Tere Bin Pornistan

Pakistan was in international news twice this week. Not because of the war on terror or because of another horrific terror attack. No, Pakistan was in the news this week because the film censor board decided not to grant permission to the Indian-produced Tere Bin Laden to be screened in the country and because it has been reported that, pound for pound, Pakistanis view more pornography on the internet than anyone else in the world.

Or, in columnist speak, you wait and you wait and then two show up.

The refusal to allow Tere Bin Laden to be screened in Pakistan is not because the film is Indian. That restriction was put in place in the 1960s in an attempt to save the Pakistani film industry from the gigantic Bollywood machine. But mollycoddling an infant rarely produces a champion and the state of Lollywood today is, in some ways, proof of the stupidity of the policy. Thankfully, this is no longer the case today as cinema owners successfully lobbied the government to lift the prohibition. The decision not to allow the film to be screened is apparently due to the contents of the film and the ‘security situation’ in the country. The film satirises Osama Bin Laden and the board believes, perhaps correctly, that some lunatic militant fringe might not get the joke.

The film censor board exists to ensure that films pass whatever arbitrary standard of morality that’s peddled about nowadays. That’s why is perfectly fine to watch Shaan annihilate hordes of villagers right after ducking bullets while prostrating himself but it is impermissible to show man and woman sleeping in the same bed together. But whatever one may think of the purpose and existence of the film censor board, it one would have to agree that it’s simply not its job to make decisions on whether or not a film can be screened on the basis of what might happen if there’s a breach in security at the box office.

Two things have happened because of this decision. First, Pakistan is in the news under a headline that runs “Tere Bin Laden banned in Pakistan”. The related article uses words like censorship, ban, film, Indian, artist and fleshes out a stereotype of Pakistan and Pakistanis that’s being developed nowadays. Second, the ‘security situation’ is once again the reason for not doing something. The great American writer and personality Samuel Clemens once said that if people sacrifice a bit of their liberty for security, they mostly wind up getting neither.  The film censor board should think about that.

Meanwhile, an intern at Fox News with too much time on her hands decided to see what would happen if she typed in ‘horse sex’ and a whole bunch of other, random, sex-related search parameters into Google’s Insight programme. Lo and behold, some Pakistanis are into zoophilia and, it appears, have an insatiable appetite for online pornography. Whatever floats your boat. Never mind that the infamous Kinsey Report of 1948 acknowledged that as many as 17 percent of rural Americans experienced zoophilia at least once, Pakistan is in the news because, while it bans websites such as Wikipedia and YouTube, it appears to do nothing about pornography.

The Fox News report is a particularly nasty piece of reporting. It merely points out the obvious fact that Pakistanis are interested in sex. And that they must, since our population is now 170 million and rising. There’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong, however, is hiding the hypocrisy that it’s the US consumer who has driven online pornography into the multi-billion dollar industry that it is. In any event, pornography is the least of Pakistan’s problems. In fact, the Google statistics merely point out to the normalcy of repressed sexual curiosity.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 17^th, 2010.