By Jessica Sandida Lyngdoh
In this present generation, when the word ‘sex’ is being thrown around during conversations, discussions, or gossips, why is it being generalised only for sexual intercourse? Why does a man’s penis and a woman’s vagina highlight the interest of people rather than discovering the gouging iceberg? Rather than to understand the outer skin, the sole purpose of this topic is to dive into the extensive study of sex itself and its distribution.
We all know sex has two meanings — the classification of species based on gender and the second refers to the act of reproduction or to perform desirable and pleasurable activities. In this article, we shall have an analytic exposure of sex from its existence.
Sex in Gender
From human birth, we are being categorised as male or female which defines the line of separation between masculinity and femininity. As the process of human body grows and transforms, it also means that there is a social construction through which he or she performs within the society.
Biologically, we are of two binary species but as our bodies mature we are ideally influenced by the nearest surroundings involving people, habits, hobbies, likes and dislikes of other subjects. A misguiding absorption of these for the human is likely to be susceptible from the time of its developmental stages. A child who is socially and psychologically constructed by certain ideologies of the opposite sex will thereby face confusion in his or her sexual orientation.
With this generates the ‘Third Gender’. We can say a son without a father figure grows up with a mother and her feministic lifestyle or a sister with only elder brothers in the household grows to be a dike. Whereas, the modernity in this age have allowed the mindset of the people in the western culture to bend a little more and create a sense of compassion for the LGBT Community. However, in a country like India, being a ‘Hijra’ is considered a taboo.
The fear that exist in the people’s mind is that if a ‘Hijra’ asks for money, you have to do as you are told otherwise a curse follow you. Not only is India going backwards but the fact that their traditional roots in religion, customs, race, ethnicity, culture are far and strongly rooted to the ground that they themselves create a tardy conserved culture that is reluctant of change.
Sex in Culture and Society
The formulation of culture is that it is a set of beliefs, traditions, practice, race, religion, food habits, behaviour, language, gestures, etc. In the early 15th century, the word “f.u.c.k” was an acronymic phrase for ‘Fornication Under The Consent of The King’ or ‘For Unlawful Carnel Knowledge’. This meant that the people had to explicitly take permission for a legal sexual act before marriage.
In the cultural religious aspect of orthodoxy, sex before marriage is an illicit act to which God shall condemn those who commit adultery.
Traditional culture has transitioned in time through human thinking and technology. With strong influence from the media, the world has become globalised. There are no longer distinctions between people virtually. We speak and behave alike at the same speed and rhythm. Western culture by far has the most influential media in the world. We are mostly a submissive mass audience towards the west. We modernise ourselves by ‘Americanizing’ our appearances, livelihood, accent, behaviour and thinking. Ignorant of the traditional values, ‘sex’ in the context of this generation follows the mainstream media, which brings forth the openness of sex and multiple love affairs. There are several commercialised films which portray sex as ‘plain’ to be discussed later. This highly influences the general viewers as a whole.
Taking the age group of teenagers for consideration, an attempt in an observational study has been unearthed. Especially the females who are open about their lifeblood, their strongest impulsive visceral is attraction and sex with a little humour to mask over vulgarism. The sexual cravings, the eying for any man for their sexual desires, the secret low-talks between girls in a smoking area or in the bathroom; their fantasies over a cloth-less skin to skin thrust in the shower, or 3 am love-making on a couch besides a blazing fire or a fogged up window of a car where the intimacy of dominant hard sex pleasurably exhausts the life of a woman.
These are the metaphysical speculations of sexual, emotional behavioural forms replaced from the traditional coitus.
Lust and Love
The most intense way to relate to another person is sexually. Robert Nozick proposes the idea that “metaphysical exploration, knowing the body and person of another as a map or microcosm of the very deepest reality, a clue to its nature and purpose”.
Lust is born when either a man or a woman becomes physically attracted to each other. It is either their body structure from the strands of their hair flowing down, to the facial features, to the body language, their scent, to every particular external poise. Lust is also born out of pain, either from a previous heart-wrenching long-term relationship or simply the age of youth and freedom.
The strong urges that stimulates excitement, the thrill of dark secrecy, the fast intimate sex behind open doors; lust can come in between ‘vulgarity’ and the ‘heavenly’ sensation. It advances itself to a set of emotional feelings where sex is not plain sex anymore.
A man learns the body of a woman, exploring her anatomy, her sensitivity, and her pleasures. Because of this exchange in pleasure builds a human relationship that is vulnerably emotional. Therefore, it is possible for love to exist after sex.
Plain Sex and Sex Object
Plain sex denotes no attachments, which means a strict sexual satisfaction for oneself. This activity dismisses all concerning emotional factors or any human relationships. A person becomes a user for sex, to run away from problems, work, stress, relationships, to even having recreational fantasies.
A person having sex may drift in thought amidst the action by fantasizing of another man or woman or both; using the present as a human sex object. Plain sex seems to be a following trend; 70 per cent of the population will settle for Plain Sex.
Like a drag from a cigarette de-stresses a weighing-mind of a person, so does sex relieves the mental pressure. Scientifically, it releases hormones including oxytocin and endorphins.
Masturbation
Masturbation is the key to emergence by giving yourself the pleasurable state of enjoyment and gratification; to know your own body desires against the other’s doing can never be the same. The freedom of visualising any provoking sex appetisers, the liberating feeling within an enclosed space to tempt the mind with your own creative thinking and reaching the climax of orgasm. On the other hand, masturbation creates a small sphere of unsociable character impairing a person’s sexual activity (foreplay). This becomes problematic when the need to reach peak ejaculation does not surface.
Pornography is closely intertwined with masturbation. Porn sites give the viewers the closest fantasies of their sex life. They begin to imagine by bringing these porn stars to life, almost at their presence. The risk again with pornography is that it affects the cost of relationships and marriage.
The structure of sex itself is complex for one to completely understand sex as a whole.
(The author is a student
of Journalism and Mass
Communications, North-Eastern
Hill University)
