Thanks to Manish and the rest of the Sepia Mutineers for welcoming me to guest-blog here.
There’s a new Bollywood film out carrying the same name as one from the early ’80s. However, while the old movie was directed by Shyam Benegal and is a modern take on the Mahbharata, the new one is a Mahesh Bhatt production, directed by Mohit Suri, about the international pornography trade. The 2005 version of Kalyug follows the idea of an age of decline, but focuses on sexual degeneracy specifically. At least in the (intentionally?) punningly titled article “Kalyug exposes porn trade,” the movie is entirely negative about this industry. Says Bhatt,
I got the idea of making Kalyug after reading the India Today article on a honeymooning couple, whose lovemaking scenes were recorded in a hotel and distributed throughout the world. People all over the world want to see reality sex, not fictional sex. Human trafficking has become big business everywhere; it’s the third largest international crime after drugs and the arms trade. Desi Indian women and porn sites are a huge craze abroad. That’s why victims of natural disasters like famines and earthquakes are sold for these pornographic rackets. They are drugged, brutalised and blackmailed into joining the flesh trade.
Unless there’s been a rash of incidents of this type, I assume Bhatt refers to the episode reported by the Times of India and more sensationally by NDTV and the Chandigarh Tribune, in which presumably the tape was not made available to the world, as the groom smashed a window to try to grab the cameramen. If the entire movie is as black-and-white as the reviews’ quotes of Bhatt imply — portraying pornography as an evil into which unknowing or disadvantaged innocents are drawn — I’m unsurprised that Sunny Leone wasn’t interested in taking part. She appears to be making a healthy living on softcore and probably wouldn’t want to help inspire any new crusades to ban her meal ticket.
Pornography is generally tacky and occasionally genuinely abusive of the people who take part in it, especially of women. At the same time, it has protection under freedom of speech. The line walked in the U.S. can be bizarre: pornography is legal as long as all the participants are consenting adults, but prostitution mostly is illegal(with the exception of some areas of Nevada). So hiring a prostitute just to have sex with you can land you in jail, but you can keep from being prosecuted if you hire a director, producer and cinematographer, have one of them pay the prostitute, and then distribute the movie.
Kalyug is rumored to be “fairly tame” in actual sexual content, and sounds like a half-assed attempt to crusade against something that few people would support publicly. Taping someone doing anything, much less having sex, when he has a reasonable expectation of privacy is not only wrong, it’s grounds for a lawsuit in the U.S. But this is a fairly atypical way to make pornography, and indeed hardly desirable from a professional’s point-of-view; the people being filmed may be unattractive, fail to show themselves to advantage, etc.
A worthwhile film about pornography would show the complexities of this huge business. For example, what is going on in the mind of Hugh Hefner’s daughter, who sees no ideological conflict between simultaneously supporting feminist causes and maintaining the Playboy empire? How does Sunny Leone’s family really feel about her career? How does the average man reconcile his enjoyment of porn with his desire not to have his daughter ever go into it? There are so many questions to ask about the people involved in a morally ambiguous business like this, and to reduce the issue to Porn Is Bad misses them all.
If you’re wondering about the title of this post, you clearly haven’t seen Avenue Q, and I urge you to do so (or at least listen to the soundtrack) as soon as possible.
