The National Family Health Survey, released last month, shows that the average Indian male has his first experience of sex around the age of 25, the last among men in 67 countries for which comparable data is available.
The NFHS and similar surveys, conducted across the developing world through the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) system, help shed light on the nature of sexual activity in India. NFHS data shows that the average Indian woman has sex for the first time at the age of 18.9 and the average Indian man at the age of 24.8.
In addition, nearly two in three young people (aged 15-24) had never had sex by the time of the survey, according to NFHS data, a number that exceeds just six others, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. countries were ahead. One in three Indian men in their twenties have not had sex yet. In contrast, by the age of twenty, only one in 10 women had not yet had sex.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States, the average age of first intercourse is 17 years old, and 70% of teens have had sex.
The NFHS believes that the age at which men and women in India report having sex for the first time is linked to the age of marriage. As a result, urban men and women have sex for the first time years later than their rural counterparts; Those who have more schooling and higher incomes also tend to have sex later.
long virginity
With first sexual experience closely linked to marriage, the age of first sex is increasing counter-intuitively, rather than as is commonly believed that young people are having sex earlier than ever. Central Indian men today have sex more than two years later than 15 years ago. This is because Indians are marrying later—now the average age is 19 for women and 25 for men. In cities, those with more schooling and more money marry—and therefore have sex—later.
With the marriage-sex link come questions around female agency. Back in 2006-07, a youth survey The International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) found that only 15% of men had sex before marriage. The same survey found that one in four young women reported that their first sexual experience within a marriage was coercion. The link is unlikely as the age of first sex has increased since then.
conservative views
This number also points to the fact that premarital mingling between young people is tightly controlled. Contrary to popular beliefs about how and where young people live now, a 2017 study of young people conducted by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies and the Public Policy Program at the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Institute shows that the vast majority of youth For Indians, home means one of two things: their parents’ home and then their matrimonial home. Only 4% of the youth surveyed lived alone or with friends or in hostels. Only two out of five youths reported having close friends of the opposite sex. Attitudes towards romantic relationships before marriage were conservative among young people. More than half of those interviewed said they disapprove of meeting or dating men and women before marriage, and two in three were opposed to living with unmarried men and women.
getting it right
But what about the interviewer being reluctant to talk about sensitive topics? While NFHS surveyors do not deny this, they point to the extensive training that enumerators receive. “I think it is a misnomer that Indians will not open up about sensitive issues during the survey. When we did a survey, youths from villages would follow our teams, wanting to talk to them, including on issues of sexual activity,” said Professor Usha Ram at IIPS.
While romantic relationships may be more common than discussed, other sources suggest that the NFHS’s findings on premarital sex are largely true. In 2016-17, the Indian Population Council conducted youth surveys in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar using a range of measures to enable the reporting of sensitive information, including ‘secret ballots’. Rates of premarital sex for older adolescents compared with NFHS findings; Even within minorities who had premarital relationships, intimacy was largely confined to hugging.
(Rukmini S. is a Chennai-based journalist.)