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BJP’s Tejasvi Surya is one more man who doesn’t understand the ‘orgasm gap’

The tweet by BJP MP assumes that only Arab women don’t experience orgasm while not acknowledging that women in India also rarely receive sexual pleasure.

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Young politicians must do simple Google searches before they speak or tweet. At least, if they are male politicians, like BJP’s Tejasvi Surya, when they speak about women’s sexuality.

With his bigoted tweet five years ago about Arab women’s orgasms, he waded into an age-old dilemma and a quest. Why can a society not understand a woman’s orgasm? With rather extraordinary confidence, he said in a now-deleted tweet, “95% Arab women have never had an orgasm in the last few hundred years! Every mother has produced kids as act of sex and not love: Tarek Fatah”.

It is not just a Hindu-Muslim, or Indian-Arab gap. You are dealing with the formidable orgasm-gap, Mr Surya. But it may be much above your sexist mind to go into such a nuanced subject.

Before speaking about Arab women’s orgasms, reading up would have painfully revealed to Tejasvi Surya the sorry state of affairs of Indian women.

Headlines like ‘Why many Indian women do not orgasm during sex with men’, ‘An Indian woman’s search for an orgasm’ or ‘5 reasons why most Indian women find it difficult to achieve an orgasm’, leave little to imagination.

Then there’s also that odd Quora question that sums up our dilemma, “Do Indian women reach orgasm?” It’s safe to say, many Indian women have not orgasmed, and through no fault of their own. However, it seems as though controversy and bigotry’s favourite child, BJP leader Tejasvi Surya, didn’t get the memo.

Apart from proving his blind hatred towards a certain community, this tweet has also showcased the minuscule understanding that most Indian men have about their own country’s women.

But Mr Surya, you may be right, in theory. Most women have not had the privilege of an orgasm for decades. But I am ‘95%’ sure that it’s not just Arab women.

Since you struggle to understand Mr Surya, let me take you through the process step by step.


Also Read: Durex Condom ad: Are Indian women really having an orgasm crisis?


Not just an Arab issue

Geography is not the issue here. A cultural divide definitely persists when it comes to understanding and speaking about orgasms and female pleasures. However, it seems like you have the wrong end of the stick. It is not a contest between Arab women and Indian women.

Many therapists across India say most Indian women don’t have the privilege of experiencing orgasms. A clinical psychologist Anindita Chowdhury said, “It is true that many women in India do not experience orgasms. The most common reason is their lack of understanding or acknowledging their physical needs.” And how can you expect them to understand if society is breathing down their neck shouting that the word itself is taboo?

Their sagas of a search for orgasm are loud but still remain unheard. Mr Surya you should talk to the Indian women around you before learning about Arab women. Or maybe, decades of patriarchy has silenced them into thinking they have no desires.

Traditionally, a woman’s orgasm has been explained in movies and literature as the opening up of a “flower”, or as an experience that is gentle yet freeing. It’s a “eureka” moment. But sometimes, it can be far more powerful and scary. It can be sweaty, messy and far from a “flower”.

Margaret Mitchell’s portrayal of an orgasm in Gone with the Wind sums it up: “She tried to speak and his mouth was over her again. Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast.”


Also Read: Veere Di Wedding: It’s been a terrible week for masturbation in India 


Pleasure only for men

I am assuming your love and trust for numbers because you’re so sure that ‘95%’ Arab women haven’t orgasmed in the last hundred years. Since opinions are easy to refute, let’s talk numbers.

A survey found that women have only one orgasm for every three orgasms that are enjoyed by men in heterosexual encounters. Research published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour found that heterosexual women do experience fewer orgasms in comparison to men, lesbians or bisexual women.

Another study says that women see only a faint semblance of pleasure in their 20s. It concluded that women aged 36 or above have had the best orgasms compared to any other group.

This is a classic example of men having never understood female pleasures. A woman’s pleasure is not deemed ‘necessary’ because men’s orgasms are the ones that lead to the first biological step of procreation. Unfortunately for women, pleasure is not a precursor for zygotic existence and society has never been able to fathom the ‘need’ for it.

Behind the ‘orgasm gap’ is a serious demand and supply issue. There is a lot of demand and hardly enough supply. The demand is hardly ever recognised by men. And women have no easy access to sex toys to pleasure themselves.

Speaking of toys also feels like a stretch. We live in a country where men couldn’t even tolerate a scene from the movie Veere Di Wedding where actress Swara Bhaskar was pleasuring herself. Till today, all her reasonable rants about the current political dispensation are met with snarky comments on her masturbation scene in a movie.

