‘Just because I’m bindass doesn’t mean I sleep around’, goes an ad campaign for Bindass TV Channel. Its part of a well executed campaign targeting the youth by speaking their language. Good for them. But why sleeping around must be spoken of in the same vein as drugs, atheism, farting in public and laziness beats me. Does sleeping around imply pre-marital sex, or promiscuity? Giving this college kid in the ad benefit of doubt, assuming she isn’t referring to pre-marital sex (although I suspect most of the people reading do), promiscuous females aren’t known to have higher chances of being terrorists, schizophrenic, heartless or broke either. The last time I checked our population disaster wasn’t attributed to urban sluts. So I don’t see why they must be targeted on bus ads like this. Especially by a channel that produces a show like ‘Emotional Atyachar’. Just because I’m bindaas doesn’t meant I want to test my partner by hidden cameras either. Breaching your relationship’s trust by trapping him on primetime TV is as horrible as cheating on your partner I would think.
The backstory of this print ad lies in the TV ad, where the college kid is dancing rather sensuously i.e feeling herself up in a nightclub, while a letchy guy checks her out. This is probably the most clichéd bit of the whole ad. More purverts harass you in a Mumbai local than a Mumbai nightclub. It annoys me how an ad that is otherwise so sophisticated and unconventional should melt into such a clichéd worldview here. For that matter even Bollywood has discarded such clichés for sexually proactive heroines, without portraying them as morally depraved.
I studied in a convent school and in a college where the ratio of females to males was 8 to 2, of which one would’ve been gay. As a result most of my close friends were hormonally driven girls, who went from obsessing over boy bands, cricketers to frantically searching for a touch & feel boyfriend, settling for any chump who came along. There came a point when emancipation meant plain and simple ‘wake up and smell the coffee’. The boy you spent months chasing just wasn’t interested and worth it. In order to assert yourself, you had to move on, date as many people as you could lay your hands on to regain your self esteem. Losing self-respect seemed like a good way of finding it.
All of them turned out fine. None of them are junkies, STD ridden or even repentant for that matter. They’re young ladies that the college kid in the ad would aspire to grow into. Many are on the threshold of settling down. Which is when double standards in all colours of the rainbow pop up.
Firstly there is the myth of a soul mate and the perfect love story. In this, the boy and girl roam around like lost souls, twiddling their thumbs till they come across each other and find happiness. Marriage, is a sign of that happiness. A wedding, is a celebration of that happiness. It’s unfortunate how one’s past; love and lust included get totally whitewashed, when probably each of those brought you a step closer to where you stand today.
I just finished reading a great little polemical book called ‘Sanskara’ in Kannada by Ananthamurthy. It’s about an earnest, learned virginal Brahmin who is forced to question his worldview after tasting good ol’ Kama in a dark forest. Experience, he realizes, is a neutral term. It is we who paint it in black and white.
It’s sad that all sexual experiences are understood as promiscuity, and that promiscuity has a gender. Slut has a gender. Think about it, what do you call the male equivalent of a slut? Playboy? Loose? Jerk? None of them come close.
For some reason, we seem prepared to accept women as sexually active, but sexually proactive? Pleasure seeking? Nah, that’s where our liberalism ends. There’s something worse than sex, which is actively seeking it.
P.S- there is also another ad where a bearded guys picture is juxtaposed with the line ‘Just because I’m Bindass doesn’t mean I sleep with guys’. I wont bother with that one, hoping the change in Indian laws will breed greater acceptance of homosexuality in India. Being gay isn’t the same as farting in public once again.
