Should adults play?

Get ready for yet another controversy. This time, the bone of contention is whether adults have the fundamental right to play with sex toys and traders the right to sell them. So far, the trade has been booming in underground markets like Palika in Delhi’s Connaught Place. Now, an enterprising phoren-returned gentleman in Amritsar has opened up the border market for the needy.

Policing is a problem with this business too. But hush-hush transactions across the counter have started.  “Some of these toys are selling for as low as Rs 300,”’ says a news dispatch from the holy city. “Indian minds are opening up to a higher level of sexual freedom,” says a report quoting the dealer.

There are indigenous inflatable dolls at a price of Rs 2,000 onwards, erotic foreplay kits and so on. All these products are brought from Mumbai and Delhi, the report says. With a population of 1.3 billion, slightly ahead of India’s, China’s sex toy market is worth £6.6bn and expanding at 30 per cent annually.

According to People’s Daily study, only 21 per cent of Chinese men knew where to find the clitoris. There had been rapid increase in new HIV cases among teenagers, many of whom were unaware of how the disease was transmitted, it says.

As we’re struggling to determine the legal definitions of ‘obscenity’, ‘patriotism’, ‘promiscuity’ and ‘national pride’, an American court has already upheld law-banning sales of ‘sex toys’. It rejected the argument of ‘sexual privacy’ saying the US Constitution doesn’t guarantee it. “If we craft a new fundamental right today by which to invalidate the law, we would be bound to give that right full force and effect in all future cases including, for example, those involving adult incest, prostitution, obscenity, and the like,” the US court added.

The law, first adopted by Albama in 1998, allowed the sale of ordinary vibrators and body massagers those aren’t designed or marketed primarily as sexual aids. It exempted sales of sexual devices “for a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purpose”.

Georgia and Texas are the only other states that restrict the distribution of sexual devices. American Civil Liberties Union that questioned the ban had argued that private, consensual sexual conduct among adults is constitutionally protected and beyond the reach of government regulation. The US Supreme Court’s decision in 2003 striking down a Texas law didn’t have Alabama’s explanation why sale of performance enhancing drugs like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra was not similarly prohibited. “On the face of it, sex toys are illegal to sell,” a dissenting Judge had said, adding, “shops can survive prosecution if they can prove their products are for novelty use only.”

A physician may prescribe the use of a sex toy, but the allowance does not apply to a therapist who has only a PhD, said the judge. Let’s see how Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, who recently heard Khushwant Singh throwing choicest Punjabi abuses accepted by authoritative English dictionaries, would use the ‘phoren’ laws for a likely legislation. Khushwant was the Guest of Honour.