How Fifty Shades lied to you about female sexuality

By Sangeeth Sebastian

If you are one among the 100 million readers who contributed to the global success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, then you deserve an apology from the author.

James, it seems, was misleading readers with her depiction of Anastasia Steele, the heroine of her sadomasochist trilogy. The deception pertains to the way Steele’s arousal mechanism is portrayed in the book.

In one of the opening scenes on spanking, Steele moves away from her billionaire tormentor Christian Grey, screaming in pain, without showing any visible liking for what she is going through. Yet, she blindly believes Grey when he tells her that she likes sadomasochism by indicating the wetness of her vagina. This co-relation it emerges is wrong. Or in other words “being wet” for a majority of women, most of the time, is an automatic reflex of their body and has nothing to do with pleasure or desire to have sex, says author Emily Nagoski in her best-selling book Come As You Are (Speaking Tiger).

“Certainly there are women who are turned on by being consensually debased, but the whole plot (of the novel) pivots on the fact that Ana isn’t one of them,” writes Nagoski, mining decades of research and her own experience as a sex educator.

“There is not one word about her liking the spanking as it is happening,” she writes. Then why does she believe Grey? This, says Nagoski, happens because James like romance novelists before her, was guilty of interpreting female libido from a male point of view, mistakenly equating wetness with arousal, just like the way erections are linked to desire for sex in men. There is a scientific name for this desire discrepancy in women:arousal non-concordance.

While the discrepancy is relatively less in men, as a vast majority of them, about 75 per cent, experience an instantaneous desire for sex, the moment they see a hot looking woman, it is high in women with only 15 per cent experiencing what is known as “spontaneous desire.”

This occurs because, in women, the final call on whether to have sex or not is taken by the brain. And the decision is based on a host of factors including environment, surroundings and how comfortable she is at that particular moment. So how do you know if a woman is actually interested in sex? Listen to what she says, writes Nagoski.

This explains why the newly launched “female Viagra” flibanserin focuses on targeting the female brain, the most complex region of the human body, instead of simply increasing blood flow to the genitals, which often does the trick in men.

Just when you thought the entire world was a constant turn-on for men, Nagoski lets in on this little dark secret that even a good number of men don’t have the desire to have sex each time they experience an erection. Not convinced? Think about all those inconvenient early “morning wood” if you are a man.

She then directs her attack on scientific fraternity for propagating the fallacy that sexuality is a “drive” like hunger that pushes people to do things in desperation for survival.  “Nobody has ever died because of not being able to get laid,” she writes. Equating sex with hunger only feeds a man’s predatory instincts to look upon women as animals to be hunted for food, she says.

Yet, for all her feminist fervour in liberating female sexuality from a phallocentric world, what she conveniently overlooks apart from a brief reference to culture, is the extent to which both religion and culture have played a role in suppressing any scientific enquiry on sex for ages. Even now, living in a hypersexualised age, where everything you want to know about sex is available at the click of a mouse, the fact that a book on the subject made it to the New York Times bestseller list is in itself a testimony to how little we actually know about it.

Reading Come As You Are, a sexual self-help for women, if you are a man, like this writer, might feel like trying something as remote to your gender identity as a sanitary napkin, nonetheless you will be richer for the experience.

The review was published in Mail Today on November 8

Five Hours in Amsterdam

By Sangeeth Sebastian

There is a power blackout in Amsterdam, “major” by local standards, I am told,
 as I deboard at the Amsterdam Central Railway Station. Coming from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, I am not entirely surprised, I have seen worse. 

Outside, the weather is hot and humid. I get a feeling that I am back in India already. To be hit by a sense of déjà vu is the last thing you want when you are out to explore a new city and that too in a limited time. My return ticket from the station is at 6 p.m. I check my watch. I have around five hours to know the city.

                               

      

1. 30 p.m.

Erotic Outage

I am in the Red Light District. The place is just 10 minutes walk from the station. That’s one good thing about Amsterdam. Being a small city, most of the touristy places- the arched bridges, the watery passageways, crooked canal houses- are all within your walking range.

