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I watched porn as a teen, (like most teenage boys do), revelling in soft porn. And now I’m a 29 y.o. married man in, a dad of twins, and here’s what I feel about watching porn.
It was lazy summer noon when I, in my late childhood, accidentally encountered pictures of a few nude women along with naked men exhibiting different postures of peno-vaginal, oral and anal sex. Those pictures were in the form of a booklet, coloured printed on glossy sheets.
It were the mid-’90s, India had just leapt into the global market by its liberalization-privatization-globalization policies and the computer revolution was in its nascent stage.
I exactly don’t know whom it belonged to, because those were lying on the floor of the baitaka, the room on the ground floor of our joint house, used by only men of the house and open for almost everyone, the workers of the house, the various uncles from the neighbour and numerous of other people who visited.
The booklet with naked and nude pictures was my first encounter with the porn, though I was completely unaware of both – the sexual activity or the porn industry.
The first thought which came to my mind was that those pictures were obscene, and shouldn’t be viewed by me, as my mom had trained me and my other siblings to close our eyes during romantic scenes in Bollywood movies (quite rare during the ’90s). I felt guilty about it for quite some time, but I did succeed in keeping it a secret till now.
As time passes by and I entered my teens (grade 8 to be exact), one of my classmates infatuated by Ms Kusum (pseudonym), our English teacher brought those same porn booklets to school, hidden in his bag. He shared them quite sheepishly in our friend circle, when we all bunked class after lunch break to abscond to the community park near school.
I was encouraged by my gang to shed off any moral considerations and enjoy the booklet without feeling guilty.
India continued to progress leaps and bounds under the FDI and Internet Revolution globally. By 2008, all thanks to the Android developers and the Korean-Chinese telecom companies who made the internet easily accessible and affordable, I could have the multi-media phone of my own. My friend asked me for the memory card of my phone and after a few minutes handed back to me saying that he has given me something “hot” to watch. Later at the night when I was all alone on the terrace (I don’t have a room of my own but had to share it with my younger brother) I opened my memory card and wasn’t surprised to find numerous porn videos.
I scrolled through the list of the video thumbnails accompanied by the details. Confused about which one to watch first, I choose the shortest one on the basis of the size of the videos. To my luck, it was a very intimate scene between a couple which filled me with a tantalising sense of excitement often felt by a young adult like me. I was encouraged to see more of them.
I went back to the main list and this time chose the one on top. It was soft porn; most of them were soft porn. At that time I wasn’t aware of anything like soft or hard porn, they were just porn. I continued watching them for an hour and didn’t realise that my younger brother had been looking all over the house for me, even though I had heard him calling me loudly. I went to our room, unhappy because I cannot watch there. The next day I waited for the night so that I may find the privacy to watch porn.
This continued for 2-4 days but here comes the twist. Though I was no longer governed by a sense of morality and guilt, I found myself kind of bored by the videos, all having the same activity, albeit different faces. I was no longer interested in watching them.
I am 29 now, happily married and have twin sons. My wife, a Cancerian (though I do not believe in horoscope and the birth stars) is very romantic and sensuous and I have the latest smart-phone. The porn videos are one finger touch far for me. I am tempted to watch them; I hit the search button of my phone and an endless list of porn videos appear before me. I click one of them and very soon felt nauseated.
Why? There’s too much violence in the video, male forcing their female counterparts to involve in oral and anal sex, the porn is vehemently biased, male-hegemonic and fervently unequal in power structure. I am appalled by the sexual activity carried out in the video. The tantalizing sensation which I once felt on the terrace of my home is long gone and dismay and despair fill in. I choose not to watch them anymore.
A version of this was first published here.
Image source: shutterstock
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