It was also a step forward for Bollywood to actually promote a scene like this. For the longest time, showcasing a woman’s pleasure in a Bollywood movie was a no-no. Which is why Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) led to an inextinguishable furore.

Moreover, awkward and close-to-no conversations with Indian mothers on orgasms don’t help either. Even in 2020.


Also Read: Tejasvi Surya, Arvind Kejriwal, Smriti Irani learned Twitter karma can be such a glitch


Marital rape not illegal 

For a Member of Parliament to assume that all children are born of orgasms and consensual sex shows blatant ignorance. Why does it have to be pointed out that many children in this country are also born of marital rape?

Forget pleasuring a woman, marital rape is still legal in this country.

Many esteemed BJP leaders have expressed their two cents on the subject. But BJP MP Maneka Gandhi’s comments take the cake. In a response to a question on marital rape in Rajya Sabha, Gandhi said  “It is considered that the concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors like level of education or illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious beliefs, mindsets of the society to treat the marriage as a sacrament etc.”

In 2013, a United Nations survey found that nearly a quarter of 10,000 questioned in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, admitted to having raped their female partners.

NCRB data suggests that 98 per cent of most rapes involve perpetrators familiar to survivors. And if you were to argue that 2020 has allowed more freedom to women to walk out of marriage, I have some news for you.

Khadijah, a counselor working on domestic violence, said, “In my 25 years of case-work I have seen that a woman who wants to walk out of an unhappy marriage will inevitably face sexual violence.”

We are in a country where women’s orgasms are as rare as non-sexist parliamentarians. We are in a country where sex is over when a man decides so. We are in a country where women’s desires are a strike on her character. Where the g-spot is the missed spot.

Yes, Mr Surya, you are 95 per cent right about missing orgasms.

Views are personal. 

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32 COMMENTS

  1. Can’t help is your BF or Husband can’t satisfy you . India women are too awful in bed devoid of any innovation . Second if writer knows about Islam . FGM/MGM is widely practices in Islam which require vulva and clitoris to be removed so that female or mle respectively is devoid of orgasm. Idea is to have sex multiple times and with multiple partner to breed mujhaaed. Women are specially treated as sex slave and child producing factory . Writer agenda is to divert from real issue of female oppression in islam to feminism issue. While writer for sure don’t know that there are women who fantasize rape as well.

  2. ORGASM ? There are laboured effort to change the perspective of this brat’s tweet ! To say that he was gleefully retweeting Tareeq Fateh or out of concern for the Arab women can be clearly understood where he stands on communal harmony and the reason this upstart was given a ticket by Modi !

    I wonder where he finds evidence of TF statement different from the experience of Indian women contrary to the number of published surveys in India !
    Does it means that he knows what he says from the number of women he has access to and it is a suitable survey size sample or is it a often discussed concern within the family ! Given that he was barely 25 at that time ,says a lot about him as a person and his family on the subject !

    BJP truly lacks talent or personalities of even minimal class ! Knicker wallahs are the standard !

  3. With all due respect ma’am, you are as bad a journalist as Arnab! Bring a topic completely unrelated to the current affairs, twist the facts a little and blow it out of proportion with the only agenda of badgering someone without any logical reasoning just to increase the viewership/readership base is exactly what Arnab does and you’re the female / left version of him.

    Shekhar Gupta sir, I’ve always had great regard for you but being the editor in chief, if you have approved this article, may be it’s time for me to stop watching Cut the Clutter! The Print is literally the only media I follow as it seems logical and balanced and not far left or far right. But not anymore. This article proves that The Print is also one among far left and actually worse than NDTV.

  4. Well perhaps one thing is clear that 100% of Mr. Surya’s partners never have or will ever experience the Big O since he is not capable of providing one.

  5. Well, what Tejaswi Surya did was to quote Terek Fatah from an interview that he had given and the context in which this was spoken was Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as practices in the Arab world and by some Muslim groups in India too. It was like a Retweet, if Tarek Fatah had sent this as a tweet instead of saying it in an interview. And don’t most Twitter profiles have the following statement:

    RT ≠ Endorsement

    This simply means that quoting someone in a tweet is not necessarily an endorsement of what was said by the other person. It is like saying “Hey look what this person has to say…”. Now if you want to draw Tejaswi Surya over the coals for what can be classified as a retweet, then probably most people should stop retweeting. (What Tejaswi Surya could have done was to add the link to the interview in the tweet. That would have clarified the issue in the first place and avoided all this controversy.) So the first premise of this article, that look what a bigoted person Tejaswi Surya is, is flawed ab initio.

