India's Pornographic Invasion

Geez, there sure are a lot rapes in India making international news, huh?

It makes one wonder what's going on over there. Is it that there are actually more rapes in India than before or that the rapes have gotten more horrifying? Or is it that the police are taking it more seriously than before? Or is it that they are getting reported more often? Or is it that their news media is more expansive than before, meaning local crimes get national coverage?

I was lucky enough to travel in India in 1998. I can say that the attitude toward women there is similar to what I've always heard about Italy, namely, that the men there are always on the prowl and free with their hands.

I wonder--and there's no way of knowing this from the outside--if the rapid Westernization of the country has something to do with the upswing in rape. That is, maybe India wasn't culturally prepared for the sexual liberty their American friends have been importing.

When I was there, just as India was becoming a technology center, the internet was hard to find (and I wasn't looking for it; communication was still through land lines). They had cable television, which everybody seemed to love, and Western programming was rare. The culture, despite the grabby proles, was very chaste.

My ex-wife said, "It's like the fifties here." As a long-time student of the other entertainment (I'm nothing if not diverse in my interests), I figured it was more like the mid to late sixties.

I mentioned Bollywood films the other day and it's fairly well known that Mumbai produces films at a rate comparable and sometimes greater than Hollywood. And just like the West in the sixties, India had exploitation films and grindhouse theaters.

I only got to see one, though I would have seen all that crossed my path if I didn't have to take a woman with me. Because these theaters were no place for a woman. My ex-wife definitely got sized up as we walked in. We were able to avoid any untoward activity by buying the most expensive seats, which were probably 8 cents or something.

And even though the aura of the place was seedy and forbidden, the film was, again, surprisingly chaste. There were two female leads. In traditional sexploitation fashion, one was attractive and remained clothed and the other was a bit pudgy and had a nude sex scene.

The story, briefly, was about a couple who go out to the country for their honeymoon and discover that their seems to be haunted. In fact, the elderly owners are pretending to haunt the hotel in revenge for the gang rape and murder of their daughter years before. How this all worked was lost in the Hindi dialogue, if it was addressed logically at all. (Most Indians, and the media, speak in a mix of Hindi and often archaic English. I knew it was their honeymoon, for example, because the husband kept sing-songing "Honeymoon!" in excitement.)

I was charmed by the framing of the sex scene within the context of a honeymoon, as if seeing a couple have extra-marital sex would offend the audience. I was disgusted by the sex scene itself. For one, it went out of focus, like the cameraman covered his eyes out of shame while they were filming it. For another, there was a strange fixation on tongue kissing, with a good 90 seconds devoted to the couple rubbing their fully-extended tongues together. The nudity, too, was strange, like a camera shoved into a dressing room, barely pointed in the right direction, one shot showing a hairless pubis (without the attendant organ) that looked like a rippling plain of flesh.

Bollywood films are long and are usually structured like two feature-length films. It's as if Jaws II played for forty-five minutes, then Sheriff Brody had a flashback in which the entirety of Jaws was played. After the flashback is finished, we watch the second half of the film. This film wasn't quite that accomplished, so we had a little more than an hour of the newlyweds' experience in the hotel and then the same amount of time devoted to the flashback, ending in the aforementioned gang rape which was the second "sex" scene of the film.

At the same time, I found a copy of India's answer to Playboy, which was just as explicit as Hefner's brainchild was in 1967--that is, not very. I did find the advice column particularly interesting, though:  one question was whether the above-the-clothing fondling the writer was engaging with his sister (both early 20s) was normal or not. The magazine, ostensibly for the sexually sophisticated, struck me as sexually naive, if not ignorant.

The mid to late sixties is known as the beginning of the "roughie" era in sexploitation history. The time of "nudie cuties" was over because naked volleyball and window-peeping no longer did the trick. The average pop culture enthusiast has heard the name Ilsa:  She-Wolf of the SS--this is a late entry to the roughie genre. I got the impression that Indian exploitation culture was more or less at that point in pornographic development.

I'll thumbnail the progression from here. The roughies gave way to penetrative sex, through art films like I am Curious--Yellow and "scientific documentaries" along with 8mm loops. That led to Deep Throat and a national conversation about pornography, mainstreaming it to a great degree and eventually losing the violence that marked the late sixties era. Pornography was a legitimate business long before I got to India.

What I'm getting at is that India probably got a full-bore dose of our modern-era pornography in the last ten years. I'm not saying that porn leads to rape but I do say that it alters our perceptions of sex. I also say that the introduction of porn into India wasn't gradual. Their sexual attitudes were changing--Bollywood movies didn't even allow kissing between married couples when I was there--but they probably weren't ready for what the West found common-place. I think it made India a worse place to be a woman than before.