Four reasons why India should not ban porn
The BJP has a habit of unnecessarily meddling with irrelevant issues rather than focusing on issues of pressing importance such as farmer suicides, child trafficking, malnutrition, and so on. While the Twitterati was still busy debating capital punishment, news came in that the ministry of information and broadcasting had issued a directive for MTNL, BSNL and ACT service providers to ban several porn websites. However, users of private service providers didn't report any such issue, according to DNA.
Last month, while hearing a petition to ban all pornographic sites, chief justice HL Dattu had said, "Such interim orders cannot be passed by this court. Somebody can come to the court and say 'Look, I am an adult and how can you stop me from watching it within the four walls of my room? It is a violation of Article 21 (right to personal liberty) of the Constitution. Yes the issue is serious and some steps need to be taken. The Centre has to take a stand, let us see what stand the Centre will take."
However, the Centre looks determined to ban porn based on its factually wrong views. But given the information age, can porn be banned?
While whether porn can entirely be banned or not is a debate for another day, India definitely needs porn to stay. Here are four reasons why:
1. Source of curiosity: Discussing sex in India is taboo. Even the mere mention of the word makes people hide in shame and run away with full energy. Parents, who ideally, should have sensitive conversations with their children over sex, hardly engage. Therefore, in such a conservative cultural scenario, porn serves as the most important source of information for teenagers about sex and its various intricacies. Satisfying teenagers' curiosity about sex is important and therefore providing sex education is critical. But our culturist government is opposed even to sex education, as was made clear last year by Union minister Harshvardhan.
2. Exploring sexuality and fantasies: In India, sex is mostly considered a tool for procreating. Discussions about exploring sex in different ways and the fantasies over it are extremely rare. During a recent hangout with friends, I told them that I am planning to buy a sex toy for self pleasure. Their response was that they had never heard a guy using a sex toy for personal use. Pornography allows exploring one's own sexuality and developing fantasies for experimentation with your partner. Be it shower sex, using chocolate sauce and masturbator, or having sex inside a car, porn exposes you to every possible fantasy.
3. Porn promotes equal rights for women and men: Watching porn and the right to pleasure have always been assumed to be male things. India's patriarchal society believes that women just have the duty of being penetrated and cannot demand pleasure. Women who demand or even talk about sexual pleasure are termed sluts and prostitutes. In my opinion, porn is the only place (though it's only a movie) where men and women put in equal efforts to give pleasure to each other, and it is not a one way affair. Many couple watch porn together for sexual stimulation and therefore, watching porn together goes a long way in making them realise that pleasure is important for both - not just the man.
4. Banning porn doesn't reduce crime: In 2013, a petition was filed in the Supreme Court seeking a ban on porn, citing it as a major cause for crimes against women, which is believed to be the reasoning behind banning porn by the government. However, there is ample evidence that banning porn doesn't lower crime rates. "The more repressed a society is, the more the acts of sexual violence. "If you see examples of Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - these are places (where) sexuality is not out in the open and acts of sexual violence are high," said Arundhati Ghosh, a woman activist. Furthermore, research studies in the Czech Republic, Denmark and Japan established that with increasing availability of pornography there was a significant decrease in the number of sex offences.
Even if a total ban is imposed by internet service providers, given today's age of hacks and jugaad, porn can easily be accessed through Torrent and many other proxy websites. Therefore, the BJP's ludicrous plan is bound to fail, making them a laughing stock again, on the Twitter court of India.