A Post on Porn

Indian men are a frustrated lot. I have spent a lot of time trying to decipher how this diagnosis of a minority of perverts became a truism for the majority. It's not only because of our conservative culture. Society in Iran is much more conservative. Yet, you never hear of Iranian men spoken of in the  same note. Psychoanalysts like Sudhir Kakar have theories of upper caste Brahmins and British rulers colluding to ensure sexual repression of the masses in the Victorian days of the Raj. Such theories, sound both far fetched and irrelevant to the bigger picture. There are a variety of factors at play here. I've made an attempt to explore, if not explain, one such latent reason. I have done my best to avoid double entendres and have kept "quoted" words to a minimum. Try to read this with a straight face. No snickering.

We, (Indian) boys have a sad childhood. Numbers, multiplication tables, mental maths and gulli cricket are our only companions as we grow up ill-equipped to deal with the emotional and social demands of the adult world. Interaction with the fairer sex is a big-big problem. It is never ever "normal" to have a female friend. It is either ridiculously exalted ("Meri ladkiyon se kaafi dosti hai") or is a subject of leg pulling comments ("Kaun thi wo ladki ?")

The female is an eternal enigma to the desi boy. This is evident from the fact that "bandiya/ bandiyo/ ladkiya/ ladkiyon" make up about half of his lexicon. The rest of which is dominated by cusswords, also generously sprinkled with references to female anatomy. It is an inevitable result of being brought up in an environment where girl-boy interactions are strictly regulated under watchful parental eyes. As in other cases in the national economy where various forms of regulation have caused smuggling and duty-evasion to proliferate, this regulation has also led boys to seek an alternate avenue to the female world.

Bless the internet. The dot com decade triggered a massive explosion of an audio-visual, cinematic art form that focuses entirely on both whetting and satisfying this curiosity at the same time. Internet porn dawned with a promise to provide us this information in graphic detail at the click of a button, a set of earphones, both parents asleep and the door to the room tightly shut. We boys could finally be properly educated. And oh my, did we learn!

Lesson 1: The female is always submissive 

Isn't it obvious? Why then would she allow that grotesquely tattooed, heavyset man to take her so violently? It's not because the two are in love (that would be a bummer) and she obviously seems to enjoy it.

Lesson 2: The bigger, the better

The fashion industry celebrates size zeroes and models with wafer-thin cross sections. Not the porn industry. It has gone out of its way to promote a healthy body image (I am especially thankful to the Mallu version for playing the Good Samaritan). For the dudes this works the other way round, hitting them where it hurts the most. Brought up on the metric system, the guys get a cruel introduction to inches as a unit of measurement. 

Lesson 3:  Girls are loose, Firang girls more so

We can probably attribute the demand in the Bollywood audience for Eastern European backup dancers to porn and Yana Gupta (who's from the Czech Republic). "With hair as black as ebony, and skin as white as snow" goes the norm. God forbid if it's the other way round. 

Also, blondes are preferred. 

Lesson 4: In the west, 'it' happens in the most banal of situations. Sadly not here

Porn productions often have a plot line and a setting that involve the most commonplace of backdrops, where somehow the “action” erupts spontaneously. 

In fact, Lesson-4 remains the no.1 reason for Indian males opting to study abroad. Forget the lack of good colleges here, it is the slim chance that the pabulum of college life might be intercepted by a banal situation similar to the one described above has motivated them to ace SAT, GRE and GMAT year after year.

As the above contorted lessons that we picked up have made it clear, the internet has served as an incredibly poor substitute to common sense.

The advent of Internet porn has changed how the young male population has traditionally looked at sex (no pun intended) and sexuality. This skewed change of views coupled with ossified attitudes towards the subject has led to a situation where libido is celebrated while sexual freedom is denied. The intrinsic voyeurism of a sexually repressed society is being exploited to sell everything from deodorant and soaps to underwear and even toothpaste. The result is an increase in bottled lecherousness which inadvertently reveals itself in ways ranging from eyeballing to sexual harassment. 

Porn isn't going anywhere. I only wish there was a more dignified outlet to our 'frustrations'.