Prudes and porn: India panics at the naked web

By the looks of it, India Today magazine makes more money from sex than it does from art, literature, hate, god, and politics put together. 

Every year it does a survey or two about Indian bedroom antics, announcing that 70 percent of Punjabis are into wife-swapping, that 27 percent of Tamils are backdoor men (in one way or another) or that 46 percent of urban women fantasize about (Bollywood's) Govinda. 

But that's all in the guise of censure, so it's OK.  What's really got the (fake) prudes hot and bothered this time around — following a too-convenient news peg supplied by two politicians caught watching porn in the Karnatak state assembly — is the Internet.  "Blue movies" and skin mags are one thing, the logic runs, but when porn is free, the sky really is about to fall. 

Just for kicks, get on Google and type "hot desi sex" or maybe something a little more innocuous like "voluptuous Punjabi princess" and you'll see what these guys are getting at…. Okay, stop!  Are you 18 years old?  All right.  You can read the rest.

"The organised $12 billion (Rs.60,000 crore) American adult entertainment industry, to which [Indian-origin actress Sunny] Leone belongs, has bred explicit images beyond the limits of imagination," writes Damayanti Datta. "And they are free."

"Fuelled by the Internet and facilitated by high-speed data service, pornography, born in dozens of studio lofts around the world, has entered teenagers' mobile phones with the force and sweep of a dangerous flood. It threatens to swamp conventional notions of morality, raise tensions in bedrooms, lure children into a world they do not understand, and initiate a culture that threatens the mores of family life as we know it."

That's an understatement.

Wait, no it isn't!  That's a ridiculous overstatement.  But it makes for a fun read.  And it reminds me of the greatest (apocryphal) news lead of all time, read over the radio on the day Thomas Edison unveiled his invention of the electric light:

"….Tragedy struck the candle-making industry today…"