The district located in the south is the oldest part of Amsterdam, built around 1385. The place confirms everything you have heard and read aboutAmsterdam. The canals and alleys in the district are fringed on either side with peep shows, live sex theatres, sex souvenir shops, prostitution windows and legal marijuana cafes.

It’s a hedonist’s dream. Groups of men, women and couples, constantly move along the canals and in and out of the alleys.

I wander aimlessly soaking in the visual spectacle before narrowing down on a double storied building overlooking the canal called the Red Light Secrets. It is a museum that claims to give a historical overview of the district “through the eyes of a prostitute.” The entry ticket is 9 Euros (around Rs 665). I step in to pay. It is then that I realise the gravity of the outage that has hit Amsterdam.

Amy, the genial owner of the place, politely declines to issue the ticket saying there is no power to run the film, which is a part of the Museum’s tour for visitors.
“I already lost 40 customers today,” she says wearily. I ask her how bad the electricity problem in Amsterdam is. “In the last two to three years blackouts have become quite frequent,” she says.

How frequent?  She pauses for a while and says, about two to three times a year. You call that frequent? I wonder to myself.

I stroll down the street and reach near a sex souvenir shop located in one of the alleys. The owner of the shop, Mustafa, a second generation Pakistani is standing outside. “It’s dark inside you won’t be able to see anything properly,” he shouts as I am about to enter. “Usually, they (the authorities) tell us in advance about the outage, but today it was unexpected,” says Mustafa expressing his helplessness. Nearby, even the window prostitutes, operating from their stuffy one room enclosure that has space just enough to squeeze in a bed and a side table, are struggling to attract clients due to blackout. Some are even willing to offer discounts. The desperation is understandable, given the fact that a prostitute has to pay 150 Euros (Rs 11,000) a day (yes you heard it right) as rent for her enclosure. The blackout has temporarily brought the sex-business in the district to a standstill.

3.30 p.m.

Hunger Pangs

All the walking has made me hungry. There are so many different speciality restaurants and street food corners to choose from in the district. I am clueless where to go. Google recommends ‘The Old Sailor.’ The pub is located right in the middle of the district, overlooking the canal. It is decorated with a lot of stuff used in a ship. It has also received some rave reviews on TripAdvisor. I settle for an Argentinean steak house instead. It didn’t take me long to realise that I made a mistake. The house speciality, a mixed grill platter, an assortment of various meats, is bland and rubbery. It also takes a long time to arrive.

4.15 p.m.

Back to the Museum

The neon lights have finally flickered back to life along the canal in the Red Light District. The sight of the red lights reflecting on the canal looks best when it is dark, informs my travel guide book. I make a beeline for Amy’s Red Light Secrets. The tour begins with a short film that offers a behind the scene peek into the functioning of the district through the tales of people who live and work there. Around 25,000 people, including 900 prostitutes, most of them from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, work in an area spread across half a square mile.

Though legalised and taxable like any other profession since 2000, prostitution it emerges is still a source of conflict in Amsterdam, with authorities trying to reduce the number of window prostitutes in the name of curbing crime every now and then. The occasional crackdowns, however, has done little to dampen the enthusiasm of their clients who in their excitement for a quickie often leaves behind personal belongings such wallets, sunglasses, cell phones and even false teeth never to claim them back. All these are now a part of the ‘Lost and Found’ category of Amy’s Museum.

5 p.m.

Enter the Gandhi

On the way back to the station, I discover Gandhi, an Indian restaurant. The name it seems is a just a ploy to cash in on the recall value of a global figure. There is nothing Gandhian about the menu. The restaurant specialises in non-vegeterian tandoori and curry dishes. It also serves vegetarian dishes. The restaurant is patronised mostly by foreigners and visiting Indians who miss North Indian food. I meet the restaurant owner Rajinder Singh who hails from Jalandhar in Punjab. His is a kind of rags-to-riches story.  A commerce graduate, Singh claims to have started out as cleaner at a restaurant in Amsterdam after arriving on a six months tourist visa in 1987. Though he has relatives in Jalandhar, he rarely visits them these days. I ask him if he miss India. “Initially yes, but not anymore,” he says, adding “this is the closest place to heaven on earth.”

