Porn for All Seasons

The internet and cellphone have made sure that there is no age limit to enjoying porn now.

A group of senior managers from an infotech company have finished a sales conference in Dallas. They freshen up and meet again in one of the hotel rooms for drinks and dinner. They are mostly Maharashtrian. They are in their 40s, married and have children. Among them is Anand. His friends call him ‘Wolf’, because that is what he is, only in sheep’s clothing. 

A few drinks later, Wolf whips out his laptop. The others in the group smile and shake their heads. They know the drill. Wolf is famous for being up-to-date with the latest releases in the world of pornography. MMS clips are his specialty. The men watch and drink a little more. 

“It is inevitable,” one of them says. “After a few drinks, we know Anand’s laptop is going to come out.”  Indeed.

Worldwide, it shocks no one that the venerable French daily Le Monde could end up in the hands of an internet porn millionaire. Even back in India, there are millions of Wolves who devour MMS clips and other forms of pornography. Most, one would assume, are less privileged and educated than the group of infotech hotshots in Dallas. It just shows how technology, mainly the internet with its ever increasing download speed and easy access, has made all types of Indian males, irrespective of upbringing and age, regular and even compulsive seekers of pornographic thrills. Earlier generations of Indian men did not have such anonymous short cuts to smut. Poor guys only had magazines or video tapes, risky to buy and store. They lived in large families. Willy nilly, they outgrew porn. 

Now you can’t outgrow it even if you want to. Laptops are affordable. Nuclear families and increased work travel mean more time to be up to mischief. Internet connectivity is a breeze. You are online in less time than Tiger Woods takes to unzip his pants. Then you hit the search engine, the diving platform from where you type in the search words and then plunge into a universe with uncountable galaxies. 

Guys remember their first tentative search words like their first proposal to a girl. “Mine was ‘porn photos’,” says a teacher in his late 30s. “What else could it be? This was Google, not Starbucks, where you seek something ultra-specific. Within nanoseconds there were a million pages in front of my eyes.” 

Sexologist Dr Prakash Kothari says that use of pornography by grown-up Indian men is not a recent development, but agrees the internet has made it easier. “Indian men have been using porn for years,” says Dr Kothari. He speaks patiently and without inhibition, chortling every now and then, thus releasing the awkwardness from the conversation. “Growing up, I too read the Hindi stories written by the famous Mast Ram. Oh, they were passionate. You even found erotic material on Air India. Their First Flight envelopes and philately, which were collectibles, had sensual images. My favourite envelope was the one commemorating their first Bombay to Seychelles flight. It had a mermaid. And a mermaid never wears a top.” And, “I have recommended erotica to patients, even the old Johnnies who wanted to improve their performance. But it’s true that with the internet, it is much easier.”

As a Mumbai executive says, “After 7 pm, when the female staff leaves, all the guys surf porn. They do not even hide it. It is not just the junior staffers, who would be expected to be hungry for porn, but also the seniors with cabins, with paunches and grey hair. One time I pushed open the door of a colleague’s cabin to find him looking at all these images on his computer. He didn’t deny it. In fact, he showed me more stuff, and we laughed at some of the funny ads and products that porn sites offer. Another senior colleague was rather annoying. He did no work, and spent all his time in chatrooms, calling himself ‘Hot and hung’.”

Talking of funny ads, internet porn seems to have a strange infatuation with stations on Mumbai’s Central Railway line. Websites have pictures of striking blondes and brunettes with the caption: ‘Meet girls in Sewri, Vikhroli’. Of course. Blondes and brunettes proliferate in Sewri and Vikhroli, apparently.

That pornography is a great leveller and appearances are often deceptive, sometimes becomes clear when you mentally line up the jokers that you know check porn (including yourself). It is a club with diverse disguises. There is the orthodox, well-read Muslim who used to wear a traditional Islamic cap throughout his course in a hip college. There is the very decent bespectacled proprietor of a stock broking firm who wears Zodiac shirts and signs with a Mont Blanc pen. This club also has the Ganesh-worshipping MBA and the alcoholic newsroom section head, among others. Only their degree of dependence on the drug and the brazenness with which they imbibe it varies. 

“It’s not that corporate sector guys are higher beings,” says a senior employee of an infotech firm in the US. “We exchange nude images. Of course, we do not use the office network or systems for this. And we do not surf hardcore porn.” 

The consequence of easily reachable pornography is that the Indian man no longer outgrows the habit with marriage. Even after taking into consideration the assertion of Dr Kothari that grown-ups of the past too availed of pornography, even allowing for the compelling penmanship of Mast Ram, it was never as common as it is today. 

