Published in The Times of India, 20 October 2021
Nothing illustrates our hypocrisy as a society as dramatically as porn. We condemn it and consume it, both profusely. Ostensibly, we despise it; eagerly, we pay for it and watch it. Porn or pornographic films are a huge industry, now reaching $100 billion according to NBC. It is also a flourishing trade, growing at an incredible pace every year. We know its massive, burgeoning presence on the US west coast, but it is also spurting in India, Thailand and a dozen other countries. PH Analytics estimates 5 billion hours of porn are watched every year, especially by young people including teenage women.
Porn is spreading fast, simply because we are patronizing it. Horrendous as the thought is, our adored parents saw it; we are doubtless seeing it more; in turn, our children are seeing it in ever-increasing numbers. Every hotel or motel room, from New York to New Delhi, Dhaka to Dakar, Kathmandu to Kiev, has, if nothing else, a television set, and it has, along with multiple channels, access to porn shows and porn channels. Those are the channels, hotel statistics tell us, most heavily used. Middle-aged executives, aging politicians, respectable businessmen, revered gurus, itinerant scholars, roving journalists, young cyberhacks, all seek a respite from their chores by watching hulking men bring eager women to moaning orgasm. Far from their docile wives and complaisant secretaries, they savor the safe excitement of seeing lively women and ever-ready men in enthusiastic congress, writhing and sweating as they explore new ways of coupling.
May the aged and jaded have their short-lived thrill before they fall off to half-sodden sleep, but the young are now, all accounts show, getting their first lessons in sex from porn. Very few societies have a decent way of telling young people about an important part of life, the part they most want to know about. All they usually get is some pompous talk about venereal diseases, HIV and AIDS, and the need for abstinence, plus a dose of spiritual hocus pocus about divine purpose or yogic transcendence. What they most want to know about, the joy of close intimacy, the magic of physical relationship that could be most useful for their adult life, they absorb zero. They gain little and learn nothing from any mentor either about our bodies and what pleasure they can yield.
So it is that porn has become our most important instructor of young people about physical relationship. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones and easy internet access, young people are getting the first idea of their bodies from porn. They are learning what they most want to learn: how one can have fun with their bodies and enjoy themselves. Porn has, in effect, become the principal educator of young people about sex.
Shocking as it may sound to many, experts say it is a good thing that people learn a few rudiments about their bodies. Most men, even educated ones, have a scant notion of how women’s private parts look like; women have, unless they have grown up with immodest brothers, have no idea how men are equipped. Their mutual physical encounters, as they occur more and earlier, are based on appalling ignorance. They have only the faintest idea about how to offer some pleasure to the other person. An act of sex is more likely to be an inept affair, a guaranteed disaster, than a source of lasting joy. It can play serious havoc with relationships instead of adding to the joy and strength of a relationship. When porn makes a dent in that universe of ignorance, it makes possible a sliver of understanding.
But that enlightenment comes with a price. Much of porn, as Nabokov once said, is insufferably dull. A sequence of repetitive coition hardly makes for rapt viewing. Worse, when love-making is represented by default as a physical effort, almost a gymnastic exercise, performed always by supple, athletic bodies, over an impressive interval, it begins to misrepresent the central message. When caring for each other takes a back seat, a loving deed gets converted into an insipid mechanical gesture. Though it is beginning to change, some porn has a noticeable male bias, showing the woman as an object of desire, hunted rather than courted by multiple men, rather than as an equal erotic protagonist.
The net result is that young people who get their erotic exposure increasingly from easily accessible porn tend to develop a lopsided view of the affair. Men expect oral sex from female partners, irrespective of their preference; women expect Olympic performance with multiple climaxes from their male partners. The key ingredient of mutual play and growing partnership goes out of the window.
I was talking to Dwight, a professor in a local university, who is working on the idea of a course that would use porn materials to explore erotic assumptions of young students and help them sort out the wheat from the chaff: recognize what is real and worthwhile, namely a caring relationship and the mutuality it demands, and separate it from what is not, namely the athletic prowess of the participants. It would help the students come to grips with the love, in some form or other, that has to be at the very core of love making. I hear some universities apparently already have coursework that includes porn awareness.
There is utter hypocrisy in declaiming porn to be garbage and surreptitiously viewing it, enraptured, at every suitable opportunity. If we think about porn, ostensibly indecent, and why it gets so much attention, it may one day get better and serve some decent purpose.
May the aged and jaded have their short-lived thrill before they fall off to half-sodden sleep, but the young are now, all accounts show, getting their first lessons in sex from porn. Very few societies have a decent way of telling young people about an important part of life, the part they most want to know about. All they usually get is some pompous talk about venereal diseases, HIV and AIDS, and the need for abstinence, plus a dose of spiritual hocus pocus about divine purpose or yogic transcendence. What they most want to know about, the joy of close intimacy, the magic of physical relationship that could be most useful for their adult life, they absorb zero. They gain little and learn nothing from any mentor either about our bodies and what pleasure they can yield.
So it is that porn has become our most important instructor of young people about physical relationship. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones and easy internet access, young people are getting the first idea of their bodies from porn. They are learning what they most want to learn: how one can have fun with their bodies and enjoy themselves. Porn has, in effect, become the principal educator of young people about sex.
Shocking as it may sound to many, experts say it is a good thing that people learn a few rudiments about their bodies. Most men, even educated ones, have a scant notion of how women’s private parts look like; women have, unless they have grown up with immodest brothers, have no idea how men are equipped. Their mutual physical encounters, as they occur more and earlier, are based on appalling ignorance. They have only the faintest idea about how to offer some pleasure to the other person. An act of sex is more likely to be an inept affair, a guaranteed disaster, than a source of lasting joy. It can play serious havoc with relationships instead of adding to the joy and strength of a relationship. When porn makes a dent in that universe of ignorance, it makes possible a sliver of understanding.
But that enlightenment comes with a price. Much of porn, as Nabokov once said, is insufferably dull. A sequence of repetitive coition hardly makes for rapt viewing. Worse, when love-making is represented by default as a physical effort, almost a gymnastic exercise, performed always by supple, athletic bodies, over an impressive interval, it begins to misrepresent the central message. When caring for each other takes a back seat, a loving deed gets converted into an insipid mechanical gesture. Though it is beginning to change, some porn has a noticeable male bias, showing the woman as an object of desire, hunted rather than courted by multiple men, rather than as an equal erotic protagonist.
The net result is that young people who get their erotic exposure increasingly from easily accessible porn tend to develop a lopsided view of the affair. Men expect oral sex from female partners, irrespective of their preference; women expect Olympic performance with multiple climaxes from their male partners. The key ingredient of mutual play and growing partnership goes out of the window.
I was talking to Dwight, a professor in a local university, who is working on the idea of a course that would use porn materials to explore erotic assumptions of young students and help them sort out the wheat from the chaff: recognize what is real and worthwhile, namely a caring relationship and the mutuality it demands, and separate it from what is not, namely the athletic prowess of the participants. It would help the students come to grips with the love, in some form or other, that has to be at the very core of love making. I hear some universities apparently already have coursework that includes porn awareness.
There is utter hypocrisy in declaiming porn to be garbage and surreptitiously viewing it, enraptured, at every suitable opportunity. If we think about porn, ostensibly indecent, and why it gets so much attention, it may one day get better and serve some decent purpose.
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