Inputs by Saranya Chakrapani)

This is the summer the vibrator arrives in Bollywood, declared The Guardian in June. The provocation: Two films, Lust Stories and Veere Di Wedding, showing the heroines pleasuring themselves on screen.Cut to the Indian Patent Office which rejected a Canadian company’s application for a patent on a vibrator because sex toys “lead to obscenity…and are considered to be morally degrading by the law”.The disconnect between our sanskari laws and reality is growing almost as fast as India’s adult toy market (around $228 million currently but expected to grow 34% by 2019).It would probably grow faster if it wasn’t for prudish officials and laws (Section 292(1) of the IPC) that force customers to shop in the grey market rather than buying the legal stuff.Law professor Shamnad Basheer , who highlighted the denial of the Canadian application in a blog post, points out that the patent office is supposed to judge a product only on its technical attributes. “Is it prudent to vest it with the authority to make moral or immoral determinations of this nature?” he asks.Vibrators have always carried the burden of shame and sluttiness. The only places you could buy them were small shops in Delhi’s Palika Bazar and Mumbai’s Crawford Market or when you travelled abroad (and didn’t care about what the uncle at Customs would say if he spotted them in the scanner).Till, of course, the internet made them as easy to buy as a toaster. Or so we thought. Many toys, like dildos, are considered obscene and, hence, illegal. Adult toy websites are finding ways to get around the hurdle with goods that promise to massage you “delightfully all over”.“Some of our new products are disguised as general FMCG goods so that they don’t invite curiosity or suspicion,” says Raj Armani , co-founder Imbesharam, an online adult store. For instance, their male masturbator ‘Max’ looks like a chapstick and ‘Womanizer’ could easily pass for a lipstick.Such jugaad allows manufacturers and retailers to categorise these products in the sexual wellness category, which falls under the purview of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act. “As long as a product does not look obscene, does not resemble any part of human anatomy, does not show nudity, we can sell it,” says Samir Saraiya, CEO of Thatspersonal.Saraiya recalls an encounter with customs officials. “I wanted to get edible body paint from abroad. But there was the question of classification. Customs suggested importing it under the category of paint but the official definition of paint is something that’s applied on walls. Listing it as food was also not viable because food is described as something that provides nutrition. So, it was finally categorised as “novelty”,” says Saraiya.Reetinder Singh of Kinkpin, an online adult store, says that he gets scores of queries everyday from customers for sex toys. “We have to refuse all of them,” says Singh.Like all good things, pleasure doesn’t come cheap. Products on legit adult sites are costly, starting from Rs 3,000 and up to Rs 25,000. For those who can’t afford them or access them, there are other creative solutions for self-love.A survey on how women masturbate by Agents of Ishq, a multimedia project on love, sex and desire, last year revealed that the old Nokia 3310 phone often proved handy. “I had heard jokes about it because it had a strong vibration mode but then I actually came across stories of women using it,” says Paromita Vohra, founder, AOI.