What it is like to be a man in India is a very relevant topic but the least discussed one in the public domain. Coming to the topic of masculinity, it is a culture that is being promoted by Instagram SEOs, Movies, peer pressure, etc. Our youth needs to understand that these likes and comments are Social Media tactics used by advertising companies to generate revenue and once you are in that bubble it is a dopamine generating machine as Mr Cal Newport puts it in his book ‘Deep Work’.
Social media functions on validation tactics to make the youth addicted to it. Pornography is a big menace, Many people dismiss it as an unimportant issue to be worried about but we cannot play dumb to the potential impact it has on the mind of millennials. Most pornography is purely patriarchal in nature and promotes the objectification of women in particular.
The claims that it is somehow helping our youth to release their sexual pressure in this strict victorian society is purely vague and doesn’t qualify to be a valid argument against these serious issues. Most of the sites are not responsible for the content that they host, they do nothing to purge child pornography, and they make this argument that this is somehow women empowerment and gives employment to sexual minorities. To me, this sounds like a false claim.
They promote patriarchy, corrupt young minds, promote objectification, degrade women and sexual minorities, and destroy families. It degrades emotions like love, compassion, virtues, and ethics without which a relationship is incomplete. The internet should become something productive that allows people to learn new skills and generate employment. There is no reason that large partitions of web servers hold pornographic content and I strongly feel that even consensual pornography should not be encouraged as we are still promoting all the same things.
Values like chastity need to be freed from their patriarchal origins but shouldn’t be allowed to make space for promoting a culture of rape. With the current status quo, I feel that this trivia doesn’t have a large impact on young minds because there are good films that promote good values but that’s not enough we still need to do more. As Sadhguru puts it, we need to fill the internet with good content like films and articles to fight the negative ones.
We need to promote movies like ‘Udta Punjab‘, ‘Swadesh‘, ‘Bajrangi Bhaijaan‘, etc, not ones like ‘Student Of The Year‘. And as a final note from the book ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, I would like to stress the point that men need to understand the mind of women, to feel their feelings, to care for them, and be emotionally intelligent, use internet according to the prescribed code of ethics, be aware of ‘click-baits’, ‘Search Engine Optimization, and as extra note care of the society.