    Now coming to the content of the tweet itself. The content of the tweet was the practice of FGM in the Arab world and Tarek Fatah was strongly advocating against it. The reference to the orgasms was with the view that Arab women are denied their sexual pleasure from the time they attain puberty. So it is not the insensitivity of her husband who does not ensure that she has an orgasm, as is being portrayed for the Indian women. It is that the Arab women simply cannot experience it because the organ that is supposed to be one of the most important ones that leads a woman to an orgasm, the other one being the G-spot, itself has been removed permanently, thus obviating the occurrence of an orgasm. And the physical removal of that is associated with both physical as well as mental trauma. How can you equate that with a certain section of Indian women, the percentage being debatable, not achieving orgasm due to the insensitivity of their spouses? These Indian women who do not achieve an orgasm during intercourse with their spouses, at least have the option of achieving the same in the manner demonstrated by Ms. Swara Bhaskar, as quoted by you. But do the Arab women who have undergone FGM have the same choice? When you write all of your whataboutery, you are being grossly insensitive and downright cruel to the plight of the Arab women who have undergone FGM.

    And then you conflate other issues like Marital Rape, which is totally orthogonal to the topic in question. That may merit a separate article and there can be arguments for and against criminalizing it. But conflating that with the issue of FGM is a failed attempt at muddying the waters.

    • Mr Ayonam Ray: Whilst why this armchair gaurakshak-cum-cretin Tejaswi would want to shed tears for Arab women who don’t get an orgasm is surely a mystery, it is even more of a mystery that educated persons like yourselves would want to be pro bono lawyers for this rabble-rousing loudmouth and jerk !

      But that apart, I must take issues with you when you assert that a retweet is not an endorsement. Retweets from public figures are indeed construed as endorsements unless thay are accompanied by an explicit disclaimer to the effect that the retweeter distances himself from the original tweet. And even when such a disclaimer might accompany the retweet as some sort of fine print, a retweet will be de facto construed as something the person endorses. One might lose sleep splitting hairs over this subject, but the fact remains that this is an ir-responsible statement coming from a public figure.

      The practice of FGM is abhorrent and must be banned. But it is sadly not way confined to Arabs and Muslims as significant numbers of women in non Arba, non-Muslim countries like Kenya, Liberai, Nigeria etc. Indeed, in many African countries, Roman Catholics too practice FGM. One wonders therefore why this Tejaswi wiashes to shed his crocodile tears only for Arab and Muslim when FGM is found in many other communities and religious groups.

      In any case, it is Mrs Tejaswi who would be the final authority to apply a litmus test to test her husband’s Hindutva powered orgasm inducing skills ! One eagerly awaits a tweet from her !

  6. Journalists are unable to distinguish between a tweet and a retweet… ! I am not surprised considering the quality of people who are taking to the profession these days. The young bjp politician retweeted something that was originally credited to someone else… why is he being hauled up for what he did not write…? Please explain…

    • Oh, so you want an explanation? Are you dumbheaded Jp. Was there any need for this rascal young politician tejasvi surya to spoil India’s relations with the Arab world. There are millions of Indians working and earning their bread and butter in the Gulf Countries, living a peaceful life but this kind of bigotry will put the relationship in trouble. Arab countries have treated Indians and other communities so well in their land. Several Indian State Governments have put individuals in jails because of retweeting or forwarding messages in the past because the person is held responsible. Whether it is tweet or retweet, it is condemnable. Without knowing the contents, retweeting some bigot’s tweet like Tarek Fatehis nothing but foolishness. For your information, today’s Arab women are highly educated and work in many government and private organizations. There are many of them businesswomen and chairpersons in various organizations. Tejasvi should find out whether crores of our indian women in the rural or urban areas know the meaning of orgasm before retweeting about women of other countries. Shame on him and his bigoted views. He should be dismissed from the party.

    • Mr/Ms Jp: When you retweet what somebody else has said, you are essentially quoting a point of view that you endorse, unless you explicitly point out that you do not agree with the quote/tweet. This intellectual does not distance himself from the quote and hence it is as good as his having said it.

