Thanks to Manish and the rest of the Sepia Mutineers for welcoming me to guest-blog here.
There’s a new Bollywood film out carrying the same name as one from the early ’80s. However, while the old movie was directed by Shyam Benegal and is a modern take on the Mahbharata, the new one is a Mahesh Bhatt production, directed by Mohit Suri, about the international pornography trade. The 2005 version of Kalyug follows the idea of an age of decline, but focuses on sexual degeneracy specifically. At least in the (intentionally?) punningly titled article “Kalyug exposes porn trade,” the movie is entirely negative about this industry. Says Bhatt,
I got the idea of making Kalyug after reading the India Today article on a honeymooning couple, whose lovemaking scenes were recorded in a hotel and distributed throughout the world. People all over the world want to see reality sex, not fictional sex. Human trafficking has become big business everywhere; it’s the third largest international crime after drugs and the arms trade. Desi Indian women and porn sites are a huge craze abroad. That’s why victims of natural disasters like famines and earthquakes are sold for these pornographic rackets. They are drugged, brutalised and blackmailed into joining the flesh trade.
Unless there’s been a rash of incidents of this type, I assume Bhatt refers to the episode reported by the Times of India and more sensationally by NDTV and the Chandigarh Tribune, in which presumably the tape was not made available to the world, as the groom smashed a window to try to grab the cameramen. If the entire movie is as black-and-white as the reviews’ quotes of Bhatt imply — portraying pornography as an evil into which unknowing or disadvantaged innocents are drawn — I’m unsurprised that Sunny Leone wasn’t interested in taking part. She appears to be making a healthy living on softcore and probably wouldn’t want to help inspire any new crusades to ban her meal ticket.
Pornography is generally tacky and occasionally genuinely abusive of the people who take part in it, especially of women. At the same time, it has protection under freedom of speech. The line walked in the U.S. can be bizarre: pornography is legal as long as all the participants are consenting adults, but prostitution mostly is illegal(with the exception of some areas of Nevada). So hiring a prostitute just to have sex with you can land you in jail, but you can keep from being prosecuted if you hire a director, producer and cinematographer, have one of them pay the prostitute, and then distribute the movie.
Kalyug is rumored to be “fairly tame” in actual sexual content, and sounds like a half-assed attempt to crusade against something that few people would support publicly. Taping someone doing anything, much less having sex, when he has a reasonable expectation of privacy is not only wrong, it’s grounds for a lawsuit in the U.S. But this is a fairly atypical way to make pornography, and indeed hardly desirable from a professional’s point-of-view; the people being filmed may be unattractive, fail to show themselves to advantage, etc.
A worthwhile film about pornography would show the complexities of this huge business. For example, what is going on in the mind of Hugh Hefner’s daughter, who sees no ideological conflict between simultaneously supporting feminist causes and maintaining the Playboy empire? How does Sunny Leone’s family really feel about her career? How does the average man reconcile his enjoyment of porn with his desire not to have his daughter ever go into it? There are so many questions to ask about the people involved in a morally ambiguous business like this, and to reduce the issue to Porn Is Bad misses them all.
If you’re wondering about the title of this post, you clearly haven’t seen Avenue Q, and I urge you to do so (or at least listen to the soundtrack) as soon as possible.
welcome PG…..
Parental Guidance ??
PG, I totally agree with you. I’m a huge first amendment proponent and sometimes I have a hard time reconciling that with my own personal view points re: porn.
I remember watching porn in college with some friends out of curiosity. I could handle the soft porn ok, but I had to leave when the hard porn started. I just feel like women are portrayed as nothing but receptacles in some of them.
And then, the next day I had a meeting with my advisor for career planning, and all I could think about when I was in his office, was whether or not he’d seen that movie (I was told it was popular), and how did it affect the way he looked at young females, if it affected it at all? What about that guy? Had he seen it? Was he thinking about it right now?
I know guys watch porn, and I agree that it’s important to think about it how it colors their perspective on females, and how it colors the perspective of females in the industry as well. I think the madonna/whore complex is alive and well in our society, and porn probably plays a huge part in it.
