Illustration: Bhaskaran
I DO NOT think short skirts, or momos, or cellphones, or girls wandering around late at night, or Bollywood item numbers, or even Kabir Singh are the reason why there are so many rapes in India. There are many factors that contribute to why violent rapes are so rampant in our country—misogyny, unemployment, toxic masculinity, class, caste, breakdown of law and order, no fear of retribution—but if we have to zoom in on just one trigger, it can only be pornography.
You know that in spite of our poverty, our pathetic connectivity and all our restrictive laws, India was the #3 consumer of pornography in the world last year. But did you know that the name of the rape victim trends on a porn website every single time there is public outcry over a particularly grisly gang-rape in the country? I did not. And I am reeling from the fact that this means that men go on to these sites hoping that the sickos who have just brutally raped and murdered a girl would have taken a video to ‘immortalise’ the act and uploaded it on porn sites for their ‘brethren’ to get their rocks off to. Yes, that is the ugly, unvarnished truth of us as a society.
In the weird, weird west, men of this ilk have proudly dubbed themselves as involuntary celibates or incels, for short. They throng the internet, spewing hate against women, especially attractive ones, whom they call ‘Stacys’. In their disordered imaginings, Stacys hand out sex on a platter in every possible position to successful, good-looking alpha men, whom the incels call ‘Chads’, while sparing not a thought for the poor, sex-deprived incels simply because they are ugly or poor (or perhaps just creepy AF?). I would have found a group of this sort pathetically amusing if it were not for the fact that they exist in huge numbers and egg each other on to take down the ‘normies’ (normal people) and hail every crazy white shooter who opens fire on schoolchildren or at church gatherings as a sort of a hero (Most recently, the incels hailed Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker as one of their own). In India, I suspect, the sick, twisted incels on porn sites hail all rapists as heroes, too.
It is this combination of lust, ignorance and sullen resentment, grown fat on a steady diet of misogynistic, debasing pornography, that creates incels of the type who raped and murdered the vet in Hyderabad. And, threatening them with capital punishment is not going to fix them. Of course, stringent laws, swiftly executed, would definitely be helpful, but the only thing that will fix our incels, slowly but surely, is sexual reeducation. Setting our sanskari scruples aside—or rather, reconnecting to our inner Vatsyayana—we are going to have to re-teach India about sex. Explain that mainstream, hardcore pornography caters to jaded, misogynistic male appetites, not to normal ones. Explain that the women on those videos are being paid to fake it. That they most definitely do not want what the makers of these videos are paying them to say they want.
Ad woman Cindy Gallop created a revolution when she set up MakeLoveNotPorn, a social video-sharing platform that seeks to normalise sex by sharing real videos of real people having real sex that is pleasing to all genders and dehumanises none. It is specially for millennials who have grown up on porn and need to know how to make love. We need this kind of sensible, sexual activism in India.
Recently, it came to light that 56 per cent of the funds allocated to the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao programme was spent on publicity. If that kind of money was allocated to our ministries of family planning, education and human resource development to create sensible content that could educate a diseased, porn-poisoned society about sex, we would be well on our way to being a healthier, safer nation.
Chauhan is a bestselling author and an adwoman.