The I&B Ministry has asked Hindustan Unilever to refrain from airing the “Chocolate Man” AXE advertisement. It’s a silly ad in which a young man sprays AXE on himself and his consequent irresistibility to young females as he moves around is likened to his appeal if he had been made of chocolate. Women drool at him as he breaks off his nose and crumbles it onto their ice cream cones and are literally throwing themselves at him to get a bite out of him in various places—theatres, gyms, buses…. How vulgar.

Now Wild Stone has such a decent ad: a very buff young man strolling down the passage collides with a young beautiful Bengali woman and knocks down her platter. As he helps her pick up the items, his fragrance drives her to have a wild fantasy of actually bedding the guy! Amul’s underwear ads were also quite graphic, with and without the monkeys (the kind whose arms reach the ground). What Katrina Kaif’s Aamsutra ad had to do with mango juice was quite puzzling and I am sure the name was just coincidental. And the Reliance ads with the friends all waiting to hear about the wedding night even as the bride lies asleep next to the smug groom, well, that’s so subtle.

Ours is a society where the Y chromosome is elevated above all the qualities that are deemed important in any civilization—intelligence, honesty, integrity, reliability, and maturity (among others)—and where the presence of a uterus has meant and even now, continues to mean so much trouble to its possessors—all the way from killing the fetus that shows signs that it may possess this wretched organ to denying equal opportunities for the pursuit of a decent life and happiness—all through their lives.

Marriage exists solely for the sake of procreation and the lack of progeny after marriage creates so much disturbance even now in the lives of the educated and uneducated alike, that people have no shame asking the most horrifically intrusive questions, organizing pujas to invoke the favor of the deities in granting the desirable male progeny, and generally publicizing the affair to all and sundry. “Suhaag raat” and “First night” are all concepts entrenched are important terms in the sociocultural landscape of our country, all the way from the North to the South.

Why, in a country like India, does it have to be that sex education to control the population is wrong when there are so many opportunities to view the human body and clearly so many reasons to wonder about what causes the increase in population? Why is it all right to have movies that the I&B ministry clearly approves (with whatever rating they give which clearly cable operators can bypass) with item numbers, heaving bosoms, gyrating hips, the scanty clothing, and the endless, insipid romances?

Even in the past, there have been movies with such long-drawn out rape scenes and the typical villains harassing the heroines and hero’s sister etc. Were these all decent? What is the real message? If a woman is an object of desire and lust or is accidentally swept into the magnetic field of a very macho male, she remains manageable but if a woman actually becomes the perpetrator of desire and lust, then this gets out of control?

Finally, what also confuses me is why Anbumani Ramadoss has remained silent. Isn’t there something bad about eating so much chocolate and that too, in a hypertensive and hyperexcited state and shouldn’t he have intervened rather than the I&B ministry? Along the lines of the Channel V cartoon bai (female servant) who squawks, “Itna paisa mein itna-eech milenga,” the way things are in this country can be described by, “Aise ulta khopdi ho, to aisaa-eech hoyenga.”