      Additionally, Tejaswi is an avowed anti-Muslim, armchair gaurakshak. His tweets and his afiiliation with the BJP, a party that is built on the bigoted ideology called Hindutva leave no doubt as to where he stands. He could have aplogised for the tweets or clarified the issue and the matter would have ended there. But he doesn’t. After all, Muslim-bashing is a vote getter these days isn’t it ? Including from presumably educated people like you Mr/Ms Jp

  7. Bad as it sounds and reads, the tweet in question was Mr Tejwasi Surya’s tweet. He was quoting it, totally unacceptably, from someone else. Mr Surya had deleted his rweet as he understood his mistake. Now the author of the present article not content with Mr Surya’s action, nothing less than Surya’s blood would satisfy the author, has brought in the issue of female orgadm. In India. How is this matter is being discussed when it is not even at the center of any discussion at this moment,?

  8. I am shocked that a BJP MP even knows the word ‘orgasm’! The article is a very realistic albeit acerbic chronicle of what happens inside Indian bedrooms. There is such a prude and hypocritical attitude towards sexuality in general in this country let alone female pleasures. I am not sure it’s a problem of men alone though. Women and men continue to model jurassic ideals in the name of tradition. The question for me though is why is that the case? Why are we continuing to value what we clearly know is now dysfunctional and even inefficient – to use a slightly economic argument about freedom of sexual expressions? I think the answer to this question would surprise you a little.
    Another film recommendation that you may be familiar with is the short film Khujli.

  9. So Arabs are digging now 5 year old tweets to satisfy their superiority complex. Dictators who are scared of democracy does not support secularism as in India are now questioning India’s values?? Who was driving all these twitter handles ?? Was this done by Arabs or pakistanis and some of radical Indian muslims? Most probably by them only. And this lady talking about orgasm. She does not understand pain of FGM. Or she has blatantly ignored this because of her allegiance.

  10. This MP is another good for nothing BJP leader in the making… BJP is full of such filth in their arsenal…can we expect more….

  11. Nice try to deflect the real question! Who gets orgasms and who does not is not the issue here. It is the brutal practice of female genital mutilation and how to eradicate it. But it appears that our liberandu are perfectly OK with FGM as long as it is forcibly done by the practitioners of a certain “religion of peace.”

  12. Shame on you for not publishing my comments! He is highlighting the urgent issue of the brutal Female Genital Mutilation that effects millions of women every year, that renders them incapable of having an orgasm. Are you in the pay of those countries that you won’t let people highlight the plight of women there. They literally sew women’s clitoris shut! the barbarians! And some of you call yourselves feminists?

  13. He is highlighting the urgent issue of the brutal Female Genital Mutilation that effects millions of women every year, that renders them incapable of having an orgasm. Are you in the pay of those countries that you won’t let people hight the plight of women there. They literally sew women’s clitoris shut! the barbarians!

  14. This kind of article comes when you give keyboard to dumb gossiping bimbos.
    Print should at least hire people who are interested in relevant things instead of some Twitter spat which happened 5 yrs back.

  15. The tweet was 5yrs and he was quoting Tarek Fateh. Are we going to keep discussing about a bigoted statement made years ago that was tweeted also years ago? The best way to kill a news cycle is to let it pass by and not have further discussions as we’re now entering “who all understand orgasms” a discussion that is interesting, important and relevant but under this context, it’ll never be framed right. Let this die, it’s not worth it.

  16. Muslim women have no riughts in their home country and are abused everyday but you, Kairy do not seem to care about that? It is you who has no understanding how Muslim men can treat their wives like dogs and can marry as many time as they want and dispose them like trash.Wake up and look at how women in Pakistan and Afghanistan are treated so next time think before you write.

  17. This is highly sexist article written by a man hating feminist. It is too long for me to even counter all the charges. But let me counter one or two. 1. Marital rape: rape law itself is highly abused across the world just as domestic violence law and dowry law. 74% of all rape cases are fake. And women are using it as a weapon to abuse men, extort and blackmail them. That being the case, how can you expect marital rape law not to be misused? An act of consensual sex can turn into rape overnight if the woman decides! How on earth is the man going to prove innocence? Should a man approach a. Notary public and with two witnesses because every act of sex? Is this the way society should run? This is ridiculous. If a woman decides not to allow penetration, nobody can force her unless she is drugged. The problem is feminists want more avenues for women to blackmail men and take away all their property and money.

    2. And with regard to sexual satisfaction and orgasm, the same society that you claim refers to male orgasm also gives importance to only female protection and is gynocentric. So sexism is not a one way street. We men are much more the victims of sexism than women are. Stop lying.

