Public Masturbation

Sexual perverts run amuck on the streets and trains of India. While taking a digesting stroll after dinner on Mumbai’s University campus, my friend Adey and I noticed a suspicious man, previously hanging around couples, behind us on the darkened path. Disturbed by the lingering presence now steadily following us, we decided to cut our walk short. Joking about the abundant number of weirdoes in Mumbai, we grabbed some precautionary rocks and strolled confidently back to the dorm. Although it did cross my mind and public perverts had masturbated in front of my friends before, I was unprepared by what we found underneath a street lamp. Alight as if on stage, I stood frozen stiff by a grotesque performance. With newspaper in hand and fallace in the other, the seemingly reputable man wearing a pink shirt and khakis took pleasure in jerking off in front of my friend and me. I stared in shock as Adey attacked him with rocks and insults while he cowered and ran into an overgrown field. As incredible and unlikely as this incident might have been, it was not the first or last sexual offence against travelers in the subcontinent.

As I prepared to depart south on my own, I grew anxious over attacks on tourists, in particular the brutal rape and murder of a young girl only months earlier in Goa, where I was headed. Violence against women all over the world is more common than one would like to admit, even in “developed” countries such as the U.S., where a woman is raped every four minutes. Despite never being in any physical harm, my encounter with public masturbators on trains and buses would be numerous. Heart broken and at a lost for words, I tried to comfort a fellow traveler and friend as she was molested while trying to board a public bus. On an overnight train I awoke in the middle of the night to find a man fondling a white woman as she slept. Drowsy but distrustful, I gave him a good slap on the ear and the cretin dared to stare at me incredulously. But in addition to the disbelief and utter disgust, rage did not creep into my heart until I approached a police officer in a station with a complain and the culprit. The protector and abider of law did nothing to help. He wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence and looked disinterestingly away as I gestured and explained how the man next to me followed me into the bathroom and waited until I came out to show me his penis. I didn’t expect an arrest but at the very least a few words of reproach. I had grown naïve over the few months spent out of the country for corrupt police are known to participate in crimes against women. One British girl in Indonesia shuddered as she recounted how a police officer had cupped her breast while she lifted her heavy backpack onto the upper sleeper of an overnight train. And although men all over the world have a hard time controlling their cocks, I’ve met women from New York to Paris who’ve witnessed such unsavory incidents; India surpasses most countries on indecent exposure towards foreign women.

Historically an extremely sexually expressive culture, Indian society became repressive and as baby girls and widows are murdered, the male to female ratio death drops discriminately in favor of the former. Globalized by the liberal western media, Bollywood movies increasingly push the envelope on sensuality. This is by no means an excuse, but the fact is that there are an increasing number of poor, sexually repressed, single Indian men who view westerners as lacking scrupulous erupting their frustrations in front of western women.