Adult Indian entertainment thrives on voyeurism and sexual violence

Over the last few weeks a pseudo debate has been brewing in the mainstream Indian media: whether or not porn should be banned. I find the debate pseudo because in my humble opinion a society cannot ban something that doesn’t exist or something that is already dealt with as if it were banned. To me the debate is akin to demanding that cocaine and heroin should be banned. 

People for the motion (anti-porn) allege that among other things porn creates a society in which crimes against women are either encouraged or not taken seriously enough. People against the motion (regular or weekend tharkis) hold the opposite view and claim that porn is perhaps the best thing a society like ours can offer its sexually desperate masses who have no other means of discovering sexuality.

To me the important issue is not the debate on porn and how its settlement will influence our future generations but what passes for porn in India today and what that says about the state of our minds and sexuality.

I think it is fair to judge a nation and its moral values based on the kind of porn its members watch. Western porn is essentially an industry with actors, producers and directors who, in their own way, are creating erotic art.

I do not know how many of our innocent readers are aware that Indians all over the world have endorsed a class of pornography that is not known elsewhere in the world. For want of a better word most international porn search engines call it Indian porn. It essentially comprises MMS videos shot on the sly (or shot with consent and later uploaded without consent) and slow motion rape scenes compiled from Hindi and south Indian films (connoisseurs call them zabardasti videos).

Technically, this brand of pornography cannot be termed porn since there is hardly any nudity involved, yet almost all the major porn search engines and websites carry such content and attract millions of hits every month, mostly from Indians.

It is important here to make a distinction between the western porn accessed by a largely urbane populace and this desi brand of sexual imagery consumed and created in the small towns and villages. When this distinction is made one realizes how a majority of Indians wish to see their fantasies played out on a screen.

Another interesting feature of Indian porn is the north-south divide. Most of the MMS porn is essentially North Indian while the rest is South Indian B or C grade cinema. It is important to note that C grade South Indian movies are never sold as porn as such but get the porn premium once they are dissected and the sex scenes are isolated as small clips and uploaded on a Indian porn website.

Voyeurism and sexual violence directed at women are the chief ingredients of our desi brand of porn. In my years of exploring the world of porn I have never come across any other nation as obsessed with watching other people’s hidden sexual videos as much as Indians. The most prized videos after the zabardasti category are the suhagraat videos and the MMS of girls shot by their boyfriends. As far as Indians go Sunny Leone and Leah Jay (a British porn actress of Indian origin) are small time celebrities compared to the unknown housewives and young girls who easily garner hundreds of thousands of hits in a couple of hours of their video being uploaded. What does this say about us? How is this going to change even if a ban on regular porn is put in place?

The author is a writer.