Not just the West, sexual act of stealthing common in India too: Experts

In 2008 Chetan Bhagats bestselling novel One Night At A Call Centre was made into the Hindi film Hello One scene involved the heroine asking a sensible precoital question to her boyfriend Do you have a condom While the scene stayed the c word was beeped out A decade later not much has changed Bhagats novels still make movies and now TV shows beep out breast penis condom sexBad sex or punishable behaviourWhich is why the recently documented practice of stealthing in the West seems shocking Stealthing refers to the act of the man removing the condom midintercourse without the knowledge andor consent of the women Alexandra Brodsky a Yale law graduate recently wrote a paper mdash Rape Adjacent Imagining Legal Responses to Nonconsensual Condom Removal mdash available online which talks of women who have been stealthed Most usually begin by saying they arent sure what the correct term is which is how stealthing came into being Brodsky has been reported as saying that she has proposed a new statute that makes stealthing punishable A quick search online also throws up posts by men who sound like serial stealthers The Barebacked Brotherhood a social media movement dedicated to men who prefer noncondom sex views it as an assertion of their masculinity in homosexual and heterosexual relationshipsIndian men stealthy anyway Meanwhile does stealthing happen here Here its been happening for years but Ive heard of the term only now says Dr Rajan Bhonsle MD Hon Professor and HOD Department of Sexual Medicine KEM Hospital and GS Medical College Dr Bhonsle explains that girlfriends or wives come to him worried that they may have contracted an STD or may have got accidentally pregnant because of stealthing The man in most cases will say the condom comes in the way of his pleasure which is why he takes it off midsex explains Dr Bhonsle Sometimes it happens because he may want to impregnate his wife Much like the times when the man doesnt want a baby and the wife skips her contraception pill because she wants to get pregnant In the context of stealthing abroad Dr Bhonsle says We see more instances of male partners acquiring STDs from a female partner than vice versa So any man gloating about taking off the condom is nothing but foolish Delhi based activistlawyer Nandita Rao thinks it also has to do with us being a generally fatalistic race We are an overpopulated country so access to safety isnt easy anyway add to that our mindset of leaving things to destiny which is why one sees people seating their young children in the front of twowheelers or painters made to dangle off single ropes of a high rise while working Rao goes a step further adding that while in the first world a woman can consent to sex with a condom and still be duped at the last minute most women in India are sexually powerless to begin with Marital rape is still not considered a crime in our country and women cant say no to their husbands or sex workers to their customers So we are far more badly off Can the law protect youMrinal Satish associate professor of law at National Law University Delhi says the Indian Penal Code does cover stealthing under rape Satish who was part of the research team that assisted the Justice Verma Committee on amendment to rape laws in 2013 says Consent is defined in Explanation 2 to Section 375 of the IPC as meaning an unequivocal voluntary agreement when the woman by words gestures or any form of verbal or nonverbal communication communicates willingness to participate in the specific sexual act One of the core parts of the definition is consent to the specific sexual act So if a woman has consented to intercourse on the condition that the man wears a condom and he removes it during intercourse the penetrative act after the removal will amount to rapeFlavia Agnes While that is comforting Dr Bhonsle asks How can we implement this How would you prove that the man took the condom off It will be like women who are coerced into anal sex which is punishable by law but how many actually report it As womens rights lawyer Flavia Agnes puts it The law in India deals only with consent and nonconsent its very blackandwhite It doesnt have the finesse that can make such an act punishable and we arent there yet We are a long way off Rao seconds that when she says We need a massive educational campaign about sex to blot out all social stigma attached to it and empower our women to have reproductive and sexual freedom and to be able to say No Or in the very least stop beeping out the word condom to start with