Photos by Rohit Chawla Photos by Rohit Chawla

The wisdom of surveys often provides us insightful peeks at prevailing attitudes to different phenomena. In that light, sex surveys, saucy reads as they are, hold a mirror to the society, especially one as beset by patriarchy as India's.The India Today Group, along with the marketing research organisation MDRA, set out to unmask Indians' changing attitudes to sex, their questions threw up some worrying answers even as they revealed how people in our country are getting more experimental with the art of intimacy.The inherent tendency for victim-blaming is reaffirmed by the fact that of the 1,999 men surveyed across 19 cities, a staggering 36.3 per cent blamed a woman's revealing clothes for rape. While 33.3 per cent said rape could be attributed to the rapists' perversion, only 4.6 per cent believed male chauvinism played a role.Marital rape, on the other hand, appeared to be no concern at all for most of the male respondents, an astounding 79.3 per cent of whom said it was their right to have sex with their wives. As many as 48.1 per cent even admitted to "sometimes" insisting on intercourse irrespective of whether their wives were in the mood or not. More than 13 per cent confessed to doing so "often".The survey also brings into question the common perception that education is the panacea for all of India's ills, with results showing that the belief that revealing clothes invited rape was stronger among people who had completed higher levels of formal education. Around 45 per cent of people with post-graduate degrees in professional fields were found to hold this opinion, as opposed to 35 per cent among Class XII pass-outs.The deep-seated orthodoxy evident in this response also seemed to be the determining factor for the respondents' attitude to premarital sex. Of the 2,015 women surveyed, again across 19 cities, a resounding 74.3 per cent admitted they expect the man they marry to be virgins. They fared only slightly better than men, 77.4 per cent of whom expect their prospective wives to have "saved herself", as the common euphemism goes, for after marriage.Among the male respondents, no less than 76.1 per cent said they would never marry a woman they know has had premarital sex. Of the entire pool of respondents, 44.8 per cent termed the entire concept of premarital sex "wrong".Paired with findings suggesting a more adventurous attitude to sex - 28 per cent of the female respondents admitted to masturbating as compared to 9 per cent in 2003, when the first India Today sex survey was conducted - the survey puts the verdict clearly on the wall. Indians have a long way to go before women are allowed a say over their bodies and sex shorn of the stigma.Till then, the status quo will be questioned, one sex survey at a time.