Faraaz, sitting in his small bed, is bent over his laptop. His mother, entering the room, sees this and asks: “Baeta, what are you doing?”
Faraaz irritably tells his mother off, “I’m working, I have a deadline tomorrow, and it’s important that I make it on time!” Looking at her son admiringly, for the hard work he puts into his work every day, she walks off.
Faraaz, in the meanwhile, continues struggling with his ‘work’. The next morning, he complains to his friends, “Yaar, they’ve banned every porn site I know of. I spent hours yesterday trying to get something to open but the PTCL people had everything cordoned off. I even tried my neighbour’s Wi-Tribe, no luck!”
“I can’t believe I’m going to have to torrent my ‘totay’ now!” he seethes in dejection.
Faraaz’s mother thinks he is working, and indeed he is; only it’s not something she would classify as work. And this isn’t just Faraaz’s tale, it is the story of millions of Pakistani youths – both male and female, married men, women – and even grandfathers. It is national habits such as this which bring disturbing revelations about our country to the world’s fore before we ourselves even realise them.
This pornography culture is in part promoted in the country thanks to insufficient monitoring by parents, spouses and children on the internet surfing activities of their children, spouses and parents respectively. Why is external monitoring even needed? Because we ourselves have been unable to put these checks in place for ourselves as individuals – as is evidenced by statistics, which portray an unnerving image of the country.
According to Google’s search data for the last few years, Pakistan’s search profile has consistently put it at the top of the world’s sex-deprived nations taking to Google to find something to vent their pent-up frustrations. The country has ranked first in searches for ‘horse sex’ in 2004, ‘donkey sex’ since 2007, ‘rape pictures’ between 2007 and 2009, ‘rape sex’ since 2004, ‘child sex’ between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, ‘animal sex’ since 2004, ‘dog sex’ since 2005, and ‘camel sex’ as of 2010.
Hearing this, Ahmad, a student, jokes, “Fortunately, our tastes leave little to be desired for conventional forms of porn like incest, though our tastes haven’t yet developed enough to help tentacle porn gain even more popularity. On a serious note though, this looks very hopeless, we’re disturbingly perverse.”
The other reason assisting this unbridled rise to the top of search engine queries lends itself from the fact that Pakistan has had a proliferation of internet cafes in the country in the last decade and a half. These internet café’s often provide unchecked high-speed internet at nominal per hour costs, encouraging even the most non savvy users to take the risk.
And, it has increased the accessibility of pornographic materials to unprecedented levels. As recently as five years ago, the easiest way to get your hands onto pornographic material was to purchase or rent a compact disc at a video store, and then too only if you knew the shop keeper well. 10 years ago, the case was similar too, but only for video cassettes instead of for compact discs.
The reason, according to a guest on one ‘TheYoungTurks’ program, an award winning, progressive online talk show, is that “They are kept away from porn and sex from a young age, so the curiosity drives them to these searches. Though what keeps them from searching for more conventional sex is something I don’t understand.” Though the young man might not have been able to understand what drives these young people of the country, these achievements did earn us a new title on another television program, ironically called ‘RedEye’, on FoxNews.
Despite the credibility of the said news channel often being called into question, it should be noted that the talk show host did repeatedly refer to Pakistan as ‘Pornistan’ on a national television network. Whether that is something that we need to be proud of or not is a hanging question.
Pornography is already a national crisis, though we do not yet deem it one. In a western country, such achievements might not have mattered. But in a country stuffed chockfull of extremists, and where social media is banned at the slightest whiff of ‘un-Islamic stances’, and where women are condemned to death for lashing out at religious fanatics harassing them, the irony of the statement itself notwithstanding, statistics like these call attention to the decadent, despondent and depraved condition of our morality.
We need to sit up and take notice, and maybe even appreciate a blanket ban on the internet once in a while, if only to frustrate the porn lovers.
Note: The Author actively searched google images for porn too to find fitting pictures for this article, even though it ‘was’ done with safe search on!
As Published on:
WordsOverWisdom 