The Internet is for porn/ The Internet is for porn/ Grab your dick, and double click, For porn, porn, porn
/end song and dance
(thanks Trekkie monstor 🙂
I’ve wondered that, too. I worry about how it affects both men and women. Because it does.
I also wonder about the people who go into the business, whether they supposedly choose to or not.
There are apparently quite a few good blogs supposedly written by women in the flesh trade from what I have heard. Some even landed book deals and the like. They definitely give the idea they were in it out of choice. I thought it was interesting to note how they balanced certain ‘appointments’ and then headed straight for their boyfriends. Very matter of fact about the whole situation.
the net was born so we call all be aware of awesome bands, like SWAMI (www.swamimusic.com)
Here are links to a book, Pornified and its review dealing with this subject in detail.
IMO, India has this business of secret cameras in hotel rooms etc precisely because porn is illegal.
The same way an average woman reconciles her enjoyment of porn with her desire not to have her son ever go into it!
If you have to ask rhetorical questions, please make them gender neutral.
How does the average person reconcile his/her flushing the toilet or generating two bags of garbage every week with his/her desire not to have his/her child to become a sewage worker or garbage collector?
M. Nam
But some things just aren’t gender neutral. The madonna-whore complex only applies to women. We got the short end of the stick on that double standard.
nah!!! The tagline should be – “Kalyug has another excuse to show porn trade”
Oh please call it Malyug, Chalyug but not Shyam Benegal-Shashi Kapoor’s original “Kalyug”…sigh.
when it comes to porn, it might be that the most potent moral voices in this immoral world might come from those who’ve actually done it. Kind of like good old-fashioned sex in that way. Moral ambiguity may be a safe-haven from the peddlers of middle-class guilt, and admittedly, it is hard to distinguish, in that lurid light off the monitors, between who’s the improvident grandaddy and who’s the dirty old man. But still we need a palpable counterpoint. Like let’s all admit Madonna is a whore (her latest song still bangs though)
Or
we could have a movie on pornography that doesn’t have anything to do with real life. 🙂
Commenting on Mahesh Bhatt’s rants or anyone in the Hindi movie industry is a waste of time. This is one of the better articles I’ve read on this blog (I liked your style, didn’t dig the content though). Nice to have you @ SM.
I saw this documentary on HBO about the porn industry and it said:
1) Porn industry is controlled and managed to a large extent by women.
2) Women earn many times more than men for a role.
Does the porn industry discriminate against men or are women compensated more because their roles are inherently more degrading or is there a smaller supply of female porn actors than male porno star wannabes or is it because porn customers are mostly men?
Does this qualify as gender based discrimination?
How does the average person reconcile his/her flushing the toilet or generating two bags of garbage every week with his/her desire not to have his/her child to become a sewage worker or garbage collector?
On the contrary, I think most people would find it entirely acceptable for a child who may lack the talent or intelligence for other professions to become a sewage worker or garbage collector, but not a sex worker. We see sex work as different for multiple reasons: concerns about health and safety; fear of social condemnation and psychological harm; job insecurity (unlike the unionized jobs of garbage and sewer worker, where an employee is guaranteed to be paid more as he gets older and to get a pension when he retires).
As for the gender discriminatory terminology, the majority of live-action pornography is marketed toward and consumed by men. The amount of “lesbian” porn that’s meant to appeal to actual lesbians is laughably small compared the amount that’s oriented toward men. Yes, it’s making a generalization about the nature of the porn industry that misses the minority of women who are part of the demand, but so do discussions of sexual assault that assume men to be the predators and women the victims, or of domestic violence that does the same.
If women are paid more, it’s probably partly because the industry actually requires higher standards of appearance for women, whereas ugly men are welcome as long as they’re well endowed (Ron Jeremy).
The books by prostitutes mostly seem to be by the high-end hookers, like Belle de Jour or Tracy Quan, rather than by street workers. Women who command hundreds of dollars per hour probably have a different perspective on the business than women who work for $20 a job.