A few weeks ago, Amsterdam opened up a 5D porn cinema in the heart of the Dutch capital’s red light district – complete with water jets, water cannons and vibrating seats.
While Amsterdam has upped its game with this new porn cinema, India continues to treat porn as taboo while the majority of people still call it “immoral and indecent”.
The discourse around banning porn in our country has been going on since 2009.
It started when the department of telecommunications of the ministry of IT and Telecom decided to ban the popular cartoon porn star Savita Bhabhi.
Many lauded the decision saying that the cartoon pollutes the minds of youth and depicts Indian housewives in a bad light.
Soon after, a petition moved in the Supreme Court to ban over 857 pornography websites on the stated grounds that they were disturbing public order and giving rise to sexual violence in the country.
While the petition was pending in the Supreme Court, the Centre hastily put a blanket ban on all 857 websites when the court had merely asked the Center to take note of the issue.
However, the government, later, realised the impracticality of the decision and subsequently directed internet service providers to only ban websites which hosted child pornography, thereby delegating their discretion to the internet service providers.
In the recent past, the Rajya Sabha passed the Juvenile Justice Bill under which those aged between 16 to 18 years can be tried as adults for committing heinous crimes.
The hasty decision was, presumably, driven by the emotional panic of the people as the parents of the 2012 gang rape survivor were present during the Parliamentary session.
The ban on porn – an appeal to emotion, not reason
Such extreme measures taken in the flare of emotions in order to create deterrence have not been able to achieve any success.
Despite the prevalence of sexual crimes against children, no person has been awarded the death sentence in line with the amendment till now.
Furthermore, various alternate URLs and Virtual Private Networks (VPN) are available to view banned online content, and no person has yet been convicted for creating or transmitting child pornography.
Clearly, the ruling government has been taking various quick decisions based on the emotional distress of the people without thinking of future implementation or the actual root cause of the problem.
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In 2017, another petition was filed by a woman in Bombay seeking a blanket ban on pornography.
Her 55-year-old husband had allegedly become addicted to pornography, which she claimed was making his mind perverse and destroying her matrimonial life and family values.
Identifying herself as a victim of her husband’s addiction, she also mentioned its detrimental and immoral effects on her young children.
Viewing this from the prism of morality and societal values, we question the very definition of what morality entails in Indian society.
Coming from a country that has an extensive history and literature on erotica, there is a wide disconnect in the way the public perceives sex.
Another major argument in favour of the ban is that porn exacerbates sexual violence.
Even mannequins have faced the wrath of the public, when people in Bombay voted to ban mannequins in lingerie showrooms stating that it pollutes the minds of men and is an embarrassment for women across the city.
The gang rape of a 10-year-old girl spurred the debate on how porn can possibly influence sexual violence.
This was deduced from the fact that the perpetrators watched porn before committing the crime.
The Uttarakhand high court reiterated the importance of the ban and ordered the intermediaries to be notified to disable pornographic URLs, laying out an ultimatum that they could lose their license upon non-compliance.
Porn and violence – a non-sequitur?
What we are constantly overlooking is that research findings premised on behavioural psychology, has stated that the direct link between the ban of pornography and decreasing sexual violence is inconclusive.
What has been largely ignored is that sexual violence is primarily motivated by power assertion which is rooted in patriarchal norms of the society.
A substantial number of rape cases actually occur because the woman refuses to submit to the dominance of the male.
The above arguments show that to appease the voters, the government indulges in reckless decisions out of moral panic, which ultimately leads to undesired outcomes.
While condemning the fact that a lot of youngsters with impressionable minds often form wrong notions about sex from pornography (which remains widely available despite the ban), we need to rethink our own methods of imparting sex education.
In a nation where talking about sex is still considered taboo, sensitising people with proper sex education is the only way forward.
This would normalise consensual sexual relations and highlight issues in Indian society such as rape culture and victim shaming, hence getting to the root of the problem of increasing sexual violence.
It is important to mark a clear dichotomy between porn – which is an outcome of fantasy – and consenting sex in private lives. This can only be achieved if there’s a proper sex education curriculum in place.
Nancy Shah is an advocate at Delhi High Court and Konina Mandal is an LLM graduate from University College London, United Kingdom