Bharat recently banned 18 OTT platforms for hosting obscene, vulgar, and even “pornographic” content despite repeated warnings. The banned platforms include the likes of Uncut Adda, Dreams Films, Prime Play, Rabbit, Hot Shots VIP, etc. 19 websites, 10 apps, and 57 social media accounts associated with these platforms have also been blocked in Bharat.
Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Anurag Singh Thakur has repeatedly stressed the responsibility of these platforms to not promote abuse, obscenity, and vulgarity in the name of “creative expression”. A significant percentage of content hosted on these platforms is found to have depicted nudity and sexual acts in inappropriate contexts such as incestuous family relationships, relationships between teachers and students, etc.
The government has indeed done the right thing by taking timely action against these OTT platforms. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Bharat, with its huge digital media user base and easy access to smartphones and cheap internet services, has become the prime target of the multi-billion-dollar pornography industry. All social media companies and OTT platforms view Bharat purely as a market for minting money, by hook or by crook. In the absence of any specific laws for regulating digital media, our citizens have become extremely vulnerable to all sorts of subversive and derogatory pornographic and disturbing content masquerading as “creative expression”. Furthermore, the woke ecosystem of Bharat is trying to normalize all sorts of perversions and deviant behavior by brainwashing the educated Bharatiya youth into believing that all this is normal, and a sign of them being progressive and emancipated human beings.
The woke lobby is now trying to push the project of “studying pornography” in the garb of promoting sex education in Bharat. Many educational institutions in the US have already started conducting these experiments of teachers discussing pornography with students and showing them pornographic content for teaching sex education, and the same experiments are being pushed through in elite Bharatiya higher educational institutions as well. The logic is, since Bharatiya youth are watching pornography anyway, better to sensitize them regarding its implications rather than running away from the issue. This project of promoting pornography in the garb of sex education in Bharat seems already in full swing.
An article published by the media outlet “Scroll” a couple of years back vociferously advocates the use of pornography for imparting sex education. The piece titled “Using Pornography for Sex Education: It’s not an outrageous idea” cites the findings of an international research paper titled “Is Porn the New Sex Education” to argue that since adolescents in Bharat have been using commercial pornography anyways to learn about sex, it’s high time that “policymakers engage with pornography creators and distributors and to make pornography a tool for comprehensive sex education.
The article makes the business of creating and distributing pornography sound a rather benign and philanthropic gesture. Never mind that the pornography industry is a horror site of gross abuse and human rights violations. It’s an industry having collusion of all sorts of criminal stakeholders including producers and distributors of child pornography, human trafficking agents, and all sorts of extortionists, blackmailers, and criminals violating the privacy of couples and often recording sexual activity through hidden cameras without consent. In the era of deepfakes, a lot of pornographic content also involves the use of deepfake technology, thus further making everyone from celebrities to common people vulnerable to harassment and abuse. It’s incredible that anyone could even consider that schools and colleges should collaborate with pornography creators and distributors to use pornography to impart sex education. It’s akin to legitimizing child abuse, sodomy, and all sorts of gross perversions, and human rights abuses.
How is one supposed to overlook the fact that pornography is essentially an exploitative genre that not only demeans women’s agency by projecting their bodies as objects of fantasy but also portrays sexual activity as something violent and subversive? I have never watched pornography but from my limited understanding, I can say that pornography involves the portrayal of sexual activity in a rather crass and disgusting manner, devoid of any emotions. Its sole intention is to titillate the viewer by portraying violent and kinky sex. A lot of pornography borders on masochistic tendencies of self-harm along with harming others. It trespasses all notions of societal norms of decency and mutual respect when it comes to relationships between men and women.
Now, you could argue that if adults are watching pornography in the privacy of their personal space, it’s not the government’s business to interfere in their freedom and liberty. That argument holds valid to a certain extent, yes, if porn is available freely in a society the government cannot forcefully prevent any adult form watching porn. But if the consumption and circulation of pornography have become a massive social problem leading to an alarming increase in sexual crimes against women, the government has every right to legally regulate the consumption of porn.
The Bharatiya government has tried to do it time and again. Pornography is not banned per se in Bharat, but the government routinely blocks porn sites, thus trying to regulate the consumption of porn by citizens. But it’s complicated since the technology has become so advanced that users can find multiple ways to get around. To begin with, they can use VPNs and proxy servers to get around government regulations. Certain popular browsers come with built-in VPNs and proxy servers. Secondly, there is such a proliferation of pornographic content on the internet that it’s not possible for the government to keep track of each and every porn site and keep blocking the URLs.
An article published by the Firstpost titled “A game of whack-a-mole: why banning porn sites in India does not work” gives an excellent analysis of the government’s efforts to ban pornography in Bharat and the reasons why these efforts don’t work. The article says that Bharat is one of the top consumers of porn. In some polls, Bharat comes third in the list of countries with maximum porn consumption and in certain polls, it comes at the second number, according to the article. Contrary to the popular perception that in Bharat, it’s mostly men who watch porn, about 30 percent of Bharatiya pron consumers are women, says the article.
It further says that in Bharat, most people consume porn on their smartphones but the number of people who store porn on their smartphones is very low. Most people just watch it through the internet. In that context, the government’s decision to ban several OTT platforms circulating porn is rather significant because that’s probably how a majority of Bharatiyas get access to porn, through these OTT sites installed on their smartphones. An average Bharatiya wouldn’t go out of their way to search for pornographic sites and download porn on their laptop. Thus, the government can create a significant dent in the porn-watching habits of Bharatiyas by blocking OTT platforms from circulating pornographic content.
