Feeding the voyeurs

Yesterday, a tabloid that comes free with a leading national newspaper carried fuzzy but unmistakable images of a young couple being forced to get intimate in a public place by some perverts.

The story was supposedly professing sympathy for the couple whose MMS was now being circulated widely. Yet the images carried by the paper, turned us all into voyeurs and added to the couple’s sense of violation many times over because now even those who had not been aware of the MMS had seen most of it in what was supposed to be a newspaper, meant to be read by every member of the family.

Another popular website has a video and a MyPage section now where content of questionable content is uploaded. The site is notorious for allowing and tacitly encouraging people to write sexist, communal, hate inducing comments on its message boards. Once I tried to report some of them but to my surprise, one particularly distasteful comment which had infact started an avalanche of sexist outpourings could not be removed. It was meant to be there for obvious reasons.

Take also TV channels like Bindass which actually pretend to be the voice of the youth and then invite a not so young Raja Chowdhary who has been booked for many public and private misdemeanours, to show us just how far he can go if two young women throw themselves at him and just how abusive and ugly he and his current girl-friend can get if they are locked up in a small, padlocked room for a few days.

Sample also how every item number is marketed with key tag words even before it hits the charts. Case in point, the recent remake of RD Burman’s Dum Maro Dum which was supposedly not anyone’s Daddy’s version.

Even before we had heard it, we were told that it had lyrics that would shock us. That Deepika would put Munni and Sheela out of business. There was a debate whether she would be seen in hot pants or a mini skirt. That the song is on its way to fizzle out is another matter but now two Mallika Sherawat songs are supposed to scorch the charts soon and just their titles convey that they are going to be suggestive beyond anything we have heard in the recent times.

Most item songs, whether they feature in Sajid Khan’s crassy brand of cinema or elsewhere have a lone woman in provocative situations designed to fuel fantasies and to  turn collective ogling and the celebration of orgiastic innuendo,  into an acceptable form of social behaviour.

The point I am trying to make is that every form of media in India is today trying to mainstream deviant instincts that were once dormant. Sometimes they do it in the garb of pseudo activism as in the MMS stories that are reported by newspapers and news channels with footage of the very victims they are claiming to fight for.

Though we haven’t reached a point socially where same sex marriages or even normal courtship behaviour in public places or inter-caste marriages can take place without some kind of covert or overt censor, it has somehow become okay to sensationalise rape stories, to highlight sexual misdemeanours in TV shows where even bleeps and fuzzed footage cannot hide what is happening.

Even my cellphone service provider these days sends me links to pictures and videos of women in bikinis. Why is that allowed? Are we ready to make soft porn accessible to every young person who has a mobile? Is there no link between the warped manner in which a woman’s sexuality is presented in songs, advertisements, websites, films and the crimes committed against women by men who don’t take no for an answer and think that every woman is a sexual object?

What frightens me is not just the mainstreaming of the dormant dark behaviour we once looked down upon socially but the fact that it is now not just acceptable but fashionable.

Be it the excessive repression in the name of tradition that our television serials revel in or the nether world of reality TV where everything goes,  our kids are growing up with mixed messages about what freedom is and what should be done with it.

Somewhere in the space between unreported honour killings, cops slapping and humiliating boys and girls for daring to hold hands in public gardens and rising rape statistics, we have a media which does not know whether it should be an activist or a voyeur.

It could for starters, do with a bit of introspection and decide whether it is purveyor of news or cheap sensationalism. And if the lowest common denominator is now the most common denominator and a beast that must be fed endlessly with sleaze for the sake of  higher TRPs.