Book Review: Cyber Sexy

Book: Cyber Sexy 
Author: Richa Kaul Padte
Publisher: India Penguin
Pages: 264 
Price: Rs 599

It was roughly two years ago that journalist and writer Richa Kaul Padte started research on her book Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography, a nuanced investigation into what it means to seek pleasure online. With an engrossing narrative, Kaul-Padte's book begins with a historical breakdown of what we know today as pornography. Beginning with her first encounter with porn, a list of 'sexy things' in pop culture that may or may not be pornography ("That hand in Titanic. You know the one I'm talking about: foggy glass, steamy Leo, a lingering handprint," Kaul-Padte writes in the first chapter titled, Porn 101: What Counts), following which she takes on bigger issues like consent.
Having written about gender and sexuality for a while now, Kaul-Padte was armed with some solid knowledge about the subject. Even so, she invested more time to gather more grassroot information. "I was constantly reading everything I could find about porn, sex, representation, and technology," the 30-year-old begins. At the same time, Kaul-Padte was also looking for personal accounts. "I was interviewing people across India about their experiences with the 'sexy' Internet. I also ran a couple of surveys online – one looking at how South Asians learned about sex, and one about desi women's interactions with porn," she says.

It was during these interactions that she came across several unique stories – some that even made for personal discoveries. "It was the specifics that caught me unawares! I didn't know what it was like specifically for a blind man in his 40s. Or a 15-year-old lesbian girl living in the UAE. Or a boy who knew he desired kinky sex, but always thought he was diseased – until 15 years later, when he went online and found others like him. Each story is always a brand new discovery, and that's what made researching this book so much fun," she chirps.

But what makes women and sex (or porn) a scandalous combination? Kaul-Padte explains, "Indian society is not very comfortable with sexually independent women, because our independence is viewed as a threat to male-dominated power structures. Whether it's family, religion or patriarchy – these structures organise society for the benefit of mostly the heterosexual, cis-gendered and upper caste men. A sexually empowered woman is free – and free women are not going to fall in line."

When dissecting pornography, one question is bound to arise: do men and women consume porn differently? The answer, she says, lies in consent. "Almost all the women I spoke to prioritised consensual porn, but not many men mentioned consent. Because women experience so much violence in their lives, there's an instinct to be wary of something that could suddenly take a non-consensual turn and trigger something painful," she explains.

"Consent is missing from the porn debate. What we hear are words like 'objectification', 'protection' and 'morality'. But what we need to hear more of is whether the people who are featured in porn have given their consent. Not only to the sex but to the filming, uploading and sharing of said content," she adds.

In a way, Kaul-Padte believes feminist porn takes care of this, but promoting the importance of consent is the need of the hour. "Stop making porn debates about morality and start making them about consent," she urges.