IF YOU GO

Hire a bicycle and act like a local. It is perhaps the best way to explore Amsterdam, provided you have time. Nearly 70 per cent of all the journeys in the city are made by bike.

A note of caution: clicking pictures is prohibited in certain parts of the Red Light District, especially inside the alleys, where prostitution happens. So if you are in doubt, please ask or else your camera might end up in the canal.

The article was originally published in India Today Group’s Mail Today newspaper on August 30

Why porn blockers must read Kamasutra

By Sangeeth Sebastian

How would Vatsayana have reacted to modern India’s porn blockers? In all probability with a sagely smirk on his face that says: grow up.

Well…this is an educated guess. But I have every reason to believe so, given the ancient Indian ascetic’s track record for tolerance. While composing Kamasurtra’s section on “unusual sex acts,” a chapter that details almost all conceivable forms of modern-day pornographic acts, Vatsayana dismisses it as worthless, but neverthless includes it saying that there are all sorts of people in this world with different characters and inclinations.

Mining such surprisingly progressive views from a third century book, often regarded as a matter of national shame rather than pride, is one of the focus areas of American academic Wendy Doniger’s new book, The Mare’s Trap: Nature and Culture in the Kamasutra.

In envisioning a world of total sexual and social freedom and making it accessible to all those who have money, irrespective of caste or class, Vatsayana was more of a rebel in the league of the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, than his morally uptight and patriarchal ancestors Manu and Kautilya, the authors of Dharmashastra and Arthashastra, respectively.

In fact through Kamasutra, Vatsayana’s attempt is to rescue erotic pleasure from its sole biological purpose of reproduction as decreed by Manu, the mythological Indian Adam, who behaves more like a Pope when it comes to sex.

Vatsayana’s advocacy of women’s pleasure and freedom, suggesting those who are sexually unhappy in a relationship to walk out, would have appalled Manu who wanted a “virtuous wife” to constantly serve her husband like a god.

Perhaps, had it not been for Richard Burton’s flawed 19th century translation of Kamasutra, which according to Doniger, remains popular and precious in Europe and America like Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, Vatsayana could have been lucky enough to be named after a female anatomy. Because Vatsayana, Doniger insists, knew about G-Spot, the female pleasure point named after the 20th century German gynaecologist Ernst Graefenberg, and blames Burton’s faulty translation for keeping it a secret from the Western world. A V-Spot would have been a befitting tribute to a man who believed that women have a far higher libido than men.

Vatsayana’s interest in women, however, goes beyond erogenous zones. In fact, he takes female promiscuity for granted and asks men to be alert to find out if women are attracted to them by scanning for flirt signals and paying close attention to involuntary gestures and facial expressions and if that doesn’t work, by resorting to cunning psychological approaches like a pickup artist (Neil Strauss take note) to seduce those who are immune to seduction. He also lists a number of pick-up points such as temples, weddings and, rather strangely, in the vicinity of a house on fire, to hook-up women.

If the India portrayed in Kamasutra was real, then when did it get so conservative? Doniger rejects as “jaded” V.S. Naipul’s view that Mughal invasion ravaged and destroyed this liberal world. She is right. Though it may seem hard to believe now, Islam, unlike Christianity, is not an anti-sex religion. In fact Islam’s traditional attitude towards sex, elevating it to the sacred, may even appear similar to the ancient Indian philosophy.

 “The exercise of sexuality was a prayer, a gift of oneself…To rediscover the meaning of sexuality is to rediscover the meaning of God,” writes Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, a Tunisan sociologist best known for his 1975 work Sexuality in Islam. Doniger also advises not to excessively blame the Victorian Britishers for the current prudery as it ignores the conservative anti-erotic stream that was always powerful in Hindu society. But here, she is only partially right. Even while acknowledging this old tension between the erotic and anti-erotic strains within Hinduism, never has it taken the form of one path telling the other path that it has no right to exist, like the way it did recently, when the government decided to ban porn.

