MUMBAI, India—This Indian Independence Day, August 15, IMBesharam.com, one of India’s top online retailers, released the results of its Great Indian Sex Survey 2020, a project the company conducted online during the lockdown, for which thousands of Indians from across the country answered questions about their sex lives. From sexual fantasies to sexual frustrations, from struggles with monogamy to relationships with pleasure, from oral sex to anal sex, from masturbation to porn, the results provide a window into what goes on in India’s bedrooms.
One of the country’s top sex-positive content creators, Leeza Mangaldas, was tasked to analyze the results, and what she produced is a video that manages to convey important data and truths about sex with a sense of playfulness and humor embedded in the Indian cultural context.
The video may be found on Instagram and Facebook.
While the company understands that it is nearly impossible to make generalizations about such a large and diverse nation, one thing, it says, became clear: Indians are far more curious and open-minded than they can publicly give themselves credit for, given India's history of repression of sexual material.
In a country where sex education is non-existent and gendered violence is rampant, this project asks the question: As a society, isn’t it time Indians become comfortable contending with sex and sexuality as a normal and positive part of life, with a focus on consent, safety and pleasure, instead of one to be hidden, laden in shame and fear?
According to the company, some findings from the survey include:
• We have sex on our minds a lot. 95 percent of respondents said they think of sex at least once every day. 60 percent of participants stated that they have sex less than three times a month.
• The orgasm gap is very real. 70 percent of male respondents said they orgasm every time they have sex, while only 30 percent of female respondents were able to say the same. Most women also said they’ve faked orgasm at least once.
• 64 percent of respondents said their partner’s pleasure is a primary concern for them during sex.
• Indians are very curious about oral sex and anal sex. More than 60 percent of respondents said they’d ideally like to give and receive oral every time they have sex. 31 percent said they’d already tried anal sex, while an additional 34 percent said they hadn’t tried it yet but would like to.
• About a quarter of respondents said they’d met their current partner online, and more than two-thirds had sent nude photos of themselves at least once, sometimes even to people they weren’t in relationships with.
• India has long been one of the world’s largest consumers of internet pornography, but would like more Indian representation in porn: Indian actors, Indian settings, Indian languages.
• 90 percent of participants said they masturbate at least once a month. While 73 percent of respondents currently masturbate using their hands, 85 percent said they wish they had access to sex toys.
More than 2,000 people participated in the survey, though only 12 percent of respondents were from IMBesharam’s customer base; the rest were active netizens who wished to contribute to a conversation on sex in India. 67 percent of the respondents were male, 30 percent were female, and only around 1 percent identified as non-binary or transgender. There was a reasonably wide age range in the sample: from age 18 to 60+, with a majority of respondents aged 18-40. As for relationship status, 55 percent of the respondents were single. About 40 percent were married or in a relationship, and the remaining 5 percent were in open or unspecified relationships. There were participants from virtually every part of the country—and not just the big cities, but smaller places too. There were lots of participants from Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolata, Hyderabad and other large cities, but there were also participants from Srinagar and Mohali to Allapuzha and Hubballi, from Ajmer to Aizawl, and everywhere in between.
A detailed version of this survey with all the stats will be available on IndianSexSurvey.com by September 14.
