Beginnings-7: Puberty Challenges

2004, Chennai, India

In India, we don't have the concept of Adult talk or sex talk or sex education for the upcoming puberty boys. As a very conservative society, the discussion on the topic of sex is considered taboo. And the gender which suffers the most is the boys than girls.

I will tell you why boys are the big victims of Indian culture than girls on this topic. 

Girl's Puberty Ceremony in India:

In Indian culture, girls generally have a puberty ceremony, and the rituals and customs vary from region to region. As a child, my mom use to drag me to all these ceremonies as her lap dog despite my protests saying there are only women and I don't understand what was going on. Only women were allowed except for some small boys and some family men.

I always wondered what was happening around that girl or elder sister. It was a mystery to me for a very long time, until I reached college where I questioned that one guy, who will be in every gang or group who happens to know all about sex (cool stuff), just hanging out with him was considered as a cool thing. This idiotic cool guy was even more dangerous, he was always a victim of the culture and gives all half-baked knowledge from here and there, and I carried it for a very long and still re-correcting my knowledge base on this topic. 

This picture is one such common puberty ceremony for girls who attain puberty.

Main features of this Puberty ceremony are:

1. On an auspicious day, they invite married women around the neighborhood and conduct the ceremony.
2. Turmeric is considered holy and an aspect of Goddess Durga's (a major female deity in the Hindu system) blessing and auspiciousness, so every Indian ceremony will have some customs with turmeric
   1. They put turmeric paste on the cheeks, and hands as a mark of blessing, to ward off evil eyes (a tradition).
   2. They bathe the girl with turmeric water to cleanse and for the anti-bacterial properties of turmeric to remove any bacteria from menstruation.
3. They feed rich foods like almonds, cashew, cleanse, raw eggs, honey, and other fruits to add strength to their body for the next few months to help them navigate thru the changes in their body.
4. The women may be isolated for a few days in a room or in a hut outside the house (common in villages), as they treat the mensuration blood (if spilled) as a sign of pollution to the house. (This is a carryover from the olden days when hygiene was lacking).

Why is this ceremony for women?

1. I can't speak for the spiritual side because I never cared to investigate it nor had any sisters to witness it in my house and this topic was taboo for the men. Just seen from far away.
2. This puberty ceremony for women is a carry-over from the past when hygiene measures lacked and menstruation pads were not even invented. 
   1. So, a lot of fear of menstruation blood spilling on the ground, kitchen, or in the house was instilled in the Indian psyche for both men and women and till today several customs, and traditions still revolve around it.
3. Also, women were getting married off in their teens back in the day (like 50-60 years ago), so this puberty ceremony is like a massive advertisement with posters, word of mouth around the village and subtly signaling everyone and inviting them for marriage proposals.
   1. First proposals usually are expected from close relatives or family friends. They have to bring several plates of fruits, some jewels, or even some cash and offer it to the girl and do the rites. This is a sign of respect and shows that they are interested in pursuing a matrimonial alliance with that girl in future. Sometimes they marry, and sometimes they don't. But this is the custom!
   2. Back in the day before globalization, there would be only very few families in an entire village as many as 30-100 families. And with the caste system, finding a suitable groom and bride within the village or neighboring villages gets even more challenging. So, this ceremony is a good marketing or advertising tool to attract prospective alliances and to show they have a girl in the house who is ready for marriage. 
4. With technology, sterilization, hygiene improvements, and pads, several of these customs can be questioned or even omitted but they are still followed due to generational peer pressure.
   1. Isolating the girl in a hut outside the house for a few days is still followed in villages and one girl recently died when a cyclone struck the village at an unfortunate time. Regressive practices can be replaced with better hygiene methods and sex education.  
5. Several of them are superstitious and not needed at the current time as the teen wedding is not legal in India and the date difference between puberty and the wedding of the girl is more than a decade these days, so this system of advertisement is not valid anymore.
6. But despite all this, one thing is for sure, the girl is very well educated about sex and reproduction faculty without any videos or media. Mothers and aunts educate them on the how-to-dos and prepare them on handling their bodies, biological changes, and the future reproduction acts eventually.
7. An initiation of knowledge transfer on these topics is opened up without any hesitation or fear with senior women and proper guidance and preparedness were given in such a conservative society. This is appreciated except for all other outdated systems. 

Even in Apache culture, other tribal cultures around the world have similar ceremonies for both boys and girls in the appropriation of their society's spirituality, needs, and demands. 

Boy's Puberty in India:

Now coming to men's coming of age or puberty ceremony in Indian culture. 

