The hypocrisy of Indian masculinity is alive and well reaffirming that the majority still feel that sexual crimes are caused due to women’s revealing clothes states a new national survey.

Nearly 60 per cent men in the survey say they fantasize about women in revealing clothes, yet 36 per cent blame revealing clothes for the increasing cases of rape, the survey by the India Today group said.

The results of the survey were released just as Time magazine listed "India's Rape Epidemic", about the nationwide uproar over a number of rape incidents, especially following a shocking gang rape in Delhi, as one of the top world news story of 2013.

Mass protests at the time over the shocking gang rape of a woman in a bus in Delhi at the end of 2012, the influential US news magazine noted "demanded greater protection for women and swift justice.

"The trial and sentencing of the culprits-four were given the death penalty-of the six suspects lasted through September," it recalled.

"Subsequent incidents, including the rape of another 23-year-old girl in Mumbai, also drew widespread attention nationally and abroad, and the uproar has shone a necessary spotlight on India's notoriously patriarchal society."

But little has changed despite the outcries that shook the South Asian nation this year.

Of the 1,999 surveyed by India Today across 19 cities, a staggering 36.3% feel that a woman’s revealing clothes are to blame for rape.  Only 4.6% felt that male chauvinism was to blame for rape. According to the survey the reasons for rape were:

36.3% – revealing clothes

33.3% – perverted mind

21.8% – lack of stringent laws

4.6% – male chauvinism

2.2% – women education

Marital rape too didn’t seem wrong to the respondents with a staggering 79.3% men claiming it was their right to have sex with their wives. Of them, 48.1% admitted to insisting on intercourse irrespective of their wives’ mood and 13% claimed they did this quite often.

India is also a no land for pre-marital sex

Around 74.3% women expected the men to be married to be virgins, while 77.4% men expect their wives to have ‘saved themselves’ for marriage.  76.1% men claimed that they would never marry a woman who had premarital sex, while 44.8% of the total respondents claimed that ‘premarital sex’ was ‘wrong’. 

The survey also brings into question the common perception that education is the panacea for all of India's ills, with results showing that the belief that revealing clothes invited rape was stronger among people who had completed higher levels of formal education. Around 45 per cent of people with post-graduate degrees in professional fields were found to hold this opinion, as opposed to 35 per cent among Class XII pass-outs.

Paired with findings suggesting a more adventurous attitude to sex - 28 per cent of the female respondents admitted to masturbating as compared to 9 per cent in 2003, when the first India Today sex survey was conducted - the survey puts the verdict clearly on the wall. Indians have a long way to go before women are allowed a say over their bodies and sex shorn of the stigma.

Aroon Pune, India Today Editor-in-Chief wrote; 

“ Undoubtedly, in recent times, the place of sex in our social and cultural landscape has changed dramatically. It has become more pervasive. Bollywood is a fair reflection of our changing sexual mores. For example, Bollywood's leading lady Kareena Kapoor now gyrates to the song 'Tooh' and an entire family dances to it at a wedding, replicating her steps. Grand Masti, a film brimming with sexual innuendos, makes millions at the box office. Kissing on screen no longer creates a flutter. Actor Hrithik Roshan goes to a comedy show to promote his film and the women in the audience clamour for his shirtless body. Sexually explicit lyrics make a Punjabi rapper a national sensation.

But even in the middle of this sexual revolution, some things never change-principal among them the hypocrisy of Indian masculinity.”