Sex Lies and magazine surveys...from Change Magazine

Sex lies and mass media

Mirra

September and sex… and it must be that because the first two letters are the same, that this September we were bombarded with 2 magazines telling us what Indian women are doing with their sex lives.

The picture that is being drawn – Indian women – entering the globalised, liberalized sphere of sexuality – “Free of the burden of her barren sexual history she is looking fearlessly into a future teeming with sensual possibility” (India Today). It goes further – India’s smaller town women are sexually proficient: “In Patna, a majority of single women claim to have had an orgasm”; Ahmedabad wins the top in terms of frequency  of sex, with 33% claiming they had sex more than once a week, while the nationwide average was only 14%.  In Hyderabad 49% approved of live-in relationships.

Is this a true picture? Obviously not. Anyone with a little bit of common sense knows that it isn’t.  But as mass media knows too well, sex sells (again the same two letters se…) and by even just printing questions that no one else has written about makes the articles titillating to read. I mean, there are people out there doing it in trains, in front of mirrors, video filming themselves….

The tough point comes when these magazine surveys make it out to seem that this is what is happening generally in Indian society. “Nationwide survey” you are told. Percentages scream at you in bold larger than life figures on the page. But what do these percentages actually mean? Who are these surveys actually talking about? Most people don’t have much idea what it means to do research, so perhaps they think that these percentages do reflect a reality.

Who do these percentages reflect?  And how was the survey conducted? One of the main questions in research is the sample – how was it drawn and how representative is it.

Looking at how the study was done by India Today -

Imagine yourself, a young unmarried woman, walking down a street. On the corner someone approaches you. Most women would likely tell the person to get lost. If you did listen to what this person had to say, you would be invited you to come to a central location to fill out a questionnaire. Would you agree? Some 2,035 women in 11 cities in India actually did go… and answered a questionnaire …. Since they don’t give the details, we can presume that that’s about 180 women per city. And I guess many women must have refused to go to central location after being approached in a street corner. How many refused, we don’t know.  But there must be something special and different about those young women who did go to “the central location” and then actually sat down and answered these questions.  Questions like

What do you prefer – Long foreplay or quick sex?

What is your preference in foreplay?

What do you do after sex?

Do you share sexual fantasies with your boyfriend?

Have you masturbated in front of your partner?

And a host of other questions and then smiled and walked out of the central location with a little gift in their hands.

These women were in the age group 18-30 we are told.  62% were graduates, 54% students, and 33% working. All upper income.

Of these women, 24% say they have had sexual intercourse. A royal sum of 488 women, and across 11 cities, means that when the magazine reports on how women in Ahmedabad are so forward looking, or more Patna women having orgasms, we are probably talking about the 20-40 women. Only the most irresponsible research person or agency would say that this is a sufficient sample to be making any generalization – but journalists can conclude “Women have started experimenting with their bodies.”

A smaller survey of men was also conducted: 517 men from the same cities were surveyed on the street corner itself. Imagine answering the question,“Have you ever peeped through keyholes or stealthily watched other people having sex?”, on the street corner as people sauntered by (20% answered yes).

While the cover of  India Today promises to give you the scoop on “Sex and the Single Woman,” Outlook’s cover screams “WOMEN BUY MEN FOR SEX” and offers a “Nationwide survey on FORBIDDEN SEX.”

If you read the fine print, you find that these articles claim to have revealed the sexual attitudes and behaviour of urban middle class men and women in metropolitan cities in certain age categories (and in India Today, only singles), but the text gives the impression that it talking about all urban women and in some cases, all Indian women. Because of the convenience sampling method and the likelihood that women willing to go to a central location to fill out a questionnaire would be unrepresentative (and with over half of the India Today respondents being students, perhaps wanting to have some fun with their answers), the findings cannot be reliably generalized to urban metropolitan women or to Indian women in general.

Another reason these findings seem unreliable is that they are so different from a recent survey carried out by BBC World Services Trust, New Delhi. As part of a Knowledge attitude and practices study on HIV AIDS, a survey was carried out in 17 states, covering 169 towns and 570 villages in June –July 2005, with respondents chosen randomly by interviewing individuals in every fifth household.

Although the population studied is different (smaller urban areas and rural areas), the picture of the behavior and attitudes of young adults in India shows that it is far from the picture drawn by these media studies.

The few comparable questions yield extremely different answers. While 24% of India Today’s unmarried female respondents claimed to have had sex, this was the case for only 8% of the men and 0.59% of the women, age 15-29, in the BBC study.

 According to India Today, among urban women, 18-30, 65% believe men and 66% believe that women should be virgins before marriage. In contrast, In the BBC study 96% women in this age group believe that both men and women should be virgins at the time of marriage. There was no difference between rural and urban areas, nor between men and women.

Some may dismiss the India Today and Outlook articles as harmless fluff, but there are consequences of such kinds of mass media portrayals. It is only when one reads the fine print that you realize that this is not the portrayal of Indian women. Sex and the Single Indian woman and the Nationwide survey on FORBIDDEN SEX seems to be drawing a picture of Indian women. But this is simply not the case.

Who is it that these surveys are reporting about? Those urban men and women who would want to participate in a sexual study of this kind. It does not even represent the young educated urban woman. The fact that individuals were stopped at street corners, or given questionnaires which they mailed in 2 days later, itself creates a bias.

So what difference does it make, you may wonder. People do read these articles and they do form a picture about what “young single women” in their cities are about. If they are having sex, paying for sex, having forbidden sex, then these women are (or should be) available for me (men) too.

Young women, in colleges or working, have been reporting that there is increased peer pressure from men to get into sex. And if women say no, they are branded as prudish, traditional, not with it, not cool……. Surveys like this contribute to creating an image of the young woman in urban areas.

Agreed, there are changes occurring in the lives of women and men as the economy changes. Many youth (not all) are getting independent sources of income, and living out of their homes. It is important that we support these women who are entering new ways of living. However, does creating a false picture of what is occurring in their lives help? Not all of these are engaged in the drugs, disco, drinking orgy lives that page 3 journalism is celebrating. And by creating such a picture the media is certainly doing a damage. These articles could contribute in promoting sexual aggression among men. They do reduce women the position of sexual consumer, a globalized gloss on woman as sexual object.

And it is heartening that the general public is not taking all this quietly. A Public Interest Litigation was filed against India Today and Outlook, and the magazines were asked by high court to give their replies on the charges filed by December 7^th. But there have been no replies given. The legal department of India today says they have asked for some more time…. When do they intend to reply … no idea. Parents in one of the towns were outraged against how the magazine portrayed women in their town – and said that this created a negative picture of their daughters.

But why oh why are the well informed editors of these magazines doing such biased studies and allowing them to be published so prominently in their magazines. Sure sex sells, but surely well done studies, with proper sampling procedures, more representative of the Indian population, whichever sector that they want to cover, would also provide mirch masala to their publications.

There must be some reason why these editors are doing what they are doing. Otherwise how does one explain that both come out with similar scintillating articles in the same month? What role does the sexually liberated woman play in their eyes? Is it that globalization and liberalization is creating what the “pseudo secularists” desire? A clone of the West?