No son of Bharat Mata is bad himself. ‘Bad company’ is the convenient culprit of choice. All things bad are outside of us — making a perpetrator look like a victim. Externalities explain our vices; our intrinsic qualities give rise to our virtues. This way of absolving the self gains wide public currency as a social ideology. Such societies love scapegoats. The types of scapegoats that are found also express the subterranean ideologies and anxieties we have. When the migrant poor gains currency as a ‘cause’ for rapes, it tells us less about causes of rapes and more about ideology and anxieties of the people with whom this ‘cause’ resonates. Such is the case with pornography as another cause of rape. Rather than implicating the training in gender violence that society and family’s own values and norms faithfully provide on a daily basis, porn has been identified as public enemy. Legislators and the chatterati are deliberating whether all pornography should be banned. Certain women’s rights workers, virulently swadeshi —‘porn is Western evil’ — types and free-speech wallahs debated the issue in various fora. Many asked whether anyone wants their mother to be a porn star? I wonder who wants his/her mother to be brick-kiln worker or a domestic servant working 16 hours a day at slave-wages.

COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

Beyond the obvious impossibility of showing the causality of porn and rape, this debate has uncovered something quite embarrassing — that this debate about desi men going crazy after the porn invasion of Mother India was carried on without much empirical work on brown folk themselves. A cocktail of moral righteousness, so-called ‘common sense’ and homemade theories of human psychology dominates the porn/rape discourse in the subcontinent. The insistence on causality reflects very poorly on their level of understanding.

Research on the sexual lives and sexual functioning of the billion-plus brown people is scanty beyond textual and media analyses. Where are the physiological and behaviour-analysis studies on sex and sexual enjoyment of brown people? Numerous journals on sex research exist worldwide. Why are studies from the subcontinent so rare, when research output from here has grown in other fields? This gap reminds me of illustrations of the human body in the subcontinent’s biology texts, where external genitalia are voided.

What can research inform us? Lets me take a rare homegrown study. A 2011 paper by Kalra, Subramanyam and Pinto studied sexual behaviours of a cohort of Mumbaikars and reported that 57 per cent of those above 60 were sexually active. Geriatric sexuality, thankfully, goes beyond Hugh Hefner. How does that sit with the bundling of grand-children with grand-parents at night, with a tacit assumption that old folks are ‘past’ sex? In 2012, Barrett-Connor’s research group at the University of California at San Diego reported in the American Journal of Medicine that sexual satisfaction increases with age.

Where is the corresponding study about our brown mothers and grandmothers? I have been the subject in numerous experiments at Harvard and New York University, where I was shown sexually arousing pictures on screen. Such work seeks to understand emotion-laden visual information processing by the brain. Where are such studies from the psychology departments in India?

Without research and knowledge about the full expanse of the human experience, how shall we understand the human condition? Sexuality being an integral part of that experience. Sex in brown people has to be studied for its own value, beyond mere disease, adolescence, safety, and reproduction.

Finally, prurience is as old as life itself. Scratch your own itch. Do not scratch other people’s itches unless they ask you to. Let us not mix up the two. 

The writer is a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. @gargac.