Wake up, Generation P is here: The truth behind Bangalore rape story

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Last week, a woman in Bangalore was allegedly raped by a cable TV operator to fulfill his 25-year-old wife’s porn fantasy. The news may seem disturbing to many.

But shock apart, what the incident really brings to the fore is the disconnect between Generation P, children of liberalisation raised on a staple diet of coke and porn and their parents who often cringe at the prospect of any open discussion on sex. The rift is as deep as the metaphorical divide between India and Bharat.

Today, unless you are an avid porn watcher, it is a safe bet to say that you have no idea what’s out there on the web and how easy it is to watch. All you need to know is just a few key words and the digital search engine genie will fulfill your wish in seconds. Just type ‘porn’ into Google and you get 36, 70, 00,000 results in 0.38 seconds including hard core videos that cater to all conceivable perversions and pleasures.

But does that make all those who watch porn a potential rapist? Human behaviour is far too diverse for such simplistic generalisations. Yet there is a growing body of evidence that watching porn right from a young age can alter children’s attitude towards sex and sexuality. (All the more reason to commission a study on the influence of porn on young minds in India and make sex education a compulsory part of the school curriculum.)

The accused woman in the Bangalore rape case reportedly wanted her husband to satisfy her desire to watch ‘live sex’ by seducing her best friend who stayed next door.

The truth is women too now get turned on by explicit sexual representations, not just romance novels. No where was this more evident than in the overwhelming popularity of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which dealt with coercive sexual fantasies. The international bestseller, which emerged from the fan fiction community, known for its wide variety of non-consensual sex fetishes, was a favourite Metro read for many Indian women during their office commutes. So are porn sites such as Nofauxx, East Van Porn Collective and Cash Pad series that purportedly cater to the needs of their “growing women audience.”

But as the story of the Bangalore woman, who is now cooling her heels behind bars along with her husband on charges of abetting rape and being present when the incident occurred, shows, getting excited by a fantasy is one thing and wanting it in real life is another. Arousal is not consent.

Looking for an excuse to check porn?

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Here is a lofty excuse that can help you save the blushes the next time you are caught surfing smut: I am doing research.

At least that’s what a bunch of porn enthusiasts seems to be telling their family members and friends ever since the launch of ‘Porn Studies’ an academic journal from the venerable 200-year-old British publishing group, Taylor & Francis.

The fledgling journal, which is into its fifth month of existence, publishes articles by researchers, criminologists and gender studies experts’ analyising and grading online pornographic videos on the basis of its content and sexual acts such as vaginal and anal intercourse, fellatio, use of condom and sex toys, depictions of coercion and portrayal of gender among other things. 

So you can read articles with titles like School Girls and Soccer Moms: A content analysis of free ‘teen’ and ‘MILF’ (of course you know what it means, the uninitiated, check Urban Dictionary) online pornography; Positionality and Pornography, Internationalising Porn Studies and Porn and Sex Education and Porn as Sex Education. 

In case if you intend to read the stuff just for titillation (most of it now comes with a subscription fee) then you are likely to be disappointed. (Unless what turns you on is sociological analysis based on Marxian and Foucaultian theory.)

Porn Studies, which attributes its birth to the easy availability of online pornography and the growing interest shown by mainstream media in covering it, has already triggered a global outrage among anti-porn activists with its editors Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, professors at Middlesex and Sunderland University, drawing flak for their “pro-porn” stance.

Interestingly, academic obsession with sex is not something new. Leading American Universities such as Wesleyan, New York, San Francisco State, California-Berkeley, Chapman, Massachusetts-Amherst and Northwestern, have all made their own contribution towards smut, decades ago.

The “Sexuality in Media” studies class at Arizona State University, required students to view X-rated movies such as ‘Deep Throat’, ‘Insatiable’ and ‘Dirty Debutantes’ as a part of their academic work, which culminated with a field trip to the nearest adult stores and campus visits by porn stars. A journal in Porn Studies is only a logical extension of this trend.

Under attack, the editors of the journal have sought to defend their taboo busting venture as a “labour of love” and as a “scholarly” enterprise whose time has arrived. Perhaps, what really makes so many people uncomfortable about Porn Studies could be how it also spits at the delusions and hypocrisy of a polite society.