QUOTE(Cock-up-over-conspiracy @ Sat 7th August 2010, 6:41pm)
On the other hand, she needs brought into the discussion. She has taken the bit, or bait, and is part of the PR machine now.
In the previous thread, I'm pretty sure someone linked to
this article, which is illustrative of what GBG is referring to above. Most Western radical feminists will tell you that all pornography is exploitative and that prostitution is little more than males attempting to commoditize women, no better than slavery, and not the least bit "empowering" or anything else that might be deemed positive by a civilized society.
Bishakha Datta, however, is no "Western radical feminist." India is a completely different culture, and their attitudes towards everything related to these issues tends to be quite different from those in the US and Europe. Indian couples routinely use abortion as a means of child gender selection; bride-burning still occurs frighteningly often; women are almost automatically blamed for conception failure, with men often abandoning their wives rather than submit to a simple sperm-count test (though this may finally be changing,
as Ms. Datta herself reports); prostitution is rampant while condom use is considered "unmanly" by many Indian men, leading to high rates of STDs, and so on.
Meanwhile, on Wikipedia you've got people like
GoetheanÂ
(T-C-L-K-R-D)
lamenting that Indian scholars are attempting to de-emphasize the heavy emphasis on sex promoted by certain Indian religious leaders of the past several hundred years.
It just strikes me that pornography is practically the
least of India's sex- and gender-related problems, and that someone like Bishakha Datta isn't likely to treat it as a serious issue. If anything, she's likely to agree with studies suggesting that exposing adult males to porn reduces their tendencies towards sexual violence, which from her perspective would make it a good thing. That doesn't necessarily mean she's Part Of The Problem, but if you're thinking she might take the lead on this issue, that just seems very unlikely to me.