As Indians embrace newer ideas of inclusion — regarding gender, class, caste, sexual orientation — and anachronistic Victorian laws are scrapped, it is likely porn searches of the future will approach the global average in terms of trends.
The Victorian world was, indeed, awash in pornography. The images and ideas that body of work contains helps us understand something important about it — and us Indians. In both Victorian England and modern India, prudery and perversion are closely entwined. Drawing parallels between the two pruderies is interesting because India, as a former colony, not only retains certain Victorian-era laws, but has absorbed many of its moral codes, including a preoccupation with respectability and a penchant for censorship.
Also, like Victorian England, modern India is at a juncture where it seeks to conquer the world, a pursuit in which cultural identity — including sexuality — plays an important role.
Of course, while the dominant sexual fantasies of both cultures have elements in common, they also reflect distinct cultural moorings and realities. Popular themes of erotic literature included virgins being forcibly deflowered and then developing an insatiable sexual appetite, or hapless young women being flagellated, their white buttocks squirming, until they eventually wielded the whip themselves, as in With Rod and Bum Or Sport in the West End of London: A True Tale by a Young Governess Sexual pleasure and painful punishment, thus, became conflated.
While most Victorian women were held to high standards of respectability in dress and comportment, the rules were different for actresses who were regarded as virtually inseparable from prostitutes. Some merely suggested at imminent nudity — such as an actress at her dressing table — while others utilised theatrical settings to showcase pornography, such as a set showing a nude trapeze artist in 36 poses.
