Rushdie turns India's air blue
pots of money, with the stakes only growing higher as technology improves
pots of money, with the stakes only growing higher as technology improves
He has asserted that pornography exists everywhere, but when it comes to societies in which it is difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, pornography satisfies a more general need. Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, has written in the foreword to XXX:30 that America is a puritanical society fettered with unnecessary constraints.
Here in India, views on porn take every hue. In a recent article in the national daily Hindustan Times, following the Rushdie generated debate, noted Bollywood director Mahesh Bhatt, known for his free-spirited movies, life and views says: "I have always maintained that there's nothing degrading in the displaying of any part of the human body. This amazing creation of mother nature is also considered by Hinduism as a gift so special that you are only worthy of it after several rebirths as other lowly creatures. And those who are embarrassed or offended by the display of it are those whose minds have been damaged by ideology - religious or feminist - just because we have pornography in movies today does not mean it did not exist earlier.
Siddharth Srivastava /AsiaTimes 18.Aug.04
There's a lot of givens there.
"satisfies a more general need" being a kind of universal assumption of highest good.
That wants and desires are being satisfied is all we need to know.
That's the merchants' credo, and we're now four generations deep into a race that has heard that constantly, from birth.
That there might be something even higher than the satisfaction of individual desires, that religion may in fact still be with us, in this enlightened and enlightening time, because it treats of those higher things, well it just confuses the issue.
Further confusing things is the obvious and criminal warping of sexuality in the young by the puritanical self-interests of religious proscribers, the censors and prim authorities that outlaw pictures and words that pertain to sex and the organs of reproduction, while most of them at the same time pass along freely, to open and trusting young minds, pictures of horrible violence and grisly death.
So the reaction to that is, reject the censorship - here kids! Here's a picture of a man with another man's fist up his ass, enjoy!
I'm speaking to the images now, because that's where the scam shifts gears. There's only a minimal connection between the picture of an act and the act itself. We're losing that distinction, not because it isn't there, but because we're being led away from reality.
The main problem is the framing of the issue as a duality.
Puritanism wrong, hedonism good, or vice versa, take your pick.
Total acceptance versus total repression what's it gonna be?
The idea that they're both manifestations of the same sick thing, covering its bets - well, that's too complex.
Sort of like American politics right now. The idea that the same powers that put Bush in the White House have Kerry in their pocket as well...unthinkable. So the legitmate outrage that the last four years have created is channeled precisely into the next step of a much larger plan.
It's the bank shot, where the ball seems to be heading directly away from its goal, until it hits the bumper at the edge of the table.
So we have the puritans, and then the bounce away from them toward libertine freedom. And it's presented as a binary dilemma. One or the other.
My point would be the suspicious nature of binary dilemmas generally. And the consistent appearance of this scam, the way it traps us into thinking we've chosen the direction we were intended to take.
Pornography is not the issue. Health is, health and human progress, and control. My point would be the same control structure's running both sides of this seeming conflict, and as long as we fight on its terms, on its field, it wins.
