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“Curiosity killed the cat.”

Yeah, but what difference does it make anyway? Those lucky souls are blessed with eight more lives! But life ain’t as generous with the guys as it is with the felines. More, there are enough unanswerable questions that can haunt them for more than nine lives without breaking a sweat. (Excluding the ones in the exam papers, that is.) So to know what’s happening all around, they invented television and internet; the telescope was invented to know what’s out there, and to know what’s IN there, they invented pornography.

Yes, porn, despite being a taboo, is today an integral part of almost everybody’s life today. It’s like watching any other movie sans the piracy issues and the popcorn bill. If one thinks she/he has no idea of what’s being talked of here, well, it’s high time one stopped lying to oneself. Everyone knows that almost everyone else is one of those been-there-done-that kinds. After all, how could the film industry boom despite so many flops?

The Birds, the Bees and the Butterflies

“It’s fun. In a nutshell, you can call it ‘edutainment.’ There are some things that are not taught in the classrooms, but it’s only if you have knowledge about them that we can have all right the things in all right the places, if you know what I mean,” quips Dhanukonda Ravi Teja, a student of St. Martin’s College of Engineering on being asked why so many people are into watching porn. It’s not often that you find parents who sit their kids down and declare, “It’s time!” So haunted by the dwelling riddles, one delves into finding the answers. “Porn can be informative as you get to know what you didn’t know earlier, and it’s only then do all the ads about being
protected make sense to you,” says Krishna Kanth, a student of Bharat College of Engineering.

Well, if the question is “Why porn?” the answer is just a bundle of a lot more questions — curiosity. It’s not a crime to be curious, is it? Had the first monkey not been curious, would the human race have gotten to where it is today? So it’s not surprising that it is this curiosity that is driving what is a multi-billion dollar industry today. And all that money didn’t just rain from the heavens. It is representative of what a major cluster of the society, especially the young, relates to, but is just too scared to acknowledge. And yeah, OF COURSE it’s fun! Considering that a pale, dead vampire guy can give butterflies to almost every other girl on the planet (Whoa! It seems like we don’t need the sanctuaries anymore!), a sensible person would need absolutely no explanation as to why porn is so famous with the boys.

Pants on Fire

“Most of the times people are just too scared to admit that they are into watching porn primarily because they feel embarrassed to talk about something that’s considered a taboo. Hence, they lie about it,” says Sri Ram Vishwanath, a student of CVSR college of Engineering. To even speak of something like pornography is a taboo in a country like ours which is a land of saints, sages and philosophers. Fair enough. But is someone forgetting something?  Isn’t this country also the birthplace of that philosopher who produced one of the most widely read (and appreciated) Indian books in the world? Why is porn not considered as a neo-expressionistic manifestation of Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra? But no! Here, only the ‘big people’ get to use the ‘big words.’ Broadmindedness is only a choice made by a small lot of ‘big people’ on the behalf of everyone. Not to mention Khajuraho, which even the tourism department endorses as one of the tourist destinations. And since one has no clear idea of what’s art and what’s not, everybody finds it very easy to lie than to debate.

A click away. Credits: Wording Noise

And yeah, even girls, (ESPECIALLY the ones) who put up unearthly expressions of being nauseated, when even something close to this four-lettered word is uttered, are into either reading or watching porn, (Well, reaction follows knowledge, doesn’t it?) only they don’t call it porn.  “We have books like Mills and Boon which should actually fall in the genre of the ‘romantic novels’ but lately people have been reading it for the ‘rush’ and some ‘cheap thrills’ as the stories have become monotonous with some creativity only in the adult content,” says Nidhi Inani, a student of JNA&FAU.  “Well, I’ll say Sydney Sheldon’s novels have more adult content than something like M&B. In the latter, everything is described in a pleasant and an exciting way,” says Sowmya, a student of GNITS.  And that is pretty much a myth-buster, ain’t it?

Let’s just say that this is a rampant phenomenon that pretends to be hidden, yet denying being visible.

Horns or Halo?

Studies have shown that with the growth of the adult industry, the sexual assaults per capita took a detrimental trend. But there were also studies which showed just the opposite. “We develop a queer way of looking at the opposite gender. Everything will seem like it has a dubious angle to it. This can be very distracting and disturbing,” says Kiriti Krishna of CVR College of Engineering as he points out what the obsession can lead to. “Almost all of my friends watch porn and I am pretty sure none of them is a serial rapist or demented psychopath. Even some of the nerd-o-licious, oh-so-naïve-looking ones watch porn, and they do it for nothing more than refreshment. So it all depends on you how you take it,” says Sri Charan Panchavaty of the same college. In a nutshell, every coin has a flipside, every perception has a bias and every decision has a choice.

It’s one’s choice whether or not one decides to go about with a broadminded perspective.

But the naked truth is: Curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back.