected with it”. He also insisted that “rationalism is the foundation of all scientific knowledge”. Karve’s significance to the present discussion lies in that simple insistence on knowledge. Women cannot be expected to understand their bodies, sexuality and choices when society makes honest conversation itself shameful. Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s much wider struggle for equality, including his interventions on women’s rights, marriage, property and labour, likewise placed women’s autonomy within the larger question of human dignity. Savitribai Phule and Pandita Ramabai challenged restrictions on women’s education and independence. Their histories remind us that conversations about women’s bodies have always been connected with the larger question of who has the right to make decisions about a woman’s life. That question eventually enters the most private institution of all: marriage, where desire, affection, duty and expectations meet behind closed doors.

Marriage has sometimes been treated as though it creates permanent sexual entitlement. The wedding ceremony ends, the guests leave and two people enter a private life where intimacy is expected to follow automatically. Real relationships involve changing bodies, emotions and circumstances. Desire can fluctuate. Emotional closeness can deepen or weaken. Physical intimacy can become easier through communication and more difficult during periods of stress, illness, exhaustion or conflict. A marriage certificate does not manufacture desire. Intimacy grows through attention, trust, communication and mutual willingness. Marriage joins two lives while each person retains bodily autonomy.

Women are not a single sexual category. Some experience strong sexual desire. Some experience very little. Some experience significant changes across different periods of life. Pregnancy, childbirth, ageing, stress, work, relationships, grief, medication, confidence and countless personal circumstances can influence sexuality. One woman may understand her desires early. Another may discover them slowly. Another may remain largely uninterested in sexual activity. A woman can experience desire intensely in one period of life and differently in another. Human sexuality contains enormous individual variation.

The conditioning begins early. Girls are taught how to sit, dress, walk, speak and behave. They learn that their bodies will be watched and judged. They learn that attractiveness can bring attention and that attention can also carry danger. Many receive remarkably little serious education about desire, consent, pleasure, boundaries and bodily autonomy. A woman can reach adulthood knowing precisely what society expects her body to look like while having very little language for what she herself wants from that body. Knowledge gives her greater ability to understand herself, recognise manipulation, communicate boundaries and make informed choices.

Conversation matters in relationships. Partners need to speak about sex without turning every conversation into a demand for access. Comfort, boundaries, contraception, health, expectations and changing desire all deserve ordinary conversation. People need room to say yes, no, perhaps, later, I do not know and I have changed my mind. Intimacy becomes healthier when people can speak without fear of humiliation. A mature relationship gives both people space to learn about each other.

There is another truth that deserves equal attention: life is not about sex. Sex is one part of human existence. A woman’s life can contain teaching, work, children, parents, friendship, books, art, politics, faith, ambition, disappointment, travel, solitude, laughter and countless ordinary responsibilities. She can spend one evening thinking intensely about intimacy and the next morning worrying about a lecture, a family problem, a deadline or the price of vegetables. Her sexuality exists within a much larger life. Sexual liberation can itself become a pressure when women feel obliged to demonstrate how adventurous, confident or sexually experienced they are. A woman who enjoys sex is living one aspect of her humanity. A woman who has little interest in sex is living another.

An autonomous woman can want intimacy without marriage. She can want marriage while retaining independence. She can want sex without emotional dependence. She can want love without sex. She can initiate intimacy and later change her mind. She can discover new aspects of herself at forty that she did not recognise at twenty. She can decide that sexuality occupies only a small corner of her life. She can devote herself to work, family, scholarship, art, public service, friendship or solitude. Her sexuality can exist alongside every other part of her identity.

The woman who defines herself becomes difficult for a patriarchal society to categorise. She can understand her own desire without surrendering her judgement. She can set boundaries without guilt. She can speak about pleasure without making herself available. She can refuse without humiliation. She can change her mind without having her character placed on trial. Her sexuality remains part of her private humanity.

Desire also carries responsibility. The right to express sexual desire exists alongside the obligation to respect another person’s autonomy. Consent needs to remain clear and voluntary. Marriage cannot replace it. Attraction cannot replace it. Persistence cannot replace it. Emotional pressure cannot replace it. A person who says no has communicated a complete answer. A society that takes sexuality seriously must teach people how to express desire and how to respect refusal.

Perhaps the most startling sentence a woman can still utter in a society uncomfortable with female desire is also the simplest: “I wanted it.” The sentence describes a human feeling. Other questions remain important: whether another person consented, whether the circumstances were safe, whether the relationship was respectful and whether both people understood the consequences of their decisions. Desire itself does not need to become a character judgement.

The conversation about female sexuality needs maturity. Women should be able to discuss their bodies without being reduced to them. Men should be able to hear women’s desires without assuming ownership of those desires. Parents should be able to educate children about sexuality without embarrassment. Schools should be able to discuss sexual health and consent without treating knowledge as moral contamination. Couples should be able to speak honestly about intimacy without pretending that marriage makes difficult conversations unnecessary. Sexual maturity has much to do with responsibility, consent, respect and self knowledge.

The deeper problem remains remarkably simple. Society has found it easier to accept a woman being wanted than to accept her knowing what she wants. A woman can be a wife, mother, professor, doctor, soldier, student, artist, entrepreneur, politician, farmer, activist, daughter, sister or friend and still possess a private inner world that belongs entirely to her. Her body can be beautiful, ordinary, ageing, tired, strong, soft, scarred, sweaty, working or resting. Her sexuality can exist within that entire human life. Her body can carry the marks of years and remain worthy of tenderness. Her desire can exist without becoming somebody else’s entitlement.

And to all those men who have been taught that a woman’s body exists for their approval, pleasure, control or judgement, there is a reckoning waiting in the simplest truth: she is not theirs. She never was. Her beauty does not belong to them. Her sexuality does not belong to them. Her youth does not belong to them. Her marriage does not belong to them. Her motherhood does not belong to them. Her body does not become their property because she loves them, sleeps beside them or carries their name. A man may desire a woman, but desire gives him no claim over her. He may love her, but love gives him no ownership. He may marry her, but marriage gives him no permanent access to her body. The age in which women were expected to remain desirable while remaining silent about their own desires must give way to something more fundamental: women’s authority over themselves. A woman does not exist to satisfy the fantasies men have constructed around her. She exists first as a human being, complete in herself, with a mind, a body, a history, a sexuality and a future that belongs to her. She is not waiting for permission to become free. She is free. The question is whether society is prepared to accept it.