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Showing posts from May, 2015

Let’s stop talking about sex, honey

Bittu (Tamil slang for porn) movies in Tamil Nadu may have finally found a worthy competitior: TV programmes doling out sex advice. Prior to the advent of internet, titillation in TN would have meant ‘record’ dance bars – where women in skimpy dresses gyrate to item numbers in front of raucous crowds– or theatres screening dubbed movies of the soft-porn virtuoso Shakeela. Today, it might mean turning on the tube late at night to watch a sexologist hearing out woebegone callers and advising them on everything related to sex – from intercourse to periods and masturbation. What could have been a healthy trend gets reduced to a caricature, and even worse, a misinformation campaign. And that – for a state that has made remarkable progress in curbing the incidence of AIDS (remember, it was once bracketed with the likes of South Africa) and showed the rest of India how welfare schemes for transgenders could be implemented – is a blot of gargantuan proportions. The “professional” opin