Vision 2024 | ‘Safe, judgement-free, equitable sexual health for all’: Dr Tanaya Narendra aka Dr Cuterus

Dr Tanaya Narendra aka Dr Cuterus, sexual health educator, doctor, embryologist and Instagram influencer.

Dharmesh Darshan’s Raja Hindustani was the top-grossing film of 1996 — but that news paled in comparison to the stir the film had caused with a lip lock between its two lead actors, Aamir Khan and Karishma Kapoor. “It was the final scene of the film, and as the actors came closer, the camera moved further away,” recalls Dr Tanaya Narendra, better known as Dr Cuterus, with a laugh.

“When my parents were younger, moments like this in films were communicated through vibrating flowers in the fields,” Narendra continues. “In 2022, Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan came out, whose trailer was effectively one long makeout montage. And people now barely register it.”

Narendra, who has a Master’s degree in clinical embryology from the University of Oxford, started her Instagram account under the moniker Dr Cuterus in 2020, with the mission to address the misinformation surrounding sexual health on the internet. With over 1 million followers on Instagram, she has won awards for her work and has been recognised as a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. Last year, she released a book — Dr Cuterus: Everything Nobody Tells You About Your Body — which became an instant bestseller.

As a pivotal actor in the ongoing sexual revolution sweeping across India, Narendra believes there has been “huge growth in the way we have come to understand and appreciate the depiction of sex and desire on screen.” In the past five years alone, she has witnessed a shift in conservative attitudes around sex, a rise in the number of social media pages like hers, and an evolution in the representation of diversity in gender and sexuality. But she also believes there’s a long way to go.

Narendra’s vision for 2047 is “safe, judgement-free, equitable sexual health for everyone.” Despite the sea change of the past five years, she sees this as an uphill battle — as any social change would be — albeit an achievable one, with a bit of collective will.

“Access to sexual healthcare needs is very poor and the medical burden of these conditions is very high,” says Narendra. “If you speak to any gynaecologist, mental health professional, urologist or infertility specialist, you will see a huge need for these services and yet it continues to be missing.”

In terms of healthcare services, there is the glaring absence of sexual medicine as a specialisation in Indian medical schools. “We have doctors who specialise in hair,” says Dr Narendra. “We have doctors for the butt, the eye, the brain. But we have a whole group of organs — the reproductive organs and genitalia — and there is no doctor for it.”

“I think that’s a huge area that we can target because when there are no qualified doctors, people end up going to quacks or the gupt rog visheshagya,” says Narendra, who has petitioned the National Council of Medicine to officially recognise sexual medicine as a branch, and awaits a response. “There’s a lot of weight in that terminology. It implies these are ailments meant to be hidden. This leads to further discrimination and ostracisation of such an integral part of health.”

What Narendra and her ilk of sex educators on social media have been more successful at is raising awareness among their millions of followers, but that isn’t without challenges either. Barriers include language — Narendra believes that while vernacular social media accounts exist, and their intent might be right, they may not always be disseminating authentic, trustworthy and scientifically accurate information.

Another challenge is age, as restricted social media access is considered a key part of good parenting. Children and adolescents, who might need this information to be able to, for example, survive sexual abuse, may not have access to it. “The National Education Policy did introduce a proposal for including curriculum-based sex education in 2020,” says Narendra, “but there was a lot of protest. In India, there is a huge amount of moral panic surrounding the idea of any sex education even if it is age-appropriate, comprehensive sexual education.”

Add to that the lack of literature that is updated to reflect the current landscape of sexual and gender identity. “My parents used the books by TARSHI [Delhi-based non-profit Talking About Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues] to educate me when I was growing up, but most texts are very “good touch, bad touch” focused, which itself is an outdated philosophy. They need to instead be “body-literacy focused.”

Sexual health in India is a bag of paradoxes. Sex Education is one of the most watched shows on Netflix, but classes are skipped in schools. There’s been a wild increase in the sale of sex toys in India in the last year, but we don’t have specialty doctors to consult about safely practising sex. In the world’s most populous country, we blush (if not worse) at having that very dry, biological conversation about procreation.

While institutional support is necessary, sex education is a bedrock of Narendra’s vision, and she has a blueprint for building this school of thought. “The very first thing we need to do is have educational sessions for parents as well,” suggests Narendra. “Show them that we are not corrupting children with these ‘awful’ pieces of information.”

“Parents have grown up with a lot of misconceptions too, and we need to establish good relationships around the idea of talking about sex education between parents and children. It could be done through things like workshops, if we are not comfortable adding these things to textbooks. That can be easily enforced — we could, for example, add sexual health programme to NCC’s (National Cadet Corps) workshops.”

“Secondly, we need to actually include comprehensive sex education [the internationally-accepted instruction method, as prescribed by large organisations like WHO and UNPF] in educational books and then quiz kids on it,” continues Narendra. “We can emphasise the importance of this education by actually including it in exams. Unfortunately, in this country, our priority is marks, so if we do this, we might restructure how parents see this.”

“Finally, we also need to include these workshops or conversations for older people, in colleges and corporates,” says Narendra. “Like we have sexual harassment workshops, we could also have basic sex-ed workshops, basic menstrual sensitisation workshops and gender and sexuality diversity workshops. If we can do that to prevent discrimination, why can’t we do it to establish healthier relationships with our bodies?”