The blame for this modern scorn for sexuality among both Hindus and Muslims, to a great extent, lies with the Christian colonial powers. Ironically, by resorting to extreme measures in the name of corrupting Western influences we are actually aping our colonial masters more than our tolerant ancestors.

A shorter version of this review was originally published in India Today Group’s Mail Today newspaper dated August 9

Wicked on the Web

                                 

By Sangeeth Sebastian

A few months ago, the corporate office of a Mumbai-based adult online shopping company, received a strange request from a female customer in Delhi: Hundred and twenty tubes of chocolate flavoured edible body paints. The caller wanted to give it as return gift to young couples at a party which she and her husband was throwing. Unprepared for such a huge order for any single flavour, the company appeased her by offering an assortment of different flavours.

The concern of a worried customer from Gujarat, who placed a similar order, this time for personal use, was regarding the nature of its contents. The buyer wanted to make sure that the ingredients of the edible body paint would not offend his religious dietary sensibilities.

A man from Kolakata who bought a bottle of pheromone spray wanted the customer care staff to confirm if the product would actually make him sexually attractive to women.

We know all this because hidden by anonymity and right to privacy, young Indians who hitherto felt mortified to be seen purchasing a condom or lingerie from a retail store are dropping inhibition and freely expressing their intimate desires to face-less strangers sitting hundreds of miles away.

“We have overestimated the level of shyness among Indian customers,” says Samir Saraiya, Chief Executive, That’s Personal, a Mumbai-based startup and a pioneer in the field, which boasts of 10,000 unique visitors to its site a day. “They (customers) are quite comfortable in calling or writing to us about the kind of products they want and even seek our help in guiding them with the purchases,” says Saraiya.

The company on its part wins customer trust by ensuring that the products are packaged in tamper proof bags and are delivered discreetly at a time and place of the customer’s choice. The anonymity and convenience has emboldened the shoppers to haggle and ask for discounts on condoms and personal lubricants just like any other consumer goods.

                                                   

“We get customers who want an explanation on why the price is what it is. They want the thrill at the lowest price,” says Raj Armani, Chief Operating Officer, IMbesharam, a U.S.-based company that also has offices in Delhi and Mumbai, and claims to have a subscriber base of more than 1.5 lakh and a viewership of 1.5 million on Youtube. “We then explain it to them that the price they pay covers the cost of shipping from the U.S., the duties, taxes and the hassles in delivering the product right to their doorstep,” says Armani. “You can’t get a Lexus in the budget of a Maruti,” he adds.

Yet there is little that can stop a tenacious Indian customer who is out to extract the best deal. A customer who bought a bottle of personal lubricant worth Rs 500 from That’s Personal wanted to know how many times he can use the product. (Remember the famous Maruti advertising tag line Kitna deti hai.)

“The more the number of usage, the better he feels in buying it,” says Saraiya. Buyers are also vocal and assertive. “We once had to pacify a man who purchased a woman’s inner wear called Baby Doll after he insisted that we also send him the doll along with the undergarment,” says Saraiya.

Both Saraiya and Armani claim that Fifty Shades of Grey collection is the latest flavour of the season. (A visit to their sites is like staring at a restaurant menu that offers an assortment of exotic Italian, French and Spanish cuisines.) The collection which features all the erotic items from E.L. Jame’s book including bondage kit, metal handcuffs, anal beads and spanking paddle and are a huge hit among buyers according to the duo, despite a ban on its movie adaptation in India.

                                               

“We get 15 orders a day for the products and have already done business worth more than Rs 50 lakh so far,” says Saraiya.

