Remembering Pornotopia

Consider the following during a time when sex was rarely spoken out loud: Two women locked in embrace on a magazine cover. A (banned) advertisement with a serpentine man and woman entwined around each other, wearing nothing but shoes. Photoshoots using surfboards, gift-wrap, or just a towel as suggestive props. You wouldn’t see this today, because if you wanted to, you’d see everything. The law of desire: the greater the taboo, the greater the transgression.

In America, the sexual revolution was brought about in the 50s and 60s, both by the feminist movement and by Playboy magazine, per many accounts. Some regard the latter as more instrumental in shaping the physical space: In “Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics,” Beatriz Preciado describes Hugh Hefner as a “a mass-media Plato in a porn cave.”

“It is always summertime in pornotopia,” said the theorist Steven Marcus in his book The Other Victorians. But what exactly is pornotopia? It’s an imaginary space, where sexuality is free of baggage, free of inhibition, problems, or externalities (like the economy or jobs or hunger or illness or prohibition or shame). A metaphysical space where everyone is always-already ready for it. In pornotopia, openness and repressiveness, taboo and freedom, all contain the possibility of desire.

It’s the availability of everything today that’s devoid of sex, because it’s devoid of suggestion. And pre-2000s India was full of suggestion. Post colonial-morality. Pre-Internet. Pre-millennium. Sometime after Independence and sometime before the ubiquity of high-production sex, the 80s was a decade of sexual curiosity, of desire without fear. By the 90s, there came the bans and the censors and the moral panic about liberalization bringing Western cultural values to our shores, even though the decade inherited the playfulness of its predecessor.

While they had Playboy, we had Stardust and Filmfare and Star & Style and Showtime and Cine Blitz, putting almost-naked Bollywood stars on the covers of their magazines and openly printing the words “sex, love and obsession.” Magazine editors who were initially expecting angry letters were surprised to receive requests for more (less?) coverage on the subject instead. In a similar vein as America’s media empire mainstreaming porn (or pornifying the mainstream), entertainment magazines in India were both creating and responding to a sexual awakening – taking the pleasure of “looking” out of blue film theaters and secretive pornographic cartoon booklets, à la Mastram, and putting it on newsstands and bookstores where everyone could see and partake.

You could say that the 80s and 90s were our sexual revolution. It was a period of social, political, and sexual charge. Babri Masjid, Satanic Verses, sex scandals with arms dealers and cabinet ministers, the Mandal Commission, the banned underwear advertisement, lesbian sex in multiplexes screening Fire, Bombay blasts, Dawood and Chota Shakeel, Madhuri Dixit’s “choli”, Shah Bano, Pooja Bedi’s Kama Sutra condom ad, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Debonair magazine, wet saree song sequences, satellite TV, Pooja Bhatt’s body paint magazine cover, economic liberalization. A country always on a knife’s edge is a libidinal nation. Waiting for the climax, in more ways than one.

George Bataille said: “The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that, in the 80s, sex clinics and educators reported significant spikes in premarital sex and wives talking about their own pleasure. Mills and Boon novels arrived in the visible sections of Indian bookstores. “Blue films” were rentable and viewable in private VCR sets for those who could afford it. The ever-present “Western influence” just on the horizon, but not quite yet here. Malls – with Calvin Klein underwear or Levi’s jeans showing off sculpted butts on billboards – would only arrive a few decades later, at the cusp of the 21st century. The west was only Hollywood; the rest was all us.

The portmanteau of “porn” and “utopia” isn’t a literal description of a place or time. If it were, there would be no time like the present – a world with unlimited Internet connectivity and hundreds of thousands of hours of free porn to watch, read, listen to, or even enact. But a pornutopia isn’t merely the vast availability of literal porn. It’s a world where, much like in the “plot” of actual porn, everyone is game. One where to project or subject one’s fantasies onto another person isn’t dehumanizing but, as Nancy Bauer writes in n+1, recognizes their humanity. It isn’t (like ours) a world full of pornography; it’s a world whose visual imagery, culture, media, and social psyche are laced with desire without judgement. When we look back at the 80s, we see play, excitement, fun, naughtiness, innuendo, games, euphemisms, unfiltered skin, and a lot of bedroom eyes. All conveying the same thing: the world outside may carry on, but in here it’s always on. It’s the shared experience of desire; it’s a person willing to objectify themselves for your pleasure, willing to objectify you for theirs. A lot of show, don’t tell.

Today’s sex buzzwords: objectification, empowerment, consent, enthusiasm, no means no yes means yes, education, objectification, the male gaze, contraception, safety, information, awareness, normalization, female pleasure, giving and receiving, celibacy, emotional labour, aftersex etiquette, boundaries, communication, positivity. A lot of tell, don’t show.

Mass media Plato has left the “porn cave” – opting for the real thing and leaving the shadows behind. There is nothing left to discover now. In other words, being surrounded by suggestions of sex was arguably sexier than the ubiquity of it. There may not have been as much awareness or consciousness-raising about consent back then. There may not have been sex toy brands aplenty or OnlyFans or dating apps. There wasn’t an endless menu of options to satiate your sexual appetite, like today. But how can an appetite exist if it’s always satiated?

When looking at a soft-hued magazine spread of Bollywood A-listers with unshaved chests and loincloths, one might be prompted to wonder: what were they thinking? Perhaps the point is that they probably weren’t. No curation, no performance, no gaze, no inhibition, no modesty. That’s pornotopia.