Porn OK Please!

By Meghna Pant, Features Editor

At a literature festival where I was speaking not too long ago, I bumped into two erotica writers who revealed something that stayed with me. They told me that ladies from smaller towns did not know what an orgasm was, never having experienced it. Not until they had read these author’s books. Additionally, they thought that the G-spot was short for Gold Spot and facials involved Veet bleach. Some of these women had been married for decades.

Therefore, last week’s entire fracas over the government banning porn threw into question the rather tertiary but pertinent issue of female pleasure. India gasped! Women watch porn? Our Manusmriti-abiding Sati-Savitri women have desires and needs? Yup, you better believe it.

Recent statistics show that around 60% of people come to the Internet not for Facebook or online sales, but to access porn. In India around 30% of porn users are women, which means that – with the exception of Brazilians and Filipinos – our women are watching more porn than anyone else in the world.

And it’s not roses touching and birds pecking that women are looking for. A Hindustan Times survey reveals that women mostly search for terms like lesbians, couple sex, men giving oral sex to women, and rough sex. That covers everything from Savita Bhabhi to Sunny Leone and more!

In our so-called westernized metros, female pleasure is rarely, if ever, discussed with men, and infrequently discussed among women. When a woman is single for an extended period of time she’ll talk about cobwebs growing around her ‘privates’. If a man is single for a long time his friends will jerk their hands at him and say, “Bro, your handshake has become very strong.” It is assumed that men masturbate. With women, not so.

Imagine this conversation taking place in the living room of a middle-class home in a small town. I can’t.

Yet, this is a phenomenon no one can deny.

Understandably so. Porn has become very accessible. It’s in our books, on our TV, in our movies. Earlier people had to make an effort to procure porn: sign up with a video library, subscribe to a magazine, or steal from their father’s secret drawer. Now it’s available at the click of a button. Imagine then the infinite happiness of a housewife when she realises that all she needs to achieve the Big O is a locked door and WiFi. And then, for a few minutes each day, she can set aside needy kids, demanding in-laws, lazy servants and indifferent husbands to devote to herself.

I can picture dog-eared copies of Fifty Shades of Grey stashed away under these ladies bed. And why not? It’s the era of equality and feminism, and time we made porn ok please, for everyone, especially the women of India. God knows, they deserve it.

Picture Credit: Dainik Bhaskar