Some Indian men feel guilty about doing something they should have stopped years ago. Doubtless, there is something sad about it, like a guy playing with kids much younger than himself because others his age have moved on to more important things in life. But those who have rationalised it in their heads retain a clear conscience. 

“I don’t feel guilty. I don’t think of porn as something confined to an age-limit,” says a writer in his late 20s. “I have never felt the need to try giving it up. It is just another part of life for me.”

When asked whether the internet corrupts the mind with its abundance of more depraved varieties of porn, he says, “I don’t think of anything as depraved. What is depraved to me is the necessity to be someone else. Besides, the so-called ‘depraved’ would still be depraved if the web had not been around. All that the internet does, is that it eases the access. In a way, that’s even a good thing. In the absence of easy porn, the depraved might have made real people their [sexual] targets. Or worse, they might have been persecuted for their ‘depraved’ tastes.”

Erotic stories are this writer’s preferred brew, literotica.com his sexual soulmate. He enjoys stories told from the woman’s perspective. “Being a man, it is a most intriguing journey to the other side,” he says. “I like it when the woman is confused about her desires. It is something men face so rarely. I figure my special liking for woman-as-protagonist stories has helped me travel into the woman’s way of looking at men a little.”

Some find art in porn. They really “read it for the articles”. A photographer and design aesthete stumbled upon a comic book style of pornography featuring stunning illustrations of Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “I see Savita Bhabhi for the drawings, but no one believes me,” he says. 

Most Indian women are uncomfortable about their men’s porn habit, coming to terms with it grudgingly, as if the husband’s favourite pastime were his child from another relationship. It is like the movie Masoom, where Shabana Azmi finds it difficult to accept step-son Jugal Hansraj. Well, porn is the new Jugal Hansraj. But some wives are open-minded about it. One requested a colleague of hers at work to compile a porn DVD for her husband so that he does not have to waste time surfing the net.

While perversions have always existed, the porn of the past was generally conventional, almost innocent. It was just naked women. Pornography dealing with deviant tastes must have been available, but not easily so. The internet, however, openly peddles stuff you did not even know existed. No age group, object, species or family relation is off limits here. Soon after high-profile political elections, sites like literotica.com even have erotic make-believe stories featuring Barack and Michelle Obama.

“The categories are baffling,” says the teacher in his late 30s. “It’s not that you look for the deviant stuff. The web dangles it in front of you. Some of it draws you. Then there are those categories that are so shocking that they are instantly repulsive. They are no-nos. There is no question of being drawn to them.” 

“Porn is a double-edged sword,” says Dr Kothari. “Used well, it is not harmful. It is even beneficial. It can spice things up in a jaded relationship. But it has hazards. Those who are not sexually educated can feel inadequate after comparing themselves with actors in pornographic images or films. It is also true that there is some perverted material available on the net. Now, that is harmful—harmful to the individual and to society. It must be banned.” 

The other damaging consequence of porn is that people waste more time when the medium is the internet. Reading material or DVDs are finite, internet surfing is not. Like bingers hopping pubs till day break, porn fiends jump from one clip to another, prolonging the adventure and heightening the pleasure. 

“What starts as an intended 15-minute nightcap turns into a three-hour marathon. You get up from your desk with red eyes, a stiff back and a heavy conscience,” says an engineer in his 30s who is a broadband porn slave. His sessions bring to mind Adam-Real-Last-Name-Unknown, the talented but wild bread-maker Anthony Bourdain writes about in Kitchen Confidential. While Adam’s sourdough has patrons and even fellow chefs kissing their fingertips, he has a habit of going off the radar on dope and porn benders. When he realises that his precious bread dough might rot, he makes desperate calls to his colleagues to ‘feed the bitch’ and stop it from wasting. When Bourdain imagines the scene at Adam’s apartment, he sees Adam in a stoned state, wearing just a shirt and surrounded by porn. 

Engineer First-and-Last-Name-Unknown, says that he feels more guilty about wasting time and compromising sleep than about watching porn. “I’m not hurting anyone’s feelings with porn. It is harmless that way,” he says. “But I feel terrible about wasting time. I don’t surf everyday, but when I do, I overdo.” 

The teacher too has had his moment of feeling ashamed. “It was an ad for a sex toy,” he says. “It said, ‘You poor sod, how long will you jerk off in front of your PC’. It was embarrassing.”

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