At least, according to our self-appointed moral police.

It sucks to be a sexually liberal person in this country – whatever the gender. (And there are three of those, lest you forget). And by sexually liberal we don’t necessarily mean the ability and/or desire to fuck anything with a pulse. No. What we mean is the acute awareness of your own sexuality that some of us western-thinking traitors seem to possess and our capacity to be, God forbid, comfortable with it.

Now this might not be true to some of the posh-fag Colombo 7 types reading this (no offence), but to the rest of us, being open about our views on human reproduction (the most natural thing in the world) somehow constitutes a crime beyond redemption. Because what happens behind closed doors should stay the fuck behind said closed doors, right?

Wrong!

That’s not remotely why it’s a cardinal sin to even talk about sex. No, sir. It’s a sin because it goes against what a bigoted, close-minded few would have you believe are the Sinhala-Buddhist values this nation was founded upon.

Ladies and gentlemen, bullshit never stunk this bad. The truth is that an overwhelming majority of these so called Sinhala-Buddhist “values” are actually imports from Victorian England. Before the Brits came here, Lankans were getting it on like nobody’s business. The women were practically topless (although, not for sexual reasons, admittedly) and the dudes were well known for not being able to keep it in their pants amude. In the Kandyan Kingdom, wife-swapping, a family of brothers sharing one wife (එක ගෙයි කෑම), and having multiple-partners (බහු පුරුෂ/බහු භාර්යා) were the order of the day. THAT’s how horny our ancestors were. And they didn’t give a damn who thought what.

How did we go from THAT to “OMG. Sex is so evul!”? Where did we go wrong?

Sure, sure, people are still sticking things in vaginas everywhere, but the topic of sex has become so taboo that even something as absolutely essential as sex-education is frowned upon, if not actively discouraged. A divorced woman who finds herself a boyfriend will forever be labeled a slut. A man who frequents brothels will never be accepted by “civilised” society. Porn is literally a crime. In movies and television, for instance, violence of all kinds is shown in complete abundance, all the time, but the minute a sex scene is even suggested, censorship raises its ugly head like an erection running on Viagra.

What happened? How do we end this? Should we, even?