Delhi man booked for forcing wife to dress up like pornstar, revealing a larger problem in consuming porn

Mainstream porn is dominated by a male gaze. This is common knowledge, as it unfortunately also comes out in men’s preferences for what they desire from their sexual partners. Unable to blur the line between porn and real life, a 35-year-old man from Delhi forced his 30-year-old wife to dress up like a pornstar. 

What happened

With the wife claiming that her husband is a full-fledged porn addict, PTI reports that he has been booked under various sections at Shahdara Police Station. These include Section 498A (husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty), Section 406 (criminal breach of trust), Sections 377 (unnatural offence) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code and sections of Dowry Prohibition Act.

The couple married in 2020 and lived in Noida, where the accused worked at a firm. The victim originally hails from Delhi’s East Rohtash Nagar. 

• Not only did the accused force her to look like his favourite porn actresses but he also physically abused her, forced her to cook meat even though she’s a vegetarian, and repeatedly harassed her for dowry.
• The woman claims that her father had paid her husband’s parents Rs 3 lakh before marriage and had agreed to send the rest of the dowry in instalments. Under the Dowry Prohibition Act, both the husband and his parents are liable to be arrested.
• As of now, the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Shahdara) Rohit Meena told media outlets that the investigation is in its initial stage and witness statements are being recorded. 

The porn addiction problem

The case from Delhi also reveals how toxic and normalised porn addiction can be to not just the addict but their family too.

From making huge pen**es the norm to showing all women as extra-loud, mainstream porn is known to dispense false stereotypes about sex. 

• Porn addiction might be a taboo subject, but it’s definitely a cause for concern because of how it can rewire the human brain.
• There’s a vast consensus among sexologists that excessive dependency on porn might make watching porn more desirable than actually indulging in sex.
• It also leads to side-effects like low self-esteem and anxiety as when someone is addicted to porn, their brain might release more dopamine and other “happy hormones”.
• This might want the consumer to consume porn more and more to replicate that feeling. 

Recently, Indian sex health educator and influencer Seema Anand took to Instagram to share an anonymous woman’s account whose husband couldn’t have sex without watching porn on the side. 

Describing this experience as awful and intolerable, Anand suggested that the wife can ask her husband to leave his phone out of the bedroom or an alternate strategy of the couple watching porn together before sex as an act of foreplay. But obviously, Anand, much like other sex experts, agrees that a long-term solution is required for men to make the distinction between porn and real life-sex.