Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Why Is Gay Porn So Popular in Pakistan?


I guess Pakistan shares some of the hypocrisy and hidden yearnings for sex that simmers across America's Bible Belt, the region of America with the highest online porn usage.  How else to explain Pakistan's high official intolerance of homosexuality yet the high Pakistani search engine traffic seeking gay-porn-related terms?  Candidly, to me it is an example of the psychological dysfunction that goes hand in hand with fundamentalist religions that are obsessed with supposed sexual purity and chastity, yet seem to produce the most twisted and bizarre desires for what is forbidden.   To me, it is no surprise that the number of predator priests and pastors is so high.  A new Pew/Washington Post study looked at the Pakistani search of gay sex themes.  Here are highlights from Mother Jones:

[T]he Pew Research Center published results of a public survey of gay tolerance in 39 countries worldwide. The numbers are fairly unsurprising: While a high proportion of respondents in Western Europe and North America answered "yes" to the question "Should society accept homosexuality?" few respondents in the Middle East and Africa agreed with them. 

Among the least tolerant nations surveyed was Pakistan, where only 2 percent of those surveyed said society should accept homosexuality. That statistic might be unsurprising, considering that gay sex is illegal under the Pakistani penal code. But what is surprising is how those views compare to Pakistani search traffic around gay-porn-related terms.

As of this writing, Pakistan is by volume the world leader for Google searches of the terms "shemale sex," "teen anal sex," and "man fucking man," according to Google Trends. Pakistan also ranks second in the world (after similarly gay-intolerant Kenya) for volume of searches for the search term "gay sex pics."

In its report, Pew noted that countries exhibiting the highest levels of gay tolerance are largely secular, whereas nations where religion is central to public lifesuch as Egypt, Nigeria, and Pakistantend to reject homosexuality. But in Pakistan, what's even more peculiar is that the highest number of hits for some of these terms, including "shemale sex," come not from Pakistan's cosmopolitan centers, but from Peshawar, a bastion of conservative Islam, lately known in the West as a counterterrorism frontline.

Farahnaz Ispahani, an expert in Pakistani minorities at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former member of Pakistan's parliament, says that homosexuality is a taboo subject throughout the country. In major cities such as Lahore and Karachi, gays can develop a network of allies outside their tribe or family, but in conservative Peshawar, gay identity is more complicated. Part of the popularity of gay porn could stem from the fact that even highly observant Muslim males often have physical relationships with men without considering themselves gay, she says. 

"The real love they can have that most of us find with a partner, they find with men," Ispahani says. "They mostly see their wives as the mother of their children." 

"Islamic conservatives, whether they're actually in power or the governments in power are trying to placate them, they will tend to go to very narrow definitions of Islam," she says. "One of the easiest ways to do this is to come down hard on the role of women, and particularly around sex and homosexuality."   Long before the rise of Islamic conservatism, El Feki says, the Middle East and India had a literary tradition that celebrated gay love, but in recent years, that openness has been forgotten.
The full report from Google Trends is here.

Let's be honest.  Fundamentalist religion be it Christian or Muslim is a toxic evil that the world would be better off without.   The hypocrisy of its practitioners and the hatred and abuse of those deemed "other" are fundamentalism's main hallmarks. 


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