Sin, crime, and porn

The right to make personal decisions

No one wants to advocate pornography or internet sites peddling it, and that includes me, for so many reasons. However, when the establishment loses sight of what’s improper and what’s criminal, unable to differentiate between a sin and a felony, it is necessary to cough politely and let them know that they’re veering off course.

This is, after all, a country that has been facing immense difficulty trying to implement laws on domestic violence, marital rape, and most recently, underage marriages. It’s 2016, and we cannot seem to agree on the minimum age for marriage, with the Council of Islamic Ideology stating that girls as young as nine may get married, providing that they’ve reached puberty.

I don’t mean to bring this up in the form of a hackneyed “priorities” argument, because clearly, we are capable of multitasking and dealing with multiple problems at the same time. But we mustn’t allow the state’s moralistic gestures to mollify us, while practically we continue to live in social bedlam.

There’s more than one reason to oppose pornography, not the least salient of which is the feminist argument often brought up against it. Conventional feminism is also sternly opposed to the cosmetic industry, and beauty pageants, but most realise that ‘banning’ them is not the answer; social awareness is. It is public demand that generates supply; and the government must be wary of Say’s fallacy, which states that supply somehow creates its own demand.

Regrettably, we appear to be strangely fond of paternalistic, authoritarian regimes that mimic the patriarch of one’s own household. Abba jan knows best, and we all need some tough love in our lives.

But the government really isn’t like a domestic patriarch. A good democratic government acknowledges, or ought to acknowledge, a subject’s autonomy over his or her own life and body. The right to make a bad personal decision is just as important. Or else none of us would ever be able to smoke a cigarette, up-size a meal at a fast food restaurant, or hurl an obscene remark – either as a joke or an offence – without staring out of the back of a police van.

A government has no qualms taking away the power you willingly surrender to it, either in the name of security or morality. You don’t want your teenager sons to smoke shisha? Consider it banned for everyone, including adults. They still have cigarettes and other more dangerous drugs to look forward to, especially with shisha out of the way, but that’s a technical concern we’ll discuss eventually.

You don’t want your kids to see a certain film? Censor it for everyone, again, including adults. You don’t want your daughter dating a boy you disapprove of? This is what we have the police for. We’ll be sure to track her movement. You don’t want your kid staying up late at night watching television, especially with the content becoming growingly family unfriendly? No problem. We’ll force your cable operator to shut down all service after 10:00 pm.

It would be satisfying to delegate all our parental responsibilities to a federal nanny system, but let’s not throw caution to the wind. There’s a word for a government model where the regime controls you like a parent controls his child, and it’s called ‘despotism’.

For either reason of morality or fear, nobody is expected to publicly speak out against Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s (PTA) ambitious plan to block 400,000 porn sites. But most people understand that this is an arduous, expensive and wholly unnecessary operation which stands as nothing more than a symbolic gesture of morality.

‘Symbolic’, because it has been a while since Pakistani internet users stumbled upon the wonders of proxy servers. There is a wide range of VPN services available on the internet. Many of them are free, and some provide decent ad-free services for costs as low as $3 a month.

In its inability to address the inevitability of large scale use of VPN, PTA fumbles around with the country’s internet like an angry uncle punitively putting a password lock on the family computer, without realising that his sneaky kids have already figured out a way to bypass it with ease.

For those who don’t want to deal with proxy servers, CDs with pornographic content are exceptionally simple to find in the market. Some CD shop owners claim that as much as 90 percent of their revenue is generated by the sale of erotic or pornographic material.

PTA’s crusade against porn is laughable enough to catch the attention of international news sources. Local officials and experts are not as amused, and claim that blocking websites at this level is a “gigantic and costly exercise”.

Laws aren’t just house rules written on a piece of paper and put up on a fridge door. They cost resources to implement. It is imperative to figure out the difference between bad behaviour and criminal activities because the state’s paternalistic tendencies are expected to grow, if not challenged in a proper, democratic fashion.