Porn To Be Wild

"It’s late at night and the room is dimly lit. The walls are decorated with paintings, posters of sportsmen and some birthday cards. There is silence. A boy and a girl are sitting hand in hand. In due time, the boy starts playing with the girl’s hair. She walks away from him and he follows her to the edge of the bed. The girl looks coyly up at him and says, “Please don’t.” "

“But it’s too late,” says Fawad Ali, writer of the moment at a new English language newspaper to his imaginary girlfriend, “by this time tomorrow this story I am doing on Pakistan’s porn industry will be on newsstands and the net. People all over the world will be saying who is this man? Look at the hardness of his prose, the rhythm of his sentences, and the tumescence of his intellect…”

“Oh Fawad,” she sighs.

Has there ever been such a well researched, factually correct, emotionally evocative piece of sensationalist drivel? Fawad writes the prequel to his acceptance of next year’s APNS award for Best Feature Story as he revels in her willing vapidity, her unnatural blondness, her loud smile.

“Oh Fawad,” she sighs.

The moment of intimacy is broken as someone shouts, “Repeat.” Fawad takes a minute to step outside his cubicle and reply “Nothing sir, I was just talking to myself again,” to his editor at the newspaper. The newspaper, which is considered one of the best in the country (at least around the office water cooler), combines the innovative with the traditional in its products. For example, retaining the character and formation of old school journalism by putting all the words into pretty columns, while simultaneously making sure the words are often complete batshit.

“Oh Fawad,” she sighs.

Bite your lip, Express Tribune (source: Express Tribune/ Creative Commons)

He takes a moment to run his hands through her hair again before writing the quotes that will be used in the story. He knows he cannot omit the one in which the owner of the studio that has made 90 porn films since 2002, Junaid, says he sees his work as a kind of health education for young people who have questions about intimate relationships. Or the one in which he says his business model is revolutionary because his films feature young people. These are important points to make, thinks the hard-nosed investigative journalist, because people often forget that porn filmmakers are in the business because of the goodness of their hearts, and the idea of using young women instead of old crones to turn people on is really a revolutionary one.

Fawad sketches the outlines of this movement for mass sexual literacy with rhetorical virility. Having established that the opening scene is in a room with a bed, he points out that it is being shot in a study. The filmmakers initially "hired commercial sex workers" for their films but then "they began to expand by hiring enthusiastic volunteers." Fawad considers, but then discards, the thought that readers might have questions about the existence of enthusiastic volunteers for roles in pornos in a country where girls caught on camera kissing in net cafes have killed themselves. If there are people out there who see the world in such a bleak, cynical light, he feels, they might actually find inspiration in this moving story about a passion for passion. Plus, the directors sidekick Tina, a former actor herself, explains it sweetly (and "somewhat menacingly") when she says “we have the ability to convince people.”

Nonetheless, the need for a balanced perspective having been drummed into him during the intensive training sessions conducted by the newspaper before it launched, Fawad decides to include a description of a less-than-ideal situation. One actor describes how she ran away with a boyfriend who then sold her to another man who raped her for a month before putting her up for sale again. Then he realizes the hint of exploitation takes the story in a needlessly negative direction. He compensates by including a bevy of beauties who do it because they like it. Because they are aroused by it. Because it has become an addiction.

Fawad ends his piece with a cursory nod to distribution and law enforcement, two factors that have, he feels, traditionally featured too heavily in any examination of the porn industry. In this he is aided by the courteous compliance of nameless shopkeepers who are only too happy to facilitate the sale of super hits like Take Me In Your Arms and Love On The Beach, and the bumbling incompetence of local policemen, who scoff at the very notion of there being a local porn industry. Spent, he reclines, exhausted, as the editor runs his/her eyes hungrily up and down the taut lines of his blunt word hammer.

“I’m wondering,” says the editor, “if I should listen to that little voice in my crack-smoking head that is saying 'Yeh article hamaray 'We’re not tabloid ji' credentials ki patloon utar day ga?'”

Fawad looks up coyly and says, “Please don’t.” 

Author’s Note: The above was, of course, inspired by Fawad Ali’s bodice ripping (not) take on Pakistan’s adult film industry, which was printed in the Express Tribune last Sunday and has since been doing the rounds via email and FB. Another article in their Sunday magazine, The Matriarch, also generated much excitement, primarily because it mentioned female undergarments and featured descriptions such as the following:

“Rolling around the floor in hysterical laughter, the women passed the item under inspection from hand to hand, checking the adjustable straps, the fasteners, the oyster satin and lace cups and cracking jokes about the underwires which gave it its shape until, with incredibly fast, startlingly deft movements the matriarch swung my caftan up and over my head, checked me over with her work-worn hands, covered me up, ripped open the fastening down the front of her kameez, held her matched pair of overripe watermelons out for inspection and said ‘See. Mine are much bigger than yours but I don’t wear one of those!’”

And:

“The room erupted as she then tried to stuff herself in to the too small bra, two of her granddaughters struggling to squeeze her appurtenances into its delicate cups as if they were kneading dough for chapattis…”

Fawad Ali is presumably a reporter, while Zahrah Nasir is a columnist. His function requires research and analysis; hers can be satisfied by whimsical musing. Another crucial difference between Fawad Ali’s rather sketchy sketch of local titillation options and Zahrah Nasir’s playful piece on lingerie and women’s relationships with their bodies is that Zahrah Nasir can write. The Matriarch works because its somewhat lurid descriptions of undressing and breasts are merely a stepping stone to observations about culture, tradition and communication. Fawad Ali’s piece, on the other hand, is merely a stone that he should be beaten on the head with, repeatedly. So I will stand by Ms. Nasir’s right to examine the geo-strategic significance of knickers. Unless she uses the word ‘appurtenances’ again. Then she’s on her own.