Why Indians have sex in bushes and feel dirty about porn

The government bans porn at 9am. It rolls back the ban at 5pm. Policemen in Mumbai barge into hotel rooms and arrest couples. We Indians have never been able to make up our minds about sex. We pretend not to do it but we do it all the time.

Let me go back to 1995. I am in college. I have a girlfriend. We want to do it but we don’t know where to go. I live in a hostel where girls are not allowed. She lives with her parents, so that’s ruled out too. Where do we go? We go to a park in Delhi University, a part of the Ridge. It’s full of couples. There are uncles, aunties, college kids, school kids... everyone is doing it. Eunuchs run the love business here. You pay Rs 50 and you get your own bush.

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Not very civilised, is it? There’s plan B. I smuggle her into my hostel room. It’s a complicated exercise, which requires a couple of close friends keeping watch. When the coast is clear, she makes a dash for my room, stumbling, tripping up the stairs. Then my friend puts a lock on the door. Girlfriend and I spend the afternoon having noiseless sex. The lock is an excellent idea. I’ll tell you why. A year later a student was caught with his girlfriend in his room. He was expelled.

Privacy

Picture this. This boy and his girlfriend are sharing a private moment, in their own space. The dean and a bunch of teachers start banging on the door. I’ll huff and I'll puff and I’ll blow your house down. The terrified boyfriend wraps up his terrified girlfriend in a mattress and shoves her under the bed. He opens the door. The room swarms with middle-aged pillars of society. They find the girl. She bursts into tears. The dean slaps the boy. Is this civilised behaviour? Do grownups have nothing else to do? Apparently not.

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It’s something we have never come to terms with. There’s nothing wrong with two people making love. It’s a beautiful thing. What’s really wrong is to harass people for having sex. It’s savage to force your kids to go do it in the bushes, to hide under beds. It’s simply not done to barge into people’s rooms.

Take the porn ban for example. The state barging into your bedroom again. Pornography is innocent. It’s innocent fantasy. In fact, there was something very innocent about the way the government went about trying to ban porn.

There is no point banning porn. Even if you ban all the porn sites in the world, the pirates will step in. That’s exactly what happened in the 1980s, before the internet age. You could buy porn magazines. You could buy VHS tapes. It’s just that it was all underground. Of course, on paper, everything was banned.

I don’t agree with those who say that pornography objectifies women. Maybe it does, but it objectifies men too. The "stud" in a porn video is as unreal as the women. Does it lead to rape? We really don’t know. It can be argued that porn acts as a safety valve; it offers release in your personal space. It actually prevents rape.

The world of porn is complex, more complex than the government imagines it to be. A lot of pornography now is not about the act. It’s about fetishes and fantasies. There are words that I cannot mention in this space, but let me still try and provide you with a printable list of fetishes. Sample the categories: giantess, tickling, trampling, cat fighting, mixed wrestling, high heels, ripoff, superheroines, interracial, pedal pumping, French maid, hairy armpits, balloons, financial domination... I can go on. A couple of years back there was a newspaper report, which said that sheep were big in Afghanistan. There’s a nice phrase in the English language for this sort of stuff: whatever floats your boat. At most, you might find all this funny or ridiculous. But one thing that it is not is: A Major Threat to the Moral Fabric of Society.

Myth

It’s a myth that women don’t watch porn. They might not be into what men are into, but they have their own thing going. There’s the whole world of fan fiction – that’s where Fifty Shades of Gray emerged from. Women all over the world bought it. I had a girlfriend who was into Hentai comics — a Japanese specialty.

On Capitol Hill in Seattle, stores selling sex toys sit side by side with stores selling children’s toys. Tattooed gay men go for a stroll in the same park where young mothers push prams. I hear you saying: what works there, doesn’t work here. It’s a provincial attitude that needs to be gotten rid of.

Imagination

It’s time we evolved. Human beings are the same everywhere. The only difference is that genuinely open societies tolerate difference, they allow you to express your sexuality. We sweep everything under the carpet. But god knows what’s going on in our heads. You cannot stifle someone’s imagination.

Martin Robbins wrote this excellent piece in The Guardian, which was headlined: "Porn Data: Visualizing Fetish Space". Here’s what he had to say: “Porn is one of the biggest yet worst-covered topics in popular discourse. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that sits at the heart of human sexuality in the 21st century. Many people watch it, though few talk about it, and for better or worse it exerts a major influence over our culture; but we know relatively little about it.”

It’s time that we broadened our horizons.