Though a getting a reliable estimate on the total worth of the Indian adult product market is tricky, as most of the calculations are without the support of actual data, Aramni believes that by adding the total spending population, frequency and cost of the product, the figure can come up to anywhere between 
Rs 1,200 to 1,500 crores.

But consumer power is hardly an insurance against meddling laws that can play spoilsport in bedroom pleasures in India. With ambiguous obscenity laws companies are forced to tread on a thin line while peddling their stuff. The recent criminal complaint against online major Snapdeal for allegedly selling obscene products is a case in point. “There is no objective parameter on what constitutes as obscene. It is a grey area. So we refrain from selling vibrators that resemble a male organ or products that resemble any other body part,” says Lekhesh Dholakia, Solictor, That’s Personal. Both Snapdeal and Flipkart, another new entrant in the adult wellness market, refused to participate in the story.

                              

Yet, there is no let up in demand for more explicit products such as inflatable sex dolls and dildos from the customers. “The buyers have appetite for newer, better and more unique products and our chefs are only happy to create whatever they want,” says Armani “but at times we have to tell them that in India you are not allowed to have all the fun.”

The article was originally published in India Today Group's Mail Today newspaper on April 26

DELHI’S DIRTY SECRETS

Customers from Delhi are the top buyers of fun stuff including edible body 
paints, massage oils and adult games

Delhi is also high into gifting sexual products for friends and couples with 
29 per cent of the total order coming from the Capital

Delhi men top the chart when it comes to buying condoms and personal 
water-based lubricants

A good 33 per cent of orders for women’s lingerie from Delhi are made by men

Delhi women make the third highest purchase of female products after 
Mumbai and Bengaluru

WHAT REST OF INDIA DESIRES

Hyderabad men love to get their hands on handcuffs

Chennai loves its edible body paints

Bengaluru women are the biggest buyers of massage oils

Gujarati’s invest massively in adult games

Men’s innerwear is the hot favourite in West Bengal

Kerala buys more of latex free condoms

Source: That’s Personal

INTERVIEW 

JAYASHRI BENJAMIN

HR Head

That’s Personal

                      

What motivated you to join That’s Personal?

I have been working in the shipping and IT industry for 14 years prior to this assignment. Then, two years ago, I met the founder of That’s Personal (Samir) through a common business associate and liked his vision. The opportunity for growth in the adult products category through e-commerce was large and I was ready to bet on it.

Did you face any resistance from your family when you decided to work for 
the company?

I take my own decision on work related issues. I did discuss with my husband who too believed the opportunity had good potential for growth. To my extended family, I tell them that I am in the e-commerce business selling personal products.

Are you worried about how other people would view your job?

Neither my company nor I, are doing anything illegal or unethical, so I am not really bothered about what other people think. There is a clear cut demand for these products as well as a huge requirement for privacy.

Do you believe there is a need for greater openness on sex considering the huge demand your products are getting from across the country?

Yes. Human beings are the same irrespective of geography. Sure, European and American culture is far more open than Indian culture, but we are catching up fast.

As the HR head of an adult company how easy or difficult it is for you to attract fresh talent?

We receive 20 resumes a day for various positions that we have listed on our career pages. We have candidates applying from all over India. I am pleasantly surprised at how comfortable people and their families are today about this business irrespective of their religion and socio-economic background. One aspect that clearly drives candidates while applying for a job with us is the opportunity for long-term career growth. We mostly hire MBA graduates who have three to five years of relevant experience. Our male to female ratio in the office is 60:40 with the average age being 29 years.

In future if you shift your job into a mainstream organisation will you mention your experience of working in an adult company on your CV?

Yes, I will. I am proud of my work experience and I do not want to hide what I have learnt. Believe me, it like working in any other start-up environment.

The article was originally published in India Today Group's Mail Today newspaper on April 26

No fucking Joke! India is U.S., 51 years behind

                                                  

By Sangeeth Sebastian

A thriving democracy and a nuclear deal (which many still struggle to figure out what it actually means) are probably not the only things that connect India and the U.S. The country perhaps is also on the cusp of an anti-authoritarian and taboo-busting cultural wave that characterised American society in the early 1960s known as the counterculture era.