1. The entire culture or maybe with time, coming-of-age boys were disregarded and forgot to transfer the knowledge.
2. No custom or any sort of knowledge transfer happened on the topic of sex education of self, opposite gender and reproduction act.
3. One can ask how come then India is still the world's most populous country.
   1. It can be a paradox or lack of sex education or the contribution of several factors like
      1. very long settlement or civilization in one place
      2. the lower mortality rate due to better medical sciences
      3. Better food security, fewer droughts and better response to the crisis
      4. age-old practices of having multiple kids because some kids can die in next few years due to simple diseases like fever, diarrhea, etc (like having 7-8 kids, and only 2-3 kids made till the age of 20)
         1. what if they all survive due to better medicines→ population boomed
      5. Lack of contraceptives (or knowledge of it)
4. Even senior men like fathers, uncles, and grand-dads don't talk or give sex education in the Indian Hindu culture as the topic is taboo to discuss among family members 

So how does one learn about sex when closest family members don't teach?

1. Mothers, Fathers, and Uncles expect the teen to go out and learn from others but not them. The other sources for 12-15-year-old boys are:
   1. their friends in school (who are more weirder and creative idiots than the self)
   2. from school teachers
      1. my school teacher even omitted the chapter on reproduction and she said you guys know more than what you need to know, this chapter is redundant for you guys.
      2. Other class Hindu biology teachers obviously omitted it but I expected from my Christian biology teacher to teach me but even she succumbed to the cultural pressure and disappointed us.
      3. Anyway, at that age, we were eager but not interested in learning this chapter, We all were more into giggling and making fun with our friends later on, but that 2-3 hours on that chapter would have gone a long way for all our boys. The teacher fearing our funny remarks avoided it. By the way, she is one of the strongest female Christian teachers whom we were scared to death and I was in one of the finest city schools, Imagine the rural conditions!
   3. from media
      1. Family members think the boys will know somehow and anyhow naturally 
         1. No, the boys can't know and the sexual knowledge neither comes from the sky nor from inside. It has to be taught here
      2. Family members think boys will learn from someone from somewhere but they don't want to be that person who teaches about these things
         1. Even if a kiss scene comes on TV, all the family members will try to run and hide their faces.
      3. This is the ultimate place where all our family members subtly or indirectly expect us to learn the sex stuff.
         1. There are obviously not many proper books on sex education (which are not even available or familiar to us)
         2. These are porn media, either sex stories or picture books or porn media in movies or real hard stuff.
         3. Why they wanted us to learn from these stupid media sources, because that's from even where they learned this stuff! 

Struggles due to lack of Sex education:

These are my personal experiences, some can be general to my generation and to my culture and time

1. If porn media is the source/reference of boy's sex education in Indian culture:
   1. then vulgarity and crimes against women will become the gradual consequences of this inadequate training as behind every porn some degree of violence is instilled. Violence will find its way singularly or collectively into the bedrooms or in the streets.
   2. Young boys look at women will be degrading and only as flesh and bone for pleasure purposes
2. I confirmed women's menstruation at the age of 27 with a western woman who was laughing at my innocence (ignorance).
   1. Till then I heard that women bleed but I and my friends thought this was a concocted lie spread to desist boys from viewing porn. I confronted this idea of bleeding by the evidence from porn movies where we have never seen a single bleeding across 100s of movies. 
   2. I asked my mother about the sanitary pads but she shuts my mouth and shooed me away. I thought maybe she was cleaning the bathroom with that fluffy tissue or keeping in her armpits to absorb sweat or using it like diapers if she could not find a women's restroom in India. The thought of bleeding in the reproductive organ is grotesque to me.
   3. Now, the idea/ mental image of bleeding in the women's reproductive part itself makes my head dizzy because it was always referenced or viewed as the pleasure hole in porn movies or from stupid and silly sources.
3. Unnecessary stupid fears were instilled into the psyche from hearsays from friends and immediate seniors and fear to ask these questions to family members and struggled mentally with stress from cultural backlashes
   1. In my teenage years before viewing porn, I thought hugging and snuggling an opposite gender can produce a baby or people can call it rape.
      1. Once while playing with a young neighbor girl who is like my sister, we were grappling with some petty things, ultimately I won and she cried and it went to her parents to complain about the fight we had.
      2. In an Indian movie scene where the girl was forcefully grappled and they in the next scene, she comes out of the room crying and complains to others that she was raped inside the room, Indian movies don't show what happens in the act, just before and after the act. This image mirrored into my head and I thought she might complain some rape might have happened I was stressed and was so scared to see her parent's faces for several months and even in dreams, it was haunting me for a long time during those years. This stupid fear energies still keep striking in various forms even in adulthood. 
   2. Unwarranted Fear and wrong knowledge of Sexual diseases transmission:
      1. Fear of HIV came from the previous generation of1970-90s and they transferred this fear to the next generation in the 2000s, my friends used to tell me just by masturbation and if the virus was in my pants accidentally and interacted with semen, I would be affected by that disease. Such a humbug but it bothered me for years, even now it bothers me here and there from the back of my psyche.
      2. In cinema seats or food, HIV patients are putting needles, so they want to spread the disease to the whole world. This freaked the hell out of us, we were almost crying without crying that we were virgin boys and does not want to die without having a single-sex due to these perverted idiots.
      3. Still, today, when I go to the cinema theatre, sometimes I unconsciously check my seats to see if there are any needles sticking out before sitting. The reality is the virus dies within a few seconds when exposed to air, one has to do intravenous or mix in blood within 1-3 seconds to affect it. My friend who happened to have sex education in another school (rare case) shared this knowledge with me. 
      4. This knowledge saved me from a lot of undue fears but nevertheless, I suffered a lot from these traumas of the past generation which were put into the psyche, Scientific approach helped to remove these unwarranted fears.
4. Lack of understanding of Man's reproduction biology.
   1. I know all the biological reproductive parts and their functions for exam purposes but was never taught or bothered to learn afterward about how they function as a system with other systems and to handle it harmoniously with other parts of life. This important knowledge is a miss in my psyche.

