The history of the print media”s engagement with sexuality is a topic of enormous complexity. Depictions of sexuality in the periodical press are shaped by cultural attitudes and beliefs, representational and reporting practices, political economies, and audiences across time and space. The print media have been richly social since their inception, and all but the most rigorously controlled media systems have covered topics of a sexual nature. Sexuality has been represented as an object of social regulation, a topic of prurient interest, a problem to be solved, regulated, or eradicated, a form of commerce, and even a patriotic or religious duty. The press has played a major role in the modern project of demarcating normal sex and sexual subjects from deviant practices and identities. It has fomented moral panics around sexuality and helped liberalize sexual norms, sometimes simultaneously. The commercial, advertising-driven press developed in tandem with the sexual content it contained, and has long been a vehicle for racialized narratives of rape, imperiled femininity, and vice, adultery, and divorce. Through advertisements, classifieds, and specialized content in “obscene” journals, print media have, in some contexts, advertised sexual services and even brought people together for various types of sex.

Building on the scholarship that traces how changing age of consent laws did not so much protect girls as define the boundaries and norms of girlhood, this chapter shifts the focus to the boy child – a figure who was often evoked during discussions of child marriage and the age of consent in India. This chapter uses the boy child as a heuristic device to study a cluster of Hindu patriarchal anxieties that congealed in a discourse of boy protection and compares Har Bilas Sarda’s Hindu Child Marriage Bill with other bills concerned with the ages of marriage and consent. It showcases how adjustments to the ages of consent and marriage also affected the boundaries of boyhood. This chapter shows how patriarchal considerations were articulated along the axes of age as well as sex and gender; it traces the Hindu patriarchal considerations that underwrote the Child Marriage Restraint Act; and finally, it analyzes the seemingly peculiar logic of “boy protection” as discussed by Hindu reformers to reflect on peculiarities of the liberal sex/age system that have become invisible to us.