<h1 class="left">A girl at the bar table next to us has matter-of-factly announced to her group of girlfriends that her porn category of choice is Old and Young; it’s something about a gnarly, wrinkly ball sack tired of thrusting in perfect synchrony to perky tits and pesky mouth telling daddy she wants more.</h1>
<h1 class="left">She clarifies that the category only works when it features a visibly old man simply happy to be there and let the woman have all control. It has to be amateurly shot and have shitty lighting; high production nullifies all raw feelings. Lastly, she believes there is some terrible beauty in fucking an old dude— it is her way of allowing him the opportunity to rage, rage against the dying of the light. And that it’s hot. The table lets out a collective ew and an eye roll, chortling affectionately at their friend’s earnest confession. They spend the rest of their time divulging intricate details about who likes to be thrown about in bed, who wrote Zayn Malik Wattpad smut as a teenager, and who watched YouTube soft porn in Hindi and learnt six new metaphors that describe ejaculation from a lund [penis]. She remembers ganne ka ras [sugarcane juice] coming up most often.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">After the women have graciously invited us to the next table to offer our opinion, after we’ve exchanged Instagram handles and every last anecdote of having sex in the city, I step out of the bar giddily grateful for my experience of female friendships and feminist movements. Had I a Cosmopolitan, a cigarette, and a crippling Carrie Bradshaw-esque tendency to make everything about myself, I couldn’t help but wonder: In what spaces are Indian women afforded the opportunity to be unabashed about their sexuality? And will a drunk text be the proper way to insinuate that I want to be picked up and thrown about properly?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">In the privacy of my home and incognito search tabs, I look up softporn in Hindi on YouTube and find playlist after playlist of “desi [Indian] girl naughty sexy” compilations and “aunty ko mera kela chahiye” [aunty wants my banana] abominations. Indian heterosexual porn, like most others, is rife with crudity. Women being taken forcefully, in the kitchen, in a hotel room, over a workplace desk, without much notion of consent. She is a desperate bhabhi [sister-in-law] with breasts bursting out of an unbuttoned saree blouse with an appetite for her brother-in-law’s throbbing, meaty cock, an expert in the art of seduction of flashing an untimely belly button. She is a lonely housewife who dolls up night after night for the mere satisfaction of her hardworking husband throwing a boner her way and fucking his stress away. She is never the recipient of oral sex but is more than willing to choos a lund [suck a penis] until all his precious ganne ka ras flows out.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">In the mid-80s, pre-internet pornography, the introduction of pulp magazines like Mastram fanned skewed ideas about the female body and genitalia, giving the Indian (male) reader of erotic content much fodder for his fantasies. Popular tropes and protagonists emerged in those 3-rupee-raptures, sold cautiously at railway station platforms and roadside stalls across Northern India: a busty, trusty teacher who leaned over the chalkboard invitingly, a secretary who gave more in the office than just her time, a ghost-seductress in need of erotic exorcisms. Those titillating, illustrated sexual escapades provided its readers with detailed storylines in comic book style, written in the familiar tongue of Hindi, and slapped scantily clad women on its covers amidst a famine of imagery relating to the female body.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Mastram and similar publications feature themes of force, violence, and voyeurism to appeal to a consumer whose idea of pleasure and power revolves primarily around stripping away female agency. These books were often purchased discreetly and read not-so-discreetly by young boys and men: an attempt at making sense of sexuality, written off as an innocent indulgence. Any enjoyment of erotic literature for women was confined to imaginations and romance novels where a strong-but-soft hero sweeps a rosebud-cheeked clueless heroine off her feet to make sweet love to her between dog-eared pages 189-193. No illustrated horny husbands or desperate daddies starred shirtless in trashy comic covers.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Manisha Jha, a writer of Hindi erotica (who prefers to call herself a porn writer) for platforms on the internet does what she does as a result of being introduced to magazines like Mastram as a teenager. “My younger brother would buy the magazines and bring them home but never allowed me to read them. It would be considered shameful if I did. When I managed to get my hands on them, I guiltily enjoyed the violence in those comics but I knew that they were never written with me in mind.” Privacy for women in the country is a costly affair. “I lost the years I could’ve explored my teenage sexuality due to vague ideas of morality and so I began writing sex stories for my own satisfaction,” she says. When Jha moved to New Delhi as a college student, she remembers partaking in a little act of rebellion by joining the girls in her hostel as they pooled money to rent porn cassette tapes and a VCR player for a night. The girls all gathered around a tiny TV for a communal porn-viewing party and watched with amusement as men with moustaches and women with full bushes fucked.