When New York City was struggling to deal with the spike in Covid-19 cases a year ago, Sanya Virani, a forensic psychiatry fellow at Brown University, began studying how her friends in the city were coping with the stress and anxiety induced by the pandemic. She soon realised that the consumption of pornography was a common underlying factor. She then teamed up with colleagues in the Global Mental Health Think Tank, a network of researchers led by Victor Pereira-Sanchez, an academic child and adolescent psychiatrist at New York University and Columbia University, to understand the global phenomenon of internet and pornography abuse during the pandemic. Their work was published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.
In the paper, the authors reported data to show the rise in pornography use during lockdowns in different countries. Virani was “shocked”to find that “India ranked the highest in terms of porn consumption during the pandemic among all nations”. This was based on the number of hits Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site, received from each country during lockdown.
“Covid-19 has changed everything,” said Virani. “We have seen that there is a surprising relationship between the moment in which the confinement is declared in each country and its highest porn consumption. This says a lot about the way people consume porn. I recall how on August 28 last year, when there was a technical error on Zoom (a virtual meeting app) and it stopped working for close to six hours, the consumption of pornography skyrocketed and a peak of 6.8 per cent increase in porn usage was noticed. This can mean that when a person is in front of a screen and does not know what to do, he turns to pornography.”
Pereira-Sanchez added: "This phenomenon of switching to pornography in moments of 'forced abstinence' from other activities and subsequent boredom had already be seen in the past, for example when the massive online multiplayer video game Fortnite was shut down for 24 hours in April 2018 due to the crashing of its servers. Another concerning aspect of this pornography surge during COVID-19 that merits further attention and research during COVID-19 is its extent and impact among children and adolescents, for which screens and the internet became the default medium the learning, socialisation, and leisure in times of lockdown".
Interestingly, the social isolation and ensuing depression during the pandemic led India to bag the first place, two places up from its number three position in 2018, indicating the country’s ever-growing appetite for porn.
In an email interview, Chris Jackson, communications director at Pornhub, said the past one and a half years had witnessed an unprecedented demand for adult content from India. There was a 90 per cent rise in traffic on March 24, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a nationwide lockdown.
“There is no doubt that the pandemic in India has brought about more sexual content to the fore,”said author Seema Anand, who gives lectures on Kamasutra and eastern erotology. “But research has proved that every pandemic over the millennia led to a huge explosion of erotica, including erotic literature.” And this urge for a “release”, she said, was triggered every single time people were confined.
This increased demand for adult content has also led to an increase in its production. “If I can see a mushrooming of adult content-related activities (both consumption and generation) in almost every household in Mumbai in the last 18 months, you can imagine what the national picture might be like,”said Milind Bharambe, joint commissioner of police (crime). He said hundreds of local desi over-the-top (OTT) platforms full of erotic and explicit content came up overnight during the pandemic-induced lockdown, capitalising on the absence of a regulatory mechanism.
A survey by Inc42, which highlights how the viewership for explicit content on OTT platforms shot up, supports Bharambe’s arguments. While analysing the traffic on streaming platforms such as The Cinema Dosti, Feneo Movies, Fliz Movies and Kooku, a visible and consistent trend was the progressive increase in visits as the country went into lockdown, in some cases by as much as 80 per cent.
Most of these platforms have a subscription model that involves payments starting from Rs 36 a month. "Indians have always been known to favour and view adult content. During the pandemic and especially during the first lockdown last year, Indians consumed much more of desi shows as the content, setting and language had an instant connect,” said an expert.
Interestingly, the iconic pornographic comic Savita Bhabhi, which was banned in 2008 and had inspired many spin-offs, has found resurrection in the lockdown when some 5,000 videos with the #SavitaBhabhi hashtag got uploaded and garnered average views crossing a crore.
With plenty of aspiring actors willing to bare it all and an audience that cannot get enough of erotic content, an entire industry has come around to feed into the hunger for pleasure. Production houses, casting directors and fading starlets are working round the clock to bring out meaty, sensual, indulgent content and upload it every few minutes.
However, along came exploitation, controversies, complaints and a lot of disillusionment. “We have been getting several complaints of shady work going on with production houses making promises of big role castings to the artistes to rope them in and then backing out. Since we do not indulge in moral policing, we can take action only when a victim files a complaint,” said Bharambe.
The Raj Kundra case, which Bharambe’s team is currently investigating, is a case in point. It took a 25-year-old female artist to gather the courage to complain against Kundra, a British-Indian businessman and actor Shilpa Shetty’s husband, who allegedly promised her a big role but forced her to perform nude. It led to his arrest five months after the investigation started.
The modus operandi of these production houses, said an investigating officer at the Crime Branch office in Mumbai, was to make the videos in India, send them abroad for publishing or distribute them over subscription-based mobile apps like HotHit Movies, HotShots or web sites like Nuefliks and Escapenow. These videos are crude and sleazy and usually 20 to 30 minutes long. A script outline of a film titled ‘Virginity on Auction’, which ran into 147 pages, was seized from actor Gehana Vasisth. She refused to accept that there was anything wrong with viewing adult content. “If people think it hurts the sentiments of children or those underage, well, shielding or protecting them is the parents’ headache, not anybody else’s,” she said.
Anand, a supporter of erotica and mutual pleasure, said it was important to make intimacy and the idea of pleasure non-intimidating and introduce the values of sensitivity and emotional connection into it. “Pornography continues to be demeaning to women, hurtful, coarse and can lead to negative connotations and skewed gender balances in the society,” she said. “The sad part is that it still remains the most accessed form of sexual education for young boys, especially in the absence of avenues that can be of meaning to them.”
The first time Anshuman Kumar (name changed) did sex on camera was when he was 19 years old. He did it to “explore the novelty of indulging in intercourse on call”. He said these production units usually had no formal names and they operate in rented apartments in Mumbai or UP, and total budgets seldom exceed Rs1.5 lakh an episode. “There are so many platforms to sell these films to so that we have a choice and an upper hand when it comes to bargaining,” said Kumar.
According to an industry report by KPMG, India is estimated to have more than 500 million online video subscribers by FY 2023, and this will make it the second-biggest market in the world behind China. Video will contribute 77 per cent of India’s internet traffic by 2022.
Concerns, however, are plenty. Of the many internet-related activities, said Virani, ‘erotica’ had the greatest potential to be addictive, and in persons with Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (CSBD), the behaviour became a central focus of their life, with unsuccessful efforts to control or significantly reduce it as well as adverse consequences. Despite its presumed pervasiveness, internet pornography addiction (IPA) or problematic online pornography use (POPU) is under-researched and usually fitted into the umbrella construct of hypersexual behaviour or compulsive sexual behaviour (CSB). Furthermore, people with POPU were found to have greater ventral striatal activity when seeing erotic pictures, concluding that this processing of cues was similar to conventional addictions.