MOIRA, India — A ripple of glee went through the classroom of my school in north Bombay when our teacher, nervously adjusting her spectacles, said a sex-ed seminar was scheduled for after recess. This was at the end of the ’90s; we were a class of 15-year-olds; cable television had just arrived and American soap operas had caused much moral anxiety among our elders. I don’t remember much from this sex seminar, except that we were ordered to feel our testicles once every two weeks. To demonstrate this, an unconvincing replica of a scrotal sac was passed around, with fondling instructions. Our teacher appeared to shrivel. She had to pass the sac back from the grinning boys to the sex-ed instructor, who had just pulled out of his prop bag a plaster-of-Paris model of an erection.

But the sex-ed seminar was not a success. Some weeks later the school head boy confiscated an item from a girl’s bag, declaring it contraband, much to her embarrassment. He proudly dumped the suspicious article on the teacher’s desk. She dragged the head boy out of class, whereupon she slapped him, saying, “Don’t ever put a sanitary napkin on my desk again.”

While it’s glib to make light of Indians’ national awkwardness in speaking about sex, there is something deeper simmering. In December the Indian Supreme Court upheld Section 377, a colonial-era law forbidding intercourse “against the order of nature.” This outlawed all intercourse other than peno-vaginal sex. Homosexuals, rightfully incensed, took to public protest. In a show of support, thousands of well-meaning Indian heterosexuals removed their photos from their Facebook profiles. What many of them may not have realized at the time was that this heroically stupid law affected them, too, as, contrary to what the Supreme Court seems to have strangely supposed, rather a lot of heterosexuals — even that is understating it — stray from strictly peno-vaginal sex, and as such would be culpable under this law, which does not specifically criminalize homosexuality, as largely perceived. Consequently, two powerful clichés are challenged: The omnipotent immunity heterosexuals assume from Section 377 (they too ought to be enraged, on their own behalf); and the tragic persecution of homosexuals (they must remind themselves they are certainly not alone in this). Put plainly, the law is anti-sex, and inhumane.

The Supreme Court’s reinstatement of Section 377, which had been struck down in a progressive Delhi High Court ruling in 2009, is seen as a triumph of conservatism. Many deem this a hallmark of the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party government, whose head, Narendra Modi, is India’s new prime minister. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing group which many believe represents a more hard-line Bharatiya Janata philosophy, recently said both live-in relationships and homosexuality should not be tolerated, declaring them Western imports (as if they were items well-heeled Indians might pick up from duty free).