The recent conservative outrage over comedy collective AIB’s (All India Backchod, a portmanteau name which loosely translates as senseless fucker) stage show in Mumbai is eerily similar to the kind of hostile backlash some of America’s avant-garde stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin faced in the sixties for daring the society’s uptight attitude towards sex and language. Regarded as the pioneers of “insult comedy” a genre which the comedians of AIB too specialises in, both Bruce and his disciple Carlin, had frequent run-ins with the law due to their potty-mouthed satire and gestures that took aim at American society’s hypocrisy and hang-ups about sex, morality and religion.

                                                  

In fact, Bruce was busted for his private routines so frequently that he came to be known as the “arrest-prone” comedian. All his arrests were on charges of using obscene words and indecent material during his shows.

Bruce was first arrested for saying “cocksucker” on stage (Ranveer Singh beware) at a Jazz workshop in San Francisco in the early sixties, though subsequently acquitted, he ran into trouble again a number of times, finally receiving a conviction for his word crimes in New York in 1964.

                                                 

                                   

Like the right-wing Brahman Ekta Sanstha which took offence at the AIB show and lodged an official complaint against the entire performers including Bollywood stars Singh, Karan Johar and Arjun Kapoor, the right-wing protest against Bruce & Co in the U.S. was led by the Roman Catholic Church.

In Mumbai too the Catholic groups swung into action with some of its members filing official complaints against the AIB show after finding, rather hypocritically, certain jokes pertaining to molester priests more offensive than the acts of Joseph Jeyapaul, a fugitive Catholic priest, currently cooling his heels in Tihar jail and battling extradition to stand trial in the U.S. for allegedly molesting a child.

The way some of AIB’s performers got blacklisted by restaurants and clubs soon after the controversy was also similar to how some American night clubs stopped booking Bruce for future gigs due to fear of reprisals.

But what sets apart American countercultural icons from their Indian imitators, at least overtly, is their response towards authoritarian and right-wing bullying. Despite mounting legal and financial woes, Bruce remained defiant till his end. He showed the courage to stand by his convictions when the envelope pushed back. Being a comedy collective and living in an interconnected age of social media, it would have been easier for the organisers of AIB to stay defiant and fight for the freedom of expression like the way Bruce did.

The fact that people who liked AIB’s video page outnumbered those who disliked it by ten times to one indicated the kind of popularity the show enjoyed among its supporters. However, by promptly deleting the videos instead of leveraging the phenomenal interest it generated among its eight million-odd viewers, the organisers of AIB has lost a golden opportunity to advance the cause of freedom of expression in the country further.

                                        

In Kerala, women still need permission to compete

                                                 

                                                           

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Kerala takes a lot of pride in its progressive ways. The State’s upper-caste Hindu community, the Nairs, are matrilineal, meaning they bequeath their family home
to women, not men. Even as early as 1920s the State’s erstwhile royal family
of Travancore rewarded women who went to college with an invitation for tea at the palace. The State has one of the highest female literacy rates (92 per cent) in the entire country (only two-thirds of women can read and write in India).

Yet, all this empowerment has failed to bring about any change in the State’s patriarchal mindset which continues to regulate how a woman should conduct herself in public even now. Surprisingly, the proponents of the latest patriarchal drivel are not men, but a women’s magazine called Vanita dubbed as “India’s largest selling publication” for women.

                                                            

‘Photo Queen,’ a competition which the magazine runs for its young women readers insists on written parental permission complete with signatures as a pre-condition to participate in the contest from its adult contestants in the age group of 18 to 25 years. The winner will get her photograph featured, no not on the cover, but as a headshot in one of the opening pages of the magazine along with a brief description of the candidate’s interests and hobbies.
 “It’s a shame that a women’s magazine is spreading such a regressive attitude in this day and age,” says Pravathi Nair who works with an IT firm in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram. “There is nothing wrong in informing your parents about participating in a competition, but asking adult women to get written permission first is like insulting their abilities to take independent decisions,” says Nair. “What if a woman is married? Will she have to get a written permission from her husband? ” asks Nair.

