California, Sept 12: For all I know, dear reader, you reached this column by accessing the Internet on your personal computer and a few clicks here and there landed you at this spot. Interestingly, however, if you were to search for the keywords in the headline of this piece, you would be confronted with very startling choices, none of which answer your requirement or the point this article is about to make. Let us try it out... There you go! What it throws up are a plethora of sites hawking pornography which is the exact opposite of anything aesthetic that you were searching for.
This is something that has been bothering me ever since I began writing this column and I have groped for the right words to put it before you. Frankly, I was not sure as to how to phrase it without upsetting some people but, enough is enough, let me as well say it. Faced with a dead end, so to say, my proposition is that what the worldwide web needs is more soft-core aesthetic eroticism if we have to combat the overgrowing influence and onslaughts of hard-core pornography. I don’t see how else we can fight the menace.
I know the reaction of some of the readers. You would be saying: How dare you encourage the spread of sexually stimulating material on the web that will undoubtedly be viewed by teenagers and even pre-teen children? That indeed is my problem. Yes, no matter what you do, such material will be viewed by young people.

If you are one of those whose aim is to shield our young from any exposure to sexuality on the web, I will grant it to you. In that case, my proposal is completely untenable. If it is your firm belief that you can somehow succeed in shielding them completely, you had better ban them completely from the Internet and also create suitable mechanisms that will keep them away from TV, the movies, the stack of glossy magazines displayed in such innocuous places as your local grocery store, the nearest shopping mall and even the school. Let us face it: We are raising a generation of kids in a highly sexually charged environment.



The amazing new pervasiveness of pornography is enough to make us wonder if there can be an art form - literature, cinema, dance etc. - that is aesthetically erotic and not outright pornographic. Can we still produce distinctively aesthetic material that is true to the spirit and essence of sexual love without being blatantly lustful and lurid? My humble submission is that our young desperately need that vision; otherwise they will be forever lost to the purveyors of gross vulgarity who have a free run on the web.



Our culture is fairly saturated with art products - not only pictorial images, but also art in literature, dance, and even music as well - that deal with sex in ways that assault our moral sense as dignified individuals. Distressingly, in a very seductive way, we are becoming used to this; but in our more lucid moments we recognise these products to be "pornographic." The mass media (a phenomenon specific to our age) has raised the public availability of this pornographic material to new levels worldwide. Its allure and amazing new pervasiveness are enough to make us wonder if there can be eroticism that is not pornographic.



There was a time not too long ago in memory when searching for the commendable and praiseworthy in our culture, while screening out the bad, was not fraught with the unexpected assault on our senses that we encounter unwittingly everyday on the Internet. Those were the days when salacious images existed in tangible form, music was live rather than recorded, performers and their audience occupied the same space, culture had no ‘pop’ prefix, and ‘media’ referred only to an artist’s means of expression rather than to its mind boggling myriad modes of distribution.



If we connect selective dots in our current entertainment environment, we can draw a lurid picture of a society rotting from within. By and large movies which become successful at the box office expose our young to characters that can hardly serve the purpose of role models in their lives. Network television shows now speak a language that would have startled viewers of a generation ago and stunned their parents.



Connect another set of dots, though, and the picture reveals the cultural contradictions of a complex, diverse society. The large audience turnout for family-friendly movies has caused Hollywood studios to shift the majority of their product to PG and PG-13 rated films, not limited to adult viewers. Unfortunately, the ratings on the attractively packaged boxes can only be too generic to be able to provide specific guidance. Mild profanity to some adults may be blasphemy to others. Some parents approve nudity in certain circumstances, but abhor violence, while others react in the opposite manner. Furthermore, most ratings systems evaluate only levels of sex, violence, and profanity, rarely addressing moral issues of lying, greed, self-centeredness, excessive consumerism, or prejudice. When it comes to the Internet even these small mercies are non-existent.



When I was a teenager, a topless photo in Playboy, a magazine which sold at a premium several times its cover price in India, was considered pretty hard core. We didn't have Victoria's Secret and Ann Summers those days but, if we did, you can bet that their advertisements would have been banned from the mainstream publications that are only too happy to carry them today. Look at the mushrooming of supposedly ‘self-help’ agony aunt columns these days. There is hardly a newspaper website, including those from the subcontinent, which do not have a ‘hard core’ column like this. My hunch is most of the letters they carry from agonised souls are actually cooked up to attract curious young readers. It is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator that craves for titillation. It also serves to play to the voyeur in us. Of course, it shores up their print circulation and adds to what is called 'hits' on their websites.



Surely, curiosity about sex is natural and the interest in looking at sexual material did not begin with the Internet. I must admit I am not an expert on eroticism, but I do know that what is widely available today is far more explicit than what kids could get their hands on when I was a young boy. I can bet the 1953 Playboy photos of Marilyn Monroe showing her topless (which created such a sensation in the western world) would not even get a second look from today's kids. I was not yet born then but even until two decades later those photos were deliciously coveted. Not anymore.



Today’s kids cannot understand what the excitement was all about. You may have heard recently of the fate that befell Penthouse, a long-time competitor of Playboy. Unable to withstand the competition from the Internet, as its revenues continued to slump, Penthouse's publisher had no choice but to file for bankruptcy protection. Normally that should have been welcome news because Penthouse was nothing but hard-core pornography. The irony is that the ground vacated by Penthouse has been reclaimed in a more sordid fashion by none other than the combined might of pornography and the web, and all of it is freely available for any kid to look at.