On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 6:46 AM, Shoba Narayan <sh...@shobanarayan.com>wrote:
> > The principal ground of the petition is that pornography is > > directly linked to the rise in heinous sexual offences against women. > > Is this true though? Can it be proved through numbers and studies? > If this is true, why was there not an explosion of sexual crimes when porn became freely available on the internet, about 20 years ago? I believe that, within reason, human beings need more outlets, especially in our repressed, prudish, hypocritical society. The more we ban things, the more we make a moral issue out of them, and the more we push them underground, where problems continue to simmer and fester out of sight, occasionally erupting in unbearable ways. There are no easy solutions...but a ban (how on earth are they to enforce this?) is, to my mind, not the answer. I have talked to both young women and men (far fewer of the former, given the taboos in our society) who say that when things are very frustrating at work, watching porn, and the subsequent release, act as a relief valve. But we have such a stigma about every part of our sexuality...one of the things my American son-in-law first remarked upon was the total absence of open physical context between couples, whether they were married or not. It simply is Not Done to touch someone you love in public...I see this, even now, with young people. I would call different sexual preferences "perverted" when it involves hurting someone else, with or without that person's consent, or knowledge. Such perversion, I think, has always existed...porn or not. Cain murdered Abel before violent movies were being screened. Deepa.
