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| Sunday, 24 February 2002 |
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Social reformers or sex workers? by Padma Edirisinghe Sex is almost a taboo topic in Asia in contemporary times despite the fact that Kama Sutra, that amazingly frank treatise on sex was written centuries back in the prime Asiatic country webbed in traditions shielding the modesty of females. The work goes along way in transpiring the fact that the human mind works in very queer ways transcending the barriers of age and place. Women writers especially keep away from the topic of sex. However certain ladies of Bharatha Desha perhaps emboldened by the fact that it was their sub continent that produced the must famous literary masterpiece on sex, have dared to take the plunge recently and reveal all including ravishing bed room scenes and naughty flings with unlicensed partners asking sex diseases to go to Timbukotto. Of late a certain group of females challenged me to try a piece on the Sexy Sixties that to satiate their appetite I decided to take up the challenge, using an actual episode enacted about 6 months back. The story I am going to relate began with an innocent telephone call. "Are you Padma....."" No, I replied, I am Padma...." I must add that I am a totally naive, unsuspecting and unsophisticated biped initially from the deep wilds of Siyane Korale. "Padma.... That is even better. Your name is very familiar. I am Fernando from the SSRO based along Duplication Road." What is SSRO, I asked. "SSRO stands for Sri Lanka Sex Research Organisation. Never heard of it?" "Never" (Later inquires revealed that no such organisation exists in our island). "There you are! That is why we need not only publicity for it but even assistance from people like you. You know we collect data on the topic not only from Sri Lanka but even from other countries. It is a very interesting and dynamic topic". I had to agree to that. After all the world goes on with a proliferating population purely on those three letters. Stop sex (here I mean the pure reproduction process) and the world or at least the procession of humans and all other living beings stops. Anyway It was too early in my acquaintance with the SSRO officer to voice such opinions but he was going on at the other end. "We specialise on sex abuse of females and our ultimate objective is to climate the canker of sex abuse from our country." Very good. Though I had never set my eyes on the man, Fernando was beginning to loom before of me as a noble crusader all out to retrieve sexually abused women. By the way there are more Fernandos in Sri Lanka then in Portugal where the name originated. "In fact last months we were in Egypt witnessing the most blatant cases of female abuse sexually. Do you know that in that country women are forced to have sex with horses?" I almost fell from the chair but managed. "I have been in Egypt myself but never saw such things" "That is the point. When women like you visit Egypt you keep on gazing at those massive mounds of clay that the mad pharaohs had got shaped to touch sky limits so that those under them will have something to do day in and day out without breaking out into rebellion and massacring the ones at the top. Never do these visitors observe the actual things going on now. In fact this phenomenon of getting women to have sex with animals is nothing new as the illustrations in Kama Sutra reveal. By the way , haven't you seen them?" The glib talker had now begun to issue a nauseating smell over the telephone (I am rather psychic). So even if I had I was not going to inform him about it. "As to what you mentioned about the sexy going ones in the land of the pharaohs queer things happen in any country and one need not generalise on them. The norm should be derived from the general happenings" I argued. "That is a wrong argument. Then what happens to those who are victimised by what you call the queer happenings? If we ignore them, eventually the queer will blot into the general". I had to concede a point there. But soon X (short for sextus) was beginning to lose his original lustre as a neutral beneficiary fighting the cause of abused Sri Lankan women as he went on to give me all sorts of lurid details including a curious tale about a judge's wife and a dog and depraved activities of male attendants in hospitals with female corpses. I felt that he was just revelling in talking of such unnatural acts. Now resisting the floodgates of his dirty oratory I began to reason out things. If he went on gushing out with his verbal diarrhoea with every woman that he could get hold of over the telly gadget where was the time left for him to do any solid work even in his self proclaimed sex research area? I remember my own days in office when I was very economical with the use of the telephone. Finally I asked sextus what post he held at the SSRO. He paused a bit and said, "I am a sort of a deputy chief. Boss is away in New Zealand doing sex research there. In fact I am speaking from his vacant house". The poor man, the boss I mean, just could not view from New Zealand his telephone bill sky - rocketing just to satiate the depraved erotic feelings of his deputy. "you must be having a lot of time to spare for you have been talking to me now for nearly an hour. By the way, how old are You?' "Age is no bar for sex", said sextus Fernando. "The best of wines is wine stored in age old bottles. And no research in a field can be done unless one is inclined towards the topic. To make matters explicit take a researcher on fertilizers. The research on the dirty lumps cannot be done by a man who has not dabbled in them, smelt them, mixed them, squeezed them, grabbed them, fondled them and even gone to bed with them". "Yes. Heaps of fertilizer. Then only the research on fertilizer reaches top level success. That applies to women too. When can I drop in to discuss the specific ways in which you can help us? We are a very rich organisation and can remunerate you generously". "I will look through my appointment diary and give you a date". That was what you may call a blatant lie. An appointment diary of mine is a non-existent thing. But I persisted asking his age out of sheer curiosity. Well, he said puffing loud over the telephone, I am in my sexy sixties". Message or moral encased in this piece is this. Women writers, women activists and women in general beware of these glorious masqueraders operating as benevolent social reformers. They adopt the most ingenious methods. |
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