First Masturbation:

Around 2004, during my seventh grade, this incident happened. it is still fresh in mind.

I was sleeping in the big bedroom. Usually in India, there is nothing like personal bedrooms for kids, there will be one long bedroom with elders, uncles, grandparents, and kids together. Young couples initially have private bedrooms but eventually, dissolve into large bedrooms in a joint family. But this is changing rapidly with the loss of joint families and the uprising of nuclear families. The below picture gives a good idea of this scenario as this could be very alien to modern western civilization. 

I was sleeping on just a jute mat on the floor. Around midnight at 11:30-12, certain disturbances were occurring. The events are still fresh in my memory registry.

1. The first time an inner overpowering alien force took over me.
2. I did not realize what it was but it possessed me clearly and operated on my body against the wall at the age of 12.
3. Like how one flips the fish when one fries on the pan, I was flipped and went into a sleeping pose with my belly facing the floor
4. An image of a girl student who was studying in my same class was flashed inside my forehead (precisely between third-eye & intellect location).
5. I know this girl as we were classmates but never spoke to her or interacted with her. In fact, she is a pretty person, one of my friends was behind her in later years but I was not attracted to her even a single bit because she was not my type, several of her current bodily features were the exact opposite to what I am attracted to in this birth. 
6. Her face appeared inside my forehead like a 3D projection.
7. I was pushed into the ground into submission and tried to push up myself, the force was heavy that I could not move from that position and the force made my pelvis grind in a random fashion on the hard floor like a billy goat.
8. The girl's face was just stationary inside my head and the grinding increased until the semen was spilled out. 
9. The pleasure was immense and flooded my head to toe.
10. I was like "WoW", what was this train of pleasure that just hit me and I never had this even when I tasted meat or while watching movies with my family! What was this pleasure thunder?
11. I got up to see if anyone saw me doing this in the dark, luckily no one saw, and was wondering what was this event. 
12. Slowly, the gripping force and disturbances vanished, and went into a deep sleep.
13. Her subtle body must have tracked mine and continued some previous sex energy transfer without even my control or asking. 
14. I had no clue of what puberty was at that time, but backtracking, I can say around that time is when my puberty must have started and it transpired its capabilities in this event. 
15. Next few days, I wondered about his event and try to investigate by imitating the act again and again. I rubbed my front pelvic portion on that wall, door, and on floor and found the optimal position to release the semen and enjoy the pleasure.
16. If my mom or my family members find me like a billy goat rubbing on the floor in the early morning or midnight as they sleep very close to me, I would act innocent or act like doing it in my dream. I think a few times, my mom found out what I was doing once and kicked and stomped my buttocks so hard that I thought my genitals were crushed and she walked away. Still, I acted innocent to save self-dignity and we never discussed this incident at home.
17. Years later in college, I learned that this act was called masturbation. I used to tell my school friends that I have mastered certain techniques to sleep better at night, especially doing exam stress or other stressful nights. I thought it was a stress buster (it was indeed in many ways, but comes with psychic damage) and my friends would also say they knew some other methods and we all kinda knew what was going on behind the scene. 
18. Usually, friends teach masturbation. In this case, some past-life energy transfer has already been initiated and taken over the body. Porn exposure happened at college at the age of 17 but till then some entities would come or flash up in the third eye location and I would be acting like a fully loaded billy goat, rubbing on the floor, without the use of any hands like an animal. 

This should be a revealing onset of events of the first astral sexual encounter during my coming of age. Apologies, if it is revealing or graphic in content.