Today, I noticed in Google trends that many people are searching about wife swapping in India. Then I did some search in Internet and found that this topic got some attention in the mainstream media in recent days. It came to me as a great shock as this is something that really should not go with South Asian culture. What is more worrying is perhaps the fact that it is no longer restricted to some large cities. It is now becoming popular in smaller cities and it is slowly but steadily spreading to middle class and lower middle class people. I think that it is a bad business.
Economic growth in India in the last two decades has created a flourishing middle class who have enough disposable income. Many of them have become strong admirer of anything American. American TV channels and TV serials are very popular among the educated class. Many of them are in the outsourcing sector and it seems that the idea of wife swapping has been outsourced to India from US culture. Its supporters mainly say that Indian is a democratic and open country. So, people have right to do anything with their life. They also say that if a husband and wife are willing to swap then it is their personal matter. Another argument for this is that wife swapping will decrease the possibility of extra marital affairs and thus in fact, would help the couple life to remain healthy and happy.
Yes, India is a democratic country where women still face a lot of discrimination. Dowry is a curse for most girls in the time of marriage. Many parents become very unhappy when a daughter is born. Many marriages break up only because the wife cannot give birth to a male baby. In fact, thousands of couples kill the female fetus after they realize that their upcoming baby would be a girl not a boy. If really, Indian people want to follow the US culture then the first thing they should do is to ensure more respect for female babies in the society.
About the second argument that it is a personal matter of a couple, I would like to say that in most of reports I read today, it seemed to me that in many cases the wife is not willing to engage in this kind of thing. However, she has to give in because of the pressure from the husband. In fact, Indian society is still totally a male dominated society. So, the wife has hardly anything to say. Divorce is considered to be a bad thing for women. In some cases, the wife suffers after the swapping happens.
Telegraph India reported:
Mathai cites the case of one of her female patients who had a fling with her husband’s boss, while the patient’s husband had an affair with his boss’s wife. Both the patient and her husband knew what they were doing. “But the wife was thrown out of the house by the husband’s family,” she says. “The men can have their way but the women can’t.”
Yes, this is a very common idea in Indian society: a man can do almost anything but a woman cannot. Thus, wife swapping is just another way of fun for many men with very serious and disastrous consequences for their wives. In fact, in some cases, the goal of wife swapping is purely for financial benefits. For example, the boss and his wife are in their 50s and they want to enjoy a young couple in their mid twenties of early thirties.
I really do not agree with the third argument that wife swapping helps to prevent extra-marital affairs. In fact, most couples in India are dedicated for their couple life and their children. This message is all the time reinforced in the media and even in Bollywood movies the main theme is love and marriage. In fact, what I feel is that wife swapping is a dangerous thing for Indian couple. First of all, it sometimes creates unnecessary complications when one of the partners get emotionally involved (falls in love) with the other husband or wife. It often may lead to divorce easily. The biggest danger is that in India, most people are not that much conscious of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV/AIDS. So, wife swapping in India would just increase the spread of AIDS very easily in different cities. May be now, most people do not understand this simple danger but unless Indian government does something against it, AIDS will spread very fast. You do not need to be a doctor to understand about this simple risk.
That is why; I think that it is a very bad growing business in India. It will not only create tension and disharmony in Indian society. I am not saying that unnatural or exceptional sexual practices never happened in Indian society. Unnatural practices are common in every society in the world. We all know that. However, because they are limited to a small tiny minority of the population, they are called unnatural or abnormal. What is a matter of grave concern for India is that it is becoming a cool fashion. Many websites are catering to the growing business. Thus, it is in the end, wife swapping in India is a bad business and some adult websites are enjoying the benefit more than the couples.
