S. Mitra Kalita in the Wall Street Journal:
A 2008 image of an online cartoon of Savita Bhabhi.
What does Savita Bhabhi—the sari-clad Internet porn star—have to do with Google’s threat to leave China?
For Indian companies, potentially a lot.
Savita, of course, is the voluptuous cartoon character who looks like a cross between reality television star Rakhi Sawant and Veronica Lodge of the Archie Comic book series. There’s nothing subtle about Savita—although she certainly tries.
“I’m going to take a shower! You should also change out of those wet clothes,” she greeted a neighbor in a November episode, for example. As expected, the two end up together in the shower. The illustrations are explicit, the dialogue laughably simple: “Oh that feels so…” or “Oh I’m going to…”
In June, the Indian government banned her. Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the ministry of communications and technology, says the decision was driven by a complaint received from a women’s group in Maharashtra. He did not know which one. More:
Click here to read India’s tech minister’s take on Google, China
Previously at AW:
From the Guardian:
It may have given the world the Kama Sutra and the Bollywood wet sari scene, but it appears that India is not yet ready to be exposed to the delicate subject of sex on the internet.
A Guardian investigation has discovered that several internet companies have quietly introduced filters to prevent Indian users from accessing sexual content.
The Yahoo search engine and Flickr photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo) altered their sites earlier this month to prevent users in India from switching off the safe-search facility. The block also applies to users in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea.
Microsoft has also barred Indian users of its Bing search engine from searching for sexual content. Users who do try to search for sexual material receive a notice informing them that “your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content”.
The clampdown is understood to be in response to recent changes to India’s Information Technology Act of 2000, which bans the publication of pornographic material. More:
The Indian government has quietly blocked a comic-strip hard-core pornography site, savitabhabhi.com. The Telecom Department has asked all Indian Internet Service Providers to block access to the year-old site about the “sexual adventures of a hot Indian bhabhi.”
The creators of the site, that gets 60 million visitors each month, about 70 per cent from India, has started a ‘Save Savita’ online campaign, a Twitter stream and a Facebook group.
“Savita bhabhi” (or sister-in-law Savita) is a buxom, newly-wed housewife who seems to seduce just about anyone who knocks at her door — from neighbourhood teenagers playing cricket in the street to door-to-door salesmen.
Previously in AW:
And click here to read the Global Post story.
The sixth annual India Today-AC Nielsen-ORG MARG sex survey interviewed 5,353 respondents across 11 cities in India to find out attitudes to sex outside a long-term relationship, homosexuality, sex with prostitutes and pornography. Here are the results:
It’s perhaps appropriate. In the age of universal meltdown, India seems to be a nation in heat. Take what just happened in Meerut.
A young woman, Priyanka Singh a former beauty queen, well-spoken, smart, goes on camera to plead her case after being accused of killing her parents. She and her friend, Anju Singh, hint at a murky saga of sexual exploitation by their relatives and talk of being driven to the edge of a breakdown.
Prise the lid off India’s gleaming globalised façade and a welter of images comes forth. There’s a woman in Mumbai chopping her boyfriend into pieces with her former lover.
There’s a teenager mysteriously murdered in her Noida home amidst murmurs of her parents’ swinging sexual lifestyle. If social norms are changing, with the touchstones of modern life under siege, then sexual mores are in a state of confusion.
What was considered a perversion earlier is a guiltless pleasure now. What was thought of a taboo is now believed to be an all access VIP pass.
Even the terminology, loaded with the prudishness of the past, is being reinvented. Is adultery the same as infidelity? Does kinky sex just mean prolonged foreplay? The India Today-AC Nielsen-ORG MARG sex survey 2008 of 5,353 men and women between 18 and 40, the sixth consecutive time we are studying the intimate life of urban Indians, seems to suggest all this and more.
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Michael Dirda reviews The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra, James McConnachie (Metropolitan, 267 pp, $27.50) in The Washington Post [via 3QuarksDaily]
Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. “You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world.” He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies’ man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: “But it’s just not that great.”
There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy — of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato’s Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.
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India’s first home-grown, online graphic porn star is the unlikely Savita bhabhi. In Tehelka, Anastasia Guha checks her out.
COMICS HAVE A WAY of bypassing our critical and moral register and going right to the id. They have a way of getting into, and then staying in, the deepest recesses of the psyche. This is apparent from our frenzied interest in Savita Bhabi, India’s first animated Internet porn star. Created by the appropriately underground Deshmukh, Dexstar and Mad (whoever they may be, they are not telling – we did ask), Savita Bhabhi is growing to be a phenomenally popular pornographic comic strip. It has grown solely by word of mouth to 3911 registered users in little over a month since its inception. The lead character has been drawn with every Kserial bahu trapping firmly in place: the dull gleam of a mangalsutra, sindoor forming a bright contrast to long dark hair parted chastely down the middle.
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