The article reveals another interesting fact regarding pornographic consumption in Bharat that “A significant portion of the porn that is consumed in India is the material that is shared using WhatsApp and Telegram”.
One cannot justify the proliferation of pornographic content in Bharat by the western logic of freedom and personal liberty. There is a stark difference between the western and the Bharatiya context. Our societal structure and value system are entirely different plus the educational levels of many of our citizens are still fairly low by conventional standards. A villager in Uttar Pradesh accidentally watching pornographic content on this smartphone and then getting addicted to it cannot be compared to the porn viewing habits of someone sitting in Los Angeles and watching pornography on their phone, out of personal choice. If something totally out of context and alien to their life experiences and social mores is thrust onto somebody out of the blue, it will obviously have a violent and disturbing impact on them.
As the consumption of pornography has risen alarmingly in Bharat due to the easy and cheap access to the internet on smartphones, sexual crimes against women have also risen significantly. A lot of evidence is available regarding the correlation between the increase in pornography consumption amongst Bharatiyas and the rise in sexual crimes against women. But the mainstream media doesn’t highlight this issue much. Why so? Simply because it goes against the woke agenda of glorifying pornography as a creative expression, women’s liberation, an expression of personal freedom and liberty, etc.
One can find many examples of rape cases in the Bharatiya context where the rapists have confessed to committing the crime under the influence of pornography. In February 2024, a 19-year-old man in the Kasganj district of Uttar Pradesh was arrested for the rape and murder of his 17-year-old sister. The accused, after watching a porn clip. Raped his sister who was sleeping beside him and after committing the crime, he strangled her and fled the scene, scared that she might reveal what he had done, as per various media reports.
In another rape incident that happened in the city of Dehradun in 2018, for class XII school students arrested on charges of gangraping a class X student of the same school allegedly committed the crime after watching a porn clip on their mobile phones, as per various media reports. One of the accused students reportedly confessed before the Magistrate that he was instigated to commit the crime after watching a porn movie.
In yet another recent incident in Surat, Gujarat, the police arrested a 41-year-old autorickshaw driver for allegedly raping an 11-year-old schoolgirl. Police investigation revealed that the man was addicted to watching porn on his mobile phone, as per various media reports.
As per a news report published by The New Indian Express in 2021, “According to crime statistics 2020, as many as 220 rape cases were reported in Krishna district, including Vijayawada, where a majority of the accused in the cases are minors and have confessed that they have committed crime after watching porn. On the other hand, 12 cases of murder of women were reported in Vijayawada and another six were reported in the district”.
There is a plethora of such evidence available on the internet regarding the correlation between the watching of pornography and the increase in crimes against women in the Bharatiya context. The government should take these statistics rather seriously and introduce a comprehensive Bill in the parliament to regulate digital media. The woke media, while talking about crimes against women, blames everything from patriarchy to the Bharatiya family structure and the traditional value system but it stays silent on the issue of pornography. Rather, many woke intellectuals glorify pornography as representing some sort of pinnacle of women’s liberation. The likes of Sunny Leone are celebrated as feminist icons. I have nothing against Sunny Leone’s life-choices, it’s her life, but we can certainly do better than glorifying a porn star as a women’s liberation icon.
The book “Snakes in the Ganga co-written by Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan delves deep into the dynamics of wokeism and talks about how Harvard wokeism is being exported to Bharat in the garb of social sciences and liberal arts education and infiltrating the minds of Bharatiya youth.
In an insightful video titled “Is Ashoka University breeding wokeism in India | Snakes in Ganga” hosted on the YouTube channel of Infinity Foundation, Vijaya Vishwanathan talks about how Ashoka University in Bharat has become a space for all sorts of woke experiments concerning sexuality and identity, many of these making Bharatiya kids extremely vulnerable to all sorts of ideas regarding deviant sexuality. She explains how the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) at Ashoka University calls all sorts of anti-Hindu woke experts in the name of sensitizing students on LGBTQ + issues.
In the name of teaching gender and sexuality, the university gives space to all sorts of dangerous woke theories imported from the US academia the intent of which is to make children’s bodies and identities battlegrounds for all sorts of woke experiments. She also talks about how the CSGS of Ashoka University routinely organizes conferences where the speakers vociferously advocate the teaching of pornography as part of sex education.
“Gender bias and inequality are serious areas of study. But we think it should be studied in an indigenous context. So how does critical race theory make its way into gender studies? Gender studies of the west rejects the biological binary of male and female and instead says that gender is non-binary or even sometimes fluid. In other words, one can invoke the feminine in the morning and the masculine in the evening. That’s being a female at dawn and a male at dusk.
Gender they say is a social construct and the lived experience is the final verdict and any rational objection to this debate is shut down. Subjectivity rules and objectivity is considered patriarchal. American conservatives call adults pushing LGBTQ ideas on children groomers. These are usually adults in positions of power with access to children like teachers, coaches, physicians, and mentors. They say the children are being groomed into these ideas of gender fluidity by glamorizing these made-up categories resulting in an unprecedented increase in body mutilating gender transition surgeries.
Many in India will be surprised to know that the problem of grooming is not just an American problem. The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University serves as India’s pipeline to distribute these western ideas of gender and sexuality into India”, she says.
I think what Vijaya Vishwanathan says captures aptly the horrors of glorifying pornography in Bharat and considering teaching it to kids as a part of the sex education curriculum. The regulatory framework for controlling the consumption of pornography aside, the government should also keep an eye on the ideological underpinnings of the woke system infiltrating the minds of Bharatiya children and youth.
