An encounter with porn: Confession of a youth.

It was a lazy summer noon when I, in my late childhood, accidentally encountered with pictures of few nude women along with naked men exhibiting different postures of peno-vaginal, oral and anal sex. Those pictures were in a form of a booklet, colored printed on glossy sheets. I exactly don’t know to whom it belonged to because those were lying on floors of the baitaka, the room at the ground floor of our joint house, used by only men of the house and open for almost everyone, the workers of the house, the various uncles from the neighbor and numerous of other. It was mid nineties, India had just leaped in to the global market by its liberalization-privatization-globalization policies and the computer revolution was in its nascent stage. The booklet with naked and nude pictures was my first encounter with the porn, though I was completely unaware of both - the sexual activity or the porn industry. The first thought which came to my Freudian’s superego governed mind was that those pictures are obscene and shouldn’t be viewed by me as my mom had trained me and my other siblings to close our eyes during romantics scenes if happen to be in bollywood movies (quite rare during the nineties). The moral critic of superego maintained in me for quiet a time the guilt sense of watching nude pictures in my conscious mind but I succeeded in keeping the secret till date (I am not the one with poor digestion for secrets…lol).

As time passes by, I entered my teens, infatuated by Ms. Kusum (pseudoname), English teacher of my school during 8^th grade; one of my class-fellow brought those same porn booklets in his school bag and later exhibited in our friend circle very sheepishly when we all bunked after the lunch break to the community park near to our school. I was encouraged by my gang to shed off the Freudian superego and enjoy the booklet without being guilty. India continued to progress leaps and bounds under FDI and Internet Revolution globally. It was year 2008, all thanks to the android developers and the Korean-Chinese telecom companies who made internet easily accessible and affordable by my pocket I could have the multi-media phone of my own. My friend asked me for the memory card of my phone and after few minutes handed back to me saying that he has given me something “hot” to watch. Later in night when I was all alone on the terrace (I don’t had a room of my own but had to share it with my younger brother) I opened my memory card and not to my surprise, found numerous of them – the porn videos.

I scrolled through the list of the videos and miniature photos of the scene accompanied by the details confused to an extent which one to watch first, I choose the shortest one on the basis of size of the videos. To my luck it was a very intimate scene between a couple which filled in me the tantalizing sense of excitement often felt by young adult like me. I was encouraged to see more of them. I went back to the main list and this time chose the one on top. It was soft porn and most of them were soft porn. At that moment I wasn’t aware of anything like soft or hard porn, they were just porn. I continued watching them for an hour and forgot that I was been looked all over the house by my younger brother, I heard him calling me loudly. I went to our room unhappy because I cannot watch there. The next day I waited for the night to return so that I may find privacy to watch porn. This continued for two or four days but here come the twist, though I was no longer governed by the superego mind and the guilt feeling, I found myself kinda bored by the videos, all having the same activity, albeit different faces. I was no longer interested in watching them.

I am 29 now, happily married and have twin sons, my wife; a cancerian (though I do not believe in horoscope and the birth stars) is very romantic and sensuous and I have the latest smart-phone. The porn videos are one finger touch far from me.  I am tempted to watch them; I hit the search button of my phone and an endless list of porn videos appear before me. I click one of them and very soon felt nauseated. Why? There’s too much violence in the video, male forcing their female counterparts to involve in oral and anal sex, the hard porn is vehemently biased, male-hegemonic and fervently unequal in power structure. I am appalled by the sexual activity carried out in the video. The tantalizing sensation which I once felt on the terrace of my home is long gone and dismay and despair fills in. I chose not to watch them anymore.