  18. Very poor and fallen journalism, typically left winger mentality. Such articles and journalists are endangering the lives, safety and livelihood of Hindus in Gulf countries. This article can’t be appreciated.

    • Dr Yogesh Sharma: You seem to see the world through saffron-tinted glasses which actually worsen your tunnel vision !

      Indians of all religions work in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. Thus you have Sikhs, Jains, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Lingayats, Parsis, Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Bohra Muslims, atheists etc. working there. And they come from almost all states in the Indian union. But Hindutva espousing bigots like you only seem to be concerned about Hindus, completely unconcerned about the plight of just about everyone else who is an Indian.

      You also forget that regardless of religion, Indians in the Muslim, Middle East send about 58% of all remittances coming to India. That remittance flow is vital to the Indian economy, especially since Modi has has driven it to the ground with his harebrained schemes like demonetisation, GST, crony capitalism, NPAs, funding of dubious pseudo-science project and so on. Since you do not show concern for non-Hindus outside India, would you also have liked them to not send their remittances to India ?

      But the craziest idea advanced by you is that rather than blame your fellow gomutra drinker and fellow BJP cretin Tejaswi Surya for having come out with incendiary statements and hate speech at Muslims, you rail and rant against a Print journalist who highlights the risks of Surya’s tirades. Indeed, not only this intellectual pygmy, but the entire rank and file of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar has demonised Muslims in India and Islam in general and that was bound to have consequences sooner or later for Indian migrants. You also seem to forget that the BJP’s bashing of Christians is now a source of embarassment for Indian migrants in Western countries. Hence, it is the Golwakarian Hindutva ideology that is reflcetd in BJP policies and statements that other religions have no place in India that causes difficulties for Indians outside, not an aticle pointing that out.

      In nay case Dr Yogesh Sharma, despite your doctorate and so forth, you seem to have difficulties in distinguishing between cause and effect

      • Since you harp so much about the foreign remittances from the expatriates, let me clarify that those remittances have very little effect in boosting the economy. Rather such remittances cause inflation in the Indian economy. All these remittances come to the family of the expatriate and what do they invest that money in? They mostly invest it in gold, real estate, fancy electronics and cars. And so you have the gold and real estate prices rising on such demand. Take the classic case of Kerala. In the early 80s, some people went to the Gulf and sent back tons of money with which some families bought land, gold, etc. Land became more expensive. The expats were ready to pay any amount of money to corner labour for building their fancy house. So labour became very expensive. Now for their neighbours to attain similar status, the only way left was to send someone to the Gulf. For you could not buy those things anymore with your earnings in India. Now 40 years since then, do you see any self sustaining economy in Kerala other than tourism? Any industries that employ large number of people? Cumulatively, that is probably the top most state in the country in terms of expat remittances. But no industries so to say. But the cost of living is one of the highest in the country, essentially pointing to a high rate of inflation. The only way that economy can sustain is through expat remittances.

        So the question is not how much of expat remittance we get. The questions should rather be:

        How much of that is invested in startups? How much of that is invested in entrepreneurship?

        Negligible! It is all used up in the personal comfort of the family. When you invest that money in entrepreneurship, you create a rolling of the money. You allow the money to multiply and percolate into the society. You allow people to make a living by working in your enterprise. You create value in the society. Unfortunately none of this happens with the expat remittances.

        Another classic case is that of the Asian Tigers in the mid-late 90s. They were booming economies on the strength of expat remittances. But once these expats lost their jobs and returned home, that economy crashed by the turn of the millennium.

        So, no thanks, we do not need that expat money! They should spend that money where they earn. Living like beggars in the country where they earn so that they can save and send as much money home as they can, where it multiplies by a double digit factor owing to the conversion rate, and then behave like Kings here, does not help our economy.

        If the tide turns and a very large number of these expats start investing their money earned abroad in creating businesses here, then their money will be most welcome. Then their money will not cause inflation here but create value in our system. Till that time, we are better off without their money.

  19. Indian women very often and 95% of them don’t experience orgasms and it is not the women’s fault. It is men’s fault because men only want to finish their job, not worried about the women.

  20. I see the author is trying his best to avoid or minimize dilute the issue here. The diplomatic damage this un nature tweet by this young MP has definitely ruffled the relationship between Arab and India.

    I think this excuse what ever is being said is just superficial and external.

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