Disclaimer: Contains content about rape and sexual assault, viewers discretion advised.
We, as a society, are very conservative about sex and any conversation that revolves around it. Parents switch channels, schools avoid sex-ed and the patrons? Well, they would ban condom ads, if they could. Oh wait, they did! All, because apparently safe-sex (and its awareness)–and not lifestyle choices–spoil kids.
But let me tell you, it’s a facade of moral uprightness that goes out of the window the moment a ‘hot and steamy Sunny Leone’ clip appears as a Whatsapp forward. Or when the latest ‘MMS scandal’ of unidentified strangers, ‘getting it on’ within four walls, makes it to the Internet for the entire world to see. Jilted lovers, spurned BFs or just kinky husbands, there is a gamut of providers because apparently, a woman filmed (mostly without her consent) and stripped of her modesty online, makes a spectacle like no other. Apparently, nothing makes us wet like Revenge Porn!
And that is exactly what this powerful poem tells us. Written and performed by poet, Ishmeet Nagpal for Unerase Poetry, the piece is woven around the infamous game of revenge, to avenge a bruised male ego and the dirt that it disseminates while we are casually ‘just watching porn’; a hard-hitting realisation that was long due. One that will remind you of how we feed our twisted fetishes without thinking twice. One that will show you the mirror. And definitely, one that will make you writhe in wrath and pain. However, the question remains…The mute spectator or the voice? You be the judge.