The moral policing mentality of Kerala’s media is nothing new. The recent “Kiss
of Love” protest which swept across the country was sparked by a State-based television channel after it aired what it claimed as exclusive footage of “immoral activity” (read dating) at a café in Kozhikode. The café was subsequently vandalised by right-wing Hindu groups.

Sahitya Akademi award winning writer Paul Zacharia blames this mentality on the “wrong religious doctrines and educational system” which the state has been following for ages. “It is the (religious) doctrines of Christians and Muslims that paved the way for moral policing culture in the State. Now, the Hindus, whose doctrines were more liberal, too have started sharing the ideas of Christians and Muslims,” he says.

By insisting on a written permission along with a participant’s bio-data as a mandatory criterion for the photo competition, the magazine ensures that its women contestants confirm to the State’s regressive patriarchal norms.

It may be well within the right of a magazine to decide how and on what basis it should allow women participants to take part in a competition which it conducts, but for a publication that advertises itself as a “friend and a guide” to women, the guidance Vanita offers to its readers is hardly a progressive one.

Women who like porn

                                                  

By Sangeeth Sebastian

It’s hard to imagine a subject with fewer intellectual or literary pretensions than porn. So why would women with such highbrow pedigree like Celin Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young, all of them professors at the University of California, U.S., take on something quiet so… unseemly?

The answer they offer through The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press), jointly edited with Tristan Taormino, a feminist porn producer, is this: the sensational success of EL James’s mega-selling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey (which will make its Hollywood debut next month) shows there is great demand among women for explicit sexual representations.

The book is meant as tribute to women who create and perform in porn but whose XXX fantasies are supposedly left out from the chauvinistic world of mainstream porn. The book contains personal accounts of reigning and yesteryear porn stars who have knowingly entered the industry to make women like them more visible (especially lesbians and people with disabilities) only to lament about its misogynistic and sexist ways and crave for an alternative narrative (not necessarily softer porn as women too like dirty stuff) that caters sensitively to the needs and desires of horny women.

Yes, it is a tricky attempt to segregate porn as something that can be liberating and empowering for women, if made the right way but downright degrading, if the recommended rules of production are ignored.

So what are the rules? (1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction etc, of the work (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure and or (3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn (or in other words devoid of the de rigueur money shot where a male partner ejaculates on the face of his female partner in the throes of ecstasy). The ground rules are borrowed from Feminist Porn Awards, an annual event held in Canada since 2006 to honour adult stars. For anti-porn activists, this delineation can seem as specious as Pakistan’s distinction between “good” Taliban and “bad” Taliban.

That’s because, writes Candida Royalle, a popular adult film star who pioneered the genre of erotic movies by and for women in the 1980’s “our society still can’t conceive that a relatively sane young woman would choose to go into sex work for any reason other than desperation.” Continues Royalle “sitting down to an interview, inevitably the first thing I’m asked is how I got into porn. I often get the sense that what they’d really like to ask me is “What a nice girl like you…?” she writes.

The attitude remains the same despite the crossover success of former porn stars including Sasha Grey and Sunny Leone. It is this perception of vulnerability and exploitation which Royalle and her fellow feminist porn enthusiasts aim to upend through their works termed as “ethical porn.”

The core philosophy of ethical porn is collaboration, according to Taormino, the porn producer. “Performers set their own pay rates and know up front what I am hiring them to do; there is absolute, explicit consent and no coercion of any kind,” she writes.

Yet for all its sex positive aphorisms and attempts to build a sub culture, the book doesn't offer much to critics who argue that the system itself is flawed or question whether the porn enthusiasts would willingly let their children pursue a career in porn.  Though India doesn't have an official porn industry to boast off, being a country that avidly consumes smut, I would have liked to see these issues addressed more in depth. May be that’s not the purpose of this book.