Chapter 3: From Constraints to Choices: The Evolving Intimacies of Indian Women

This chapter documents the changing attitude of young urban middle-class women toward relationships, sex, sexuality, and sexual health. It explores the ideas of education, freedom through education and employment, and how there is an opening up of conversations on sexuality and contraception within families and friends and how it impacts the sexual freedom of women.

The women who are part of the study have primarily grown up in the 1990s. Like earlier times, women in this time were also taught that sex and sexuality were bad and not something to be talked about. It looks at the manifestation of Brahmanical patriarchy in the surveillance and control of upper-caste women, making up almost all of the research participants in the current study. Though it is never really said out loud. It adds to the silence around sex and sexuality (Trivedi, 2014). Speaking to young urban middle-class women about their sexual experiences, it appears that having sex and exploring sexuality is not an exception but is becoming a norm among this group of urban young women; this finds resonance in urban middle-class women’s experience of sexuality in Trivedi’s (2014) book.