By Rajkanya Mahapatra:

MILF, Gonzo, BBW, Hentai, DP. Yes, these are words straight out of a porn site.

25 million sites or 12% of all the sites on the Internet are pornographic in nature.

One-third of all porn viewers are women. Oh wait, let me write those in capital letters so that it sinks in, yes WOMEN.

I am sorry; did it hurt your territoriality? Yes, YOU, the man reading this (While the men read this twice, the girls can smirk).

Porn is something that men think they have to themselves; this perception has been true for long but not anymore. Just because women don’t admit to it openly, a large share of them do watch pornography only to end up being disappointed, amused or scarred for life. They end being disappointed because they cannot find what they need.

They are amused because mainstream pornography is unrealistic and sometimes extremely funny. They are scarred for life because of how they are portrayed in those movies. The India Today Sex Survey 2013 shows that 35% of women in India admit to watching pornography, this is a 22% rise compared to the 13% in 2003. The numbers have said enough. My turn now.

When it comes to watching porn, the words ‘woman’ and ‘porn’ do not go generally together. When it comes to women in porn, I cannot see them there either. I say that because a body with breasts and a vagina is a machine that caters to the whims and fancies of men. To all the three parties, the male performer, the director and the average man watching it on the internet. Modern day pornography projects women as mere objects with no feelings or desires of their own, all they can do is please the man, even when he slaps her or gags her or when 20 men have intercourse repeatedly with a woman whose hands and legs have been shackled, and she is screaming her lungs out. A woman is reduced to an animal that doesn’t have a voice of its own.

Most porn videos have just a penis on the screen whereas the woman or rightfully in this case – the machine, gets full focus. The high definition camera preys on her body and her face contorting in fake pleasure, all of this, so that the man watching it on the internet thinks HE is the one doing it, if the male performer in his entirety comes into the picture, it is said that the man watching the video is likely to be threatened by ‘Homoeroticism’. I can say this stands absolutely true, supposedly, for an Indian heterosexual male or the men on the bench of the apex judiciary body in our country, who are apparently too threatened. Hence, that inane verdict.

I remember watching a discussion on television on whether marital rape should be brought into the category of a non-bailable offence or not, wherein this woman, hiding behind her ghunghat accepted while tears ran down her face that she was raped by her husband again and again over the course of their marriage. She said he would come back home, drunk, watch ‘Blue Films’ and ask her to exactly do what’s been done in the movie. He forced himself upon her when she when she refused.

Pornography has been increasingly incorporating and sexualising aggression on the screen. Women are beaten, insulted, used, all of which is supposed to appear ‘normal and appropriate’; the fact that this is supposed to arouse/appeal to the male porn viewing population (which is substantially large in number) is extremely scary.

The objectification of women and the violence that comes along with it among many other things calls for a different kind of porn. Feminist porn.

When I asked a few people what ‘feminist porn’ meant to them, someone said it is ‘gay porn’, someone said “oh it is all about the dominatrix standing in a latex suit with a whip in her hand” and some didn’t even know how to comprehend it because to them the concept of feminist porn seemed unreal and alien. Feminist porn is all about sex as something that two people do together, consensually, something that has both the man and the woman on an equal footing. Feminist porn is all about real sex, it doesn’t shun the concept of rough or group sex, what it does is provide or support such a movie with detailed interviews by the performers as to what arouses or appeals to them and to what extent are they comfortable.

Feminist porn is also about dismantling stereotypes related to the notions of male sexuality. It is about conveying actual emotions, wherein it actually matters to the man what the woman needs or what the woman may like, surprisingly many straight men prefer this kind of porn than the hard-core pornography that is generally available. Strong headed independent women like Tristan Taormino and Candida Royalle, who believed in the concept of feminist porn, started way back in the 1990s to reform the kind of pornography that is made available to people. They believed in feminist porn because it was also about the female performers, if the kind of environment they worked in was consensual, fair and ethical and they actually enjoyed what they did and no act was against their wishes.

Feminist porn has also become synonymous with ‘Couple Porn’, something that a couple can enjoy watching together. There are so many dimensions to this concept of pornography, it would surprise you and make you think twice. It isn’t just pornography after all, it works at many levels in transforming the sexual culture of a society.

Violence in pornographic movies and to what extent it translates itself in real life is a difficult thing to predict, but it does make a huge difference. Remember when there were people during the Delhi Gang Rape last year who kept blaming pornography as something the accused had seen and learned from and regurgitated on the victim? It might have been true. We do not really know. Think.

What with 90 million copies of the Fifty Shades Trilogy sold and embraced by the womankind, one can very clearly see that the modern woman is someone who is sexually liberated and not afraid to let the partner know what she feels. She’s someone who refuses to identify herself with a taut blonde woman with collagen-filled lips, silicone filled assets and geometric tans as the image of the only kind of woman who’s ‘desirable’ but someone who demands the kind of pornography that doesn’t degrade her womanhood but does exactly, ethically, what needs to be done.

After all, why should boys have all the fun, eh?