A terrific piece at Quartz by Maria Thomas, featuring an interview with the author of new book, Cybersexy: rethinking pornography, who argues for the legalization of pornography in India.
In conservative India, which has tried many times to ban pornographic websites, they’re often viewed as something only men seek out; the desires of straight women or members of the LGBTQ community are rarely considered at all.
But as the writer Richa Kaul Padte finds in her new book, Cybersexy: rethinking pornography (Penguin Random House India), all kinds of Indians—male, female, trans, gay, lesbian, and even asexual—are not only watching porn but creating their own sexual content online. And technology is transforming the way Indians think about sex and sexual identities.
“The internet has allowed people to circumvent the restrictions of their immediate worlds in order to pursue sexual pleasure,” Padte writes. In doing so, they’re carving out a space to be themselves in a society that has firmly held on to its archaic and limiting ideas of what sex is for, and who is allowed to have it.
But in her book Padte also traces how technology brings about its own complications, among them the use of online sexual content as a substitute for balanced and informed sex education, and the rise of things like revenge porn. These are issues that the Indian government hasn’t yet figured out how to handle.