The measure of the alpha male in a Delhi boys school was not how many girlfriends he had, it was his access to copies of Playboy magazine. The popularity of one classmate hinged solely on the fact that his father had a coffee-table Illustrated Kamasutra. As for VHS videotapes, well, by the time they had finished providing every boy enough material, the hard plastic was sticky and the picture dispiritingly unintelligible.
The internet changed everything. I first accessed it in the mid-1990s when I was in Class XI. Yes, it cost Rs 15,000 for 500 hours of full-fledged Net time, even though it was through a screeching 28.8 kilobit per second connection. And yes, the pictures took forever to download. Still, at the click of a mouse, one could, if one was perseverant, access a whole new world of pornographic images. Access to the Net made me the alpha male; classmates came over to my home to, for lack of a more representative word, dick around.
The internet also changed the way Indians accessed and viewed pornography. Going to the rather seedy Palika Bazaar in Central Delhi back then to get either the VHS tapes or the then new-fangled VCDs was not what one would describe as a ‘pleasant experience’. The shops were full of sales boys actively trying to sell pornographic material to schoolboys who, in an attempt to conceal themselves, removed their school ties.
Porn played a weird role in my life. One had sex the way it was portrayed in pornos. And the films themselves were changing. If you have watched porno films from the 1970s—yes I have, part of being a connoisseur is to watch ‘classic’ films—things were different. Almost no role-playing, definitely lesser foreplay and lots, and I emphasise lots, more hair. Just google Ron Jeremy.
Many years ago, while working on a story for one of my first employers, I had travelled to southern Andhra Pradesh to see the implementation of an e-governance project being undertaken by an American hardware multinational. The e-governance was all good, the locals told us, and so was the internet. But after the women journalists left the room, the local chap running the operation looked at me sheepishly and said in his broken Hindi, “Sir, yeh internet toh kamaal ki cheez hai.” Every night, the men of the village gathered around the computer to watch porn.
The internet cut out the middleman in Indian cities and villages. If you were to venture into Palika Bazaar today, you will find it just as seedy, but most shopkeepers now have to make do by selling smuggled electronics. While they still stock the rather strangely named ‘Blue Films’, they will crib about how the internet has ruined the business. At the same time, the material available online has itself changed: while well-produced porn videos are still available to download, there is a proliferation of amateur pornography, for which we have to thank the mobile phone.
When the first mobile phones with cameras emerged on the Indian market, a senior journalist commented that it would lead to an explosion of “bedroom antics being recorded and uploaded”. That has come to pass. From the infamous MMS scandal of a Delhi schoolgirl performing fellatio on her boyfriend, to the even more notorious ‘Mysore Mallige’ episode of two students from southern India having sex in pretty much every way conceivable. And then, from villages across India there are being uploaded countless videos of ‘naked dancing’, which incidentally I would not recommend that you watch.
Recording bedroom antics has almost become the new normal. A rising young lawyer has a hidden set-up in his house that he uses to record his ‘conquests’ even though almost all these trysts are paid for. But what is even more surprising, and possibly even disturbing, is that there are many more men like him who record either surreptitiously or, as is the case in many instances nowadays, with the full knowledge of the girl involved. Yes, there are some videos out there that can make you sick to the gut. Some videos leave little doubt that the act of coitus was a forced one.
In ‘proper’ porno videos, you know at least that the girl involved is an actress, but in the exploding number of amateur porn videos being posted by Indians, you have little clue about whether the girl was a willing partner. But visit the sites that host these videos and you discover that there is a massive market for them. When people talk of a few thousand views being qualification enough to deem a video “viral”, they have not seen the hits on certain sites that host Indian videos.
And yet, getting people to talk about sex in the open is almost impossible in India—unless you are at a party and far too much alcohol has been consumed and maybe a bit of powder has vanished up nostrils. Even then, asking the rather indelicate question, “Has the internet changed the way you have sex?” gets you strange looks.
At a recent dinner party, while chatting to a young divorcee enjoying her newly single status, I was informed that Indian men are willing to “go down” and indulge in foreplay that was unheard of less than a decade ago. “And they are better groomed down there too,” she added, implying that while a shaving brand’s campaign to rid Indian men of facial hair has only seen limited success, more and more Indian men are clean-shaven below deck. Even my wife expects me to be well-groomed. At least one guy I know was gifted a ‘Willy Care Kit’ by a (then) girlfriend.
A decade ago, ‘pube maintenance’ would not have been at the top of a young Indian man’s grooming agenda. It is now. And that’s true of girls as well. There are salons aplenty—across India—that can give you a ‘Brazilian’ (if you do not know what that is, friend, you are missing out). Porn has changed our bedroom habits. Foreplay is not a strange term anymore: just try getting a second date if you do not understand its importance.
The growing acceptance of pornography is best illustrated by the rise and acceptance of Sunny Leone by mainstream India. Search for her online with the filters turned off and, let me put it this way, I have seen every inch of her. But, she is a bonafide superstar, and not so weirdly, her success will prompt more girls to jump into online porndom. That is evidently already happening.
Porn, either in a physical form as a magazine or hosted online, is still illegal in India. Yet, a perfunctory search on Google Trends for search volume indicates the volume of queries for sex and sex-related terms from India is several times that of searches for the second-most popular item: Bollywood actresses. A homemade sex video allegedly featuring the sister of a Bollywood actress is one of the hottest search terms of the year, more popular oddly in that even more sexually repressed country neighbouring ours. Yet, you will not find mention of these facts in Google’s Search Zeitgeist at the end of the year.
