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'.