Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Sexual ethics, India style

Earlier this year, Playboy ran their usual The Year in Sex feature. This time, one of the intriguing items they picked up from last year was an Indian online porn comic, Savita Bhabhi (NSFW), subtitled The sexual adventures of a Hot Indian Bhabhi. Here's an example panel from the second comic:



As you can guess, she'll think of something.

The art isn't bad, but what makes the comic interesting is that it's written according to a different code of sexual ethics from ours. I mean, Western countries produce bored-horny-housewife porn in gigantic amounts, so much that practically everyone is aware of the sexual ramifications of the plumber and the pizza delivery guy.

Savita Bhabhi, despite being a horny bored housewife, is still an Indian bored horny housewife, and a code of ethics must be adhered to. This is particularly evident in the first comic, and worth a short look.

(Of course, even this has been severely condemned in India, according to a news report:
"I am certain that the activity of the website is illegal and anti-social. It violates Section 67 of ITA 2000 and several other provisions of IPC. In my opinion this site is more dangerous than a normal adult site since it targets young Indian audience and degrades women," said Vijayashankar, director of Cyber Crime Complaints and Resolution Assistance Center and techno legal information security consultant presently based in Bangalore.

He said it is possible that the publishing of the story itself (if the URL is revealed) would be falling in the grey area of "promoting obscene content" and could invite objections.

Oops, I published the URL too. It's good to know Indian "cybercrime" laws are advanced enough that publishing the URL of a website can be illegal. Wait, that sounds familiar...)

This is the setup:



The dude ringing the doorbell immediately wins my Grand Prize for Most Improbable Porn Profession Ever by introducing himself as "a travelling bra salesman". I think everyone can figure out how it goes from there, but I'll summarize it anyway. She tells him she's not interested, so the guy ha a brainwave and asks if he might come in and have a glass of water. She agrees, and he talks her into trying on a bra. As she does so in the other room, he watches her disrobe via a convenient mirror.

She notices, and is horrified. Then again, she thinks, "what harm can it do" if he sees her breasts? She ends up seducing him, but when he finally gets down to the act, she is horrified again and protests, only to meekly succumb when he doesn't stop.

The ethics at play are fascinating. In a Western porno, she'd just be a horny housewife who wants some dick, and that would be that. In this comic, though, things aren't that simple.

It's possible to read Savita's refusal and subsequent surrender as a slightly disturbing implied rape, but there's a more interesting undercurrent as well. By attempting to refuse, she changes the ethics of the situation. Obviously, according to the code of ethics present in the comic, adultery is immoral. When Savita tries ot refuse the man she's just seduced, she acknowledges this, and her refusal makes her a victim of adultery as opposed to a perpetrator. Then again, any patriarchal culture, and India certainly is one, would also view the man as a victim. After all, who could resist the charms of Savita Bhabhi?

If she straightforwardly seduced the traveling bra salesman, she'd be an adulteress. If he seduced her, he'd be guilty of seducing another man's wife. When, on the other hand, she seduces him but attempts to refuse him when it's already "too late", the situation is changed from a perpetrated crime into the curious opposite of a victimless crime: a perpetratorless crime that only has victims. Clearly she is not totally to blame, as she did try to refuse; clearly he is not totally to blame as he was provoked unreasonably.

This is a wonderful example of the kind of doublethink that our cultural attitudes on sexuality, and our desire to get around them, impose. It also serves to illustrate an important point in the politics and ethics of sexuality as understood in patriarchal culture. Female sexuality is powerful and must be controlled, goes the unspoken dictum. Why? The core reason is that according to patriarchal thought, men cannot resist womens' sexual advances. It's not a question of the power of women but of the weakness of men.

To me, as a man, this has always been one of the most repellent features of patriarchal sexual thought: the idea that I cannot be held responsible for my actions if I am "provoked". It's blatantly obvious what the logic is: the ages-old idea of shifting blame for sex crimes onto the victim. This is the reality of patriarchy in action: if a woman is raped, it's her fault. This is taken to its logical extreme by several different cultures in the institution of the "honor killing", where a woman is murdered by her relatives for being raped.

(It's worthy of a brief note that despite what islamophobes would have you believe, honor killings have nothing to do with Islam as such. They're practised everywhere in the world where patriarchal cultures exist, from Brazil to Bangladesh, and are only really absent in the affluent and secularized West. There's a fair post on the topic here.)

This idea tried to make its way into Finnish legistlation about ten years back. The current law recognizes rape and aggravated rape; a proposal was put forward to include "mild rape" as a lesser form of rape, and accepted. Currently there is a lesser crime of "coercion into sexual intercourse":

Section 3 - Coercion into sexual intercourse (563/1998)
(1) If the rape, in view of the slight degree of the violence or threat and the other particulars of the offence, is deemed to have been committed under mitigating circumstances when assessed as a whole, the offender shall be sentenced for coercion into sexual intercourse to imprisonment for at most three years.

There was a lot of public debate on what these "mitigating circumstances" could entail, and typically for Finnish legistlation, it is entirely undefined. Public discussion revolved around the idea that if the woman being raped was wearing a miniskirt, then it isn't rape.

I don't know how Finnish courts are deciding on the issue, but the fact that that piece of legistlation exists seems to point toward the idea of female irresistability being alive and well in the 21st century.

On a more cheerful note, the comic itself ain't bad. If you're interested, check out Episode 3 for the most improbable blow job ever. (don't you think someone would notice?!)

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