Blog: Censoring Sexual Content

It has been widely believed and universally accepted, that increasing the sexual content in films, and showing hot and passionate scenes between man and woman, which are erotic or vulgar, often leads to poisoning and corruption of the young minds in the audiences, leading to more sexual crimes.

But recent research, conducted by Antony D'Amato, a lawyer and a professor of law from the Northwestern Law School in Chicago, USA, and titled 'po*n Up, Rape down', has revealed facts that defy common sense and logic, and fly in the face of these assumptions. D'Amato's research reveals that the incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to po*nography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. His research revealed that in the US, there were 2.7 rapes for every 1,000 people in 1980; by 2004, the same survey found the rate had decreased to 0.4 per 1000 people, a decline of 85%.

His theory is that the sharp rise in access to po*nography accounts for the decline in rape. The correlation, according to him, is inverse—more the access to po*nography, less the incidence of sexual crimes against women.

The era of po*nographic films started with the movie Deep Throat and this film started the flood of X-rated VHS, in the year 1972. Later on, po*nographic films stared becoming available as CDs and DVDs. From the 70s to mid 80s, there was a steady increase in the availability of such films. And after that, from the mid 80s came another major change—the availability of po*n on the Internet, which has been growing by leaps and bounds. Further research by the same author revealed that those states with the lowest Internet access were also those with the highest incidence of crime against women.

The reasons mentioned by the author for this apparent decrease in crimes against women in areas where po*nography access was rampant that 1) For many people, watching po*nography may get the intense sexual desire out of their system, and they probably find no need to go out and commit some crime and 2) Sex has perhaps been de-mystified by po*nographic films and by the Internet.

In India too, every time a film tries to show something erotic, whether it is Raj Kapoor's Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Mahesh Bhatt's Murder, Karan Razdan's Girlfriend or Sanjay Gadvi's Dhoom 2, there is an uproar, which stretches right upto the Ministry for Health. History tells us that repressing anything only makes it grow and mushroom into something big and unmanagable.

Maybe it is time someone in the Censor Board of the Ministry of Information or Health started taking note!!

http://www.indiafm.com/features/2007/01/01/2017/index.html