Deepa Bhasthi explores the implications of the ubiquity of the word ‘porn’.
Sex sells. It is a truth as old as the waves of time. Advertisers knew that then and now. So did the women standing on the corners of L-shaped streets. Strange though, the politics of words. Words—those to which I as a writer shall say, “let’s play” when I begin a day’s work—how political and feministic, or not, how utterly political they are.
Sex is a mere act, devoid of the pleasantness and acceptance of making love. Naked is raw, nude is artistic, poetic. ‘Yajamana’ in Kannada is husband, but literally means the one who owns you. The less aggressive title of ‘ganda’ is rare. In the mouthing of the former is a hidden reiteration of where your place is, at the man’s feet, born to do his bidding. Words are the weapons of the passive violent to cut into your soul and show you the place they assign you to occupy.
Then there is porn. What a dirty word it is. You round your mouth around it, like a sex act and then withdraw, hesitant, unsure towards the tail end of its pronunciation, like it were illegal, illicit, too dirty for the drawing room. In its illicit meaning lies hidden the special appeal that oils its money-spinning machinery.
What a dirty word ‘porn’ is. You round your mouth around it, like a sex act and then withdraw, hesitant, unsure towards the tail end of its pronunciation, like it were illegal, illicit, too dirty for the drawing room.
Porn. Here is one word that straddles its illegitimacy and its universality with much aplomb these days. It’s everywhere. And I don’t mean in the thousands upon thousands of websites that exist, several free, for every kind of fetish in your possession—old on young, old on old, sugar daddy, cougar, MILF and just so, so much more. Porn is in every pretty thing you see, seems like.
The other day one of the yoga websites I read, for occasional inspiration to get on my yoga mat, had an article about yoga porn. The writer wrote about how photos of scantily clad, white, thin, pretty girls practicing extremely hard asanas against picture-postcard perfect locations amounted to porn and that it led to low esteem, furthered damaging body images among the young while quietly hammering onto popular consciousness a certain stereotype of who could practice yoga. Such images are dime a dozen on Instagram and elsewhere. The article, very predictably, created a furore, mostly from thin, white, very bendy yoga practitioners who argued that there was nothing wrong in these images and that they motivated people to start practicing yoga.
What was lost in all the noise that was generated, as is wont in case of all Internet arguments these days, was that the writer of the original article had also said that yoga, the true essence of yoga, was all about letting go of the ego, being mindful of the body and seeing within. The yoga selfies and gorgeous yoga shoots were narcissistic and pandered to the ego, to the materialistic and sexualised the practice. The heated debates continue.
Meanwhile, my interest was in the use of the word ‘porn’ in the context. Yoga is only the latest to fetch itself this suffix. Food has long suffered the dubious honour, perhaps from the time Instagram settled into popular culture. In the summer months of 2014 when I and some friends were conceiving The Forager, the quarterly online journal of food politics that I edit, food porn was the first thing we unceremoniously dismissed. We were clear we wanted to steer away from the porn culture, from the pretty pictures that sexualised everything we put into our mouths.
This of course did not mean that we failed to recognise the potency of a dish to be sensual. Most of us cook, and the aphrodisiacal qualities of a well-put-together meal for a partner was something we knew very well about. But the blatant sexualising of every morsel was something we decided to head in the opposite direction of.
Then just this morning, a beautiful photo I saw somewhere, a long shot of a beach with people silhouetted against a fading blue sky was hash-tagged as earthporn. Seriously! Then my personal favourite—book porn. The last time I checked, there was still an active Tumblr account under that name, featuring some truly amazing photographs of libraries from around the world.
Everything is a hashtag. Everything is porn these days. Some days I am like the old grandma grumbling for the days of our youth when things were simpler and porn was porn—forbidden, bad, and for all those delicious reasons, just as attractive.
Everything is a hashtag. Everything is porn these days. Some days I am like the old grandma grumbling for the days of our youth when things were simpler and porn was porn—forbidden, bad, and for all those delicious reasons, just as attractive. On other days, I let my mind play with the notion that perhaps this is the people power taking back the word porn, reclaiming it, “normalising” it, making it just another word. Just another word like sex, not wholly approved of, but grudgingly tolerated for being so commonplace.
But then I think that this reclaiming—a concept I find a tad pretentious and wholly dubious for its ineffectiveness—is restricted to the hashtaggers, to the very small minority of the country that has access to words like ‘hashtags’ and ‘porn’ that is not the porn they know of. Is there a point to this reclaiming, the cynic in me wonders.
Then, of course, despair sets in at how this careless, flippant use of the word sexualises all that is already just about the physical, the body. The society is highly sexualised, the one we live in today. That is common knowledge. With no sign of a turnaround—although how that could even be possible, I don’t know—it is only getting more and more sexualised. In the way we dress, speak, communicate, entertain, every damn little thing. Even in the way we make love, touched by books, internet, films, everything that tells us to behave a certain way.
What if the word porn, in its innocuous avatar, began to be used in more contexts? If everything pretty and pleasant became porn, then need we reapply, reexamine the idea of beauty itself?
What if the word porn, in its innocuous avatar, began to be used in more contexts? What if a child was its prefix? Or a moral perhaps? If everything pretty and pleasant became porn, then need we reapply, reexamine the idea of beauty itself?
Some questions are not easily answered. Actually, when you boil it down to proper scrutiny, a lot of questions cannot be easily answered. Porn has moved on from its rather linear meanings on to much more complicated narratives. The word is no longer a word. And therein lies the dilemma.
Speaking of words, there is something called word porn as well. Pretty words, quotable quotes, inspiring lines, sloppy phrases, that kind of thing. When a word itself becomes porn what of the word porn then? I wonder.
