The most horrible thing about having sex with Indian men is that they do not kiss. Of the many men I have had sex with and the hundreds I have interviewed, almost 98 per cent of men said they do not kiss another man, especially not on the mouth. Some, of course, say they would not even kiss a woman which is bull and possibly their way of hoping you will not feel insulted by their clear insult of you, and it becomes clear most often that they’ve never been with a woman at all. Nevertheless, if it were true, that’s pathetic and shows that women are not just not having orgasms (most Indian men do not even know that the clitoris is) but not getting any kissing as well, which women tend to love way more than penetration.
The fact that they do not kiss or do not set a really high store by kissing shows that Indian men are bad in bed, whether with women or men or any animate being. Most Indian men seem to have a highly functional and penis-oriented understanding of sex. It is just about penetration, orgasm and going off to sleep. The sexual act is one of release then, not of pleasure. It has an excremental rather than an erotic quality. Hours of foreplay are not part of the Indian man’s imagination and hence there are some very ‘unmoistened’, and hence sore, female and male genital and erotic cavities out there. Cunnilingus is a foreign country to most Indian men and as for anilingus, forget about it.
I have finally given up on the idea of
sex with men who do not kiss. It is just not worth it. It is not just that it is offensive that they have no respect for the fact that you are willing to put your mouth pretty much everywhere for them and they refuse to put theirs on your mouth, it’s that sex without kissing is like dessert without the main course. Kissing is one of the most intimate and beautiful and erotic activities in the world and I cannot have sex without it. Freud is really interesting on kissing. For him, kissing tells a lot about ourselves, our development and our relationship to ourselves and other people. It is linked to the suckling at the mother’s breast but crucially it is linked to sucking as pleasure, detached from nourishment of the mother’s milk. It is reciprocal, it is tasting someone else, it is devoid of power as it is tough to tell if one is giving or taking, in Freud’s words it is “the bringing together of two oral erotogenic zones instead of two genitals.” Hmmm.
Freud makes larger claims for kissing. He says it enables the individual to relate to the world (another pair of lips) because he cannot kiss himself. It helps the individual develop into an adult relationship with the self and with the world (and so most Indian men are stunted and fixated idiots) and understand, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it, pleasure as pleasure. It is such a pity that most Indian men do not understand pleasure or what an intersubjective relationship manifested through the meeting of two mouths can mean. Homophobia, hygiene fetishes, fear of intimacy (“Yaar, feeling aa jati hai,’ said one of my Jat interviewees) all these and some other messed up psychic reasons prevent men from kissing other men and apparently even enjoying kissing women in this country and we are the poorer for it.
I was not suckled as a child and that may have something to do with the fact that my most cherished erotic encounter was with the first boy I ever fooled around with when all we did was kiss, deep, with our tongues entangled for hours. He was Nepali, soft and uncontaminated by the strictures of Indian masculinity yet. We were young. It was the most beautiful sex I’ve ever had.