Back in 2015, an overwhelming number of women were posting on Reddit Gone Wild, an NSFW section of the networking site that is a safe space to share nude selfies. The popular sub-reddit (it currently has over 1.4 million subscribers) gave 24-year-old Anisha and two of her women friends an idea. They would click such pictures — keeping their faces out — and share them with each other instead of posting them online. “It was very liberating and validating to share those deeply personal pictures with women and see candid images of the female form,” she says of the experience. And in the process, according to Richa Kaul Padte’s debut book, Cyber Sexy , they were creating “unofficial porn”.
Anisha’s story reiterates that Indian women have sexual desires, actively use the Internet to explore sexuality, and create and consume porn. This is bolstered by the statistics of a 2017 survey by the website PornHub: 30% of the website’s Indian visitors are women — 6% higher than the global average. We see that the idea of porn itself is subjective — the women were sharing their photos consensually. But the digital space is a tightrope of consent and its violations. The land’s laws could ignore consent and label it as an offence — under Section 67 of the IT Act — for “publishing and transmitting electronic material that is obscene”. This is what the book is about — the overlapping worlds of sexuality and technology for millennials and beyond.
From the beginning
Cyber Sexy begins by declassifying the meaning of porn itself. Sexting? Erotic literature? Cam-shows? Khajuraho? Role-play on chatrooms? Everything is porn. Nothing is porn. Kaul Padte says, “For me, it was an attempt to diversify the word. Because everyone has some idea of what it means, and these ideas don’t match up.” These include notions of sexiness, curiosity, what turns people on, and the Victorian ideals of morality and censorship.
Her earlier writing explores women’s freedoms and sexual rights in the digital world — Kaul Padte is managing editor at Deep Dives, a blog with in-depth stories about sex, gender, and technology. She also works with SexualityAndDisability.org, a website that acknowledges the fact that women who are disabled are sexual beings as well. So, when in 2013, the Indian union banned porn, she was compelled to respond. “These proposals said a lot of things, but something that kept coming up was that women needed to be protected from porn,” she recalls. In her book, she asks, “Vulnerable who?”, adding that women seem to know exactly what they want and where they can find it!
Power to choose
Consider this: Yumna Alam and her friends, who were studying in an all-girls college in Delhi University in 2010, began exploring a group video-chat portal. “We had heard that people really put themselves out there, and were curious to experience it for ourselves,” says Alam. “There were a lot of men from different countries sitting nude before their webcams,” she shares, adding that while she found it disturbing on many levels, “we could move to other groups of people”. This power to choose is not always available in real life. Women are using this power to be sexual beings — as a user name, an online avatar, an IP address, a VPN, and as consumers and producers of sexy .
To illustrate this power, Kaul Padte’s book uses anecdotes from women (who shared their stories with her in response to Twitter calls) as well as from her own life. And while the sample size and representation is questionable, the drawing-room candidness invited me to stay in its universe, provoking memories of my own sexual explorations. That’s exactly what the 30-year-old author had envisioned. “I wanted to create something that other girls and women could hold in their hands, that could allow them to feel less alone,” she says.
Learn and grow
Cyber Sexy attempts to be inclusive, talking to people on the intersections of disability (blindness), marginalised genders and sexualities (trans, asexual), range of desires (MILF, BDSM, as you please), and men. The book also incorporates definitions for terms like Tinder, consent, patriarchy, Section 377... why? “My grandma is reading this book as we speak, and I don’t want her, or anyone, to feel like it’s full of things they don’t understand. I want the book to be accessible, and I really hope it is,” she says.
It aims to be educative, for a country where our sexual education is the stuff of celibate peacocks impregnating peahens with their tears. Stand-up comic Aditi Mittal says, “As a kid, the only time I saw people engage in sexual contact was in rape scenes in Bollywood films!” The internet has been an admirable step-in for many, giving us Erika Lust’s feminist porn and all the sites, fanfiction, and sub-reddits that Kaul Padte devoured in her research. Yet, it is not always this rosy picture of discovery and fulfilment. We still have ‘rape videos’, revenge porn, ‘MMS scandals’, changing-room videos. Like desire, we did not learn the vocabulary of consent.
In an ideal world, the dominant ones are not the only people calling the shots, no crime is committed in filming that passionate home-video and the nudie is uploaded without coercion. The book will leave you longing for such consent, both on and offline. But now, even as we continue to lead less-than-sexy lives, we will start asking the difficult questions.