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Jha began her career as a screenplay writer for popular primetime television shows and later received an offer from a soft porn OTT content streaming platform newly attempting to present ‘the female perspective’ in their porn storylines. “One of the earliest stories I wrote was called ‘Chameli ki Saheli’ [Chameli’s friend] about a woman who takes on a job as a sex toy tester after an intensely stressful period in her life. The producers told her then to make the important clarification that Chameli’s stress was induced by the death of her husband causing a lapse in judgment that led her to this sinful path of testing toys and pleasuring herself. To think that even a fictional female character’s trajectory in pornography has to be determined by a dead husband,” she scoffs. When Jha switched over to writing audio erotic stories in Hindi for podcast platforms on the internet, she discovered very quickly that an audio story could pack all the sleaze and lust and heaving bust that video formats tastefully could not. “We have some very talented female voiceover artists in the industry who will capture the excitement of a sex scene unfolding in all its rawness. The editors will very ridiculously have a writer describe a vagina as a honey pot while writing something like ‘usne apne hoth mere honey pot pe rakh diya’ [he placed his lips on my honey pot] but the voiceover artist will do a wonderful, sensual job narrating it,” she informs me. Jha is exasperated with the prudery of it all, “Just call the vagina what it is. If you’re okay with calling a penis a ling, we’ve got to stop beating around the bush of the vagina,” she says plainly.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Despite the saccharine honey pot-ness of it all, audio storytelling websites and apps present an interesting space for erotica writers in the country working independently and writing in regional languages to platform their work— cutting out meddling middleman and male producers eager to work out what ‘the female perspective’ really entails in porn storylines. Here, in the depths of internet waters, buried in plump, tight-lipped oysters or other absurd vagina metaphors, there exists the rare pearl of an idea that women in heterosexual sexual relationships do indeed have a vagina that exists for their own pleasure. And these women do indeed like the occasional hoth [lips] placed on it.</h1>
<h1 class="right">I am prepared, once again, to dive into incognito tab tribulation. Instead of the usual sinister slew of sexy desi aunties dropping their sarees for naughty boys, I am greeted by filthy hot short sex stories with titles like Desperate Husband, Sex on the Beach, माझ्या बायकोचा बॉयफ्रेंड [My Wife’s Boyfriend], and Love with Genie— all featuring stock image covers of smiling, bright-eyed, presumably well-fucked women initiating sex with husbands and boyfriends and mythical beings. Suddenly, you’re on a bus with Preeti and Sunil who sit next to each other because all the other seats are taken up. The bus driver’s reckless braking has launched a horny, tingling Preeti right into Sunil’s lap. What does she do now, oh no. Does she kiss him, does she run her hoth listlessly on his neck right down to his ling, does she want a finger tracing up her thigh and feeling her wet warmth? We’ll find out!</h1>
<h1 class="right">In the audio erotic stories featured on storytelling platforms like Headfone, Storytel, and Pralipti women writing in regional languages like Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali have an avid fan base dedicatedly following the story unfolding in parts 1, 2, 3 and other upcoming releases the writer is teasing. The comment section under each story is littered with remarks left by (mostly) female-sounding names. Rutuja gives the story a generous 4 out of 5 stars and throws in a compliment: “Very nice and thrilling ...Angad made it more interesting to listen and kept hooked till the end. Good job by both author and reader.”</h1>
<h1 class="right">Themes of infidelity caused by sexual dissatisfaction in a heterosexual relationship seem to strike a chord amongst the female readership of erotic stories written by women. A male voice actor is heard begging for his woman to return to him and leave that boyfriend she spends all day sexting on her phone. She lets out a raspy laugh in the background, overlaid by sound effects of buzzing and text notifications. Her lover has her hot and heavy. Her husband, desperate to please her, slides his fingers softly over her dimpled stomach. The male protagonist(s) in every story seems to be deeply concerned with earning the affection of his lover and fulfilling her fantasies. Manisha Jha’s ‘Charamsukh,’ published on Storytel in 2022 is a Hindi erotica online story written in English that tells of how a husband and wife in a sexless marriage finally attain a happy charamsukh [orgasm] when he sees her in a threesome with two of his colleagues.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Sayali Kedar, author of popular audio stories written in Marathi like Desperate Husband and Sex on the Beach, hosted on Storytel tells me “I have had the chance to interact with a few of my female listeners and their reactions to my story are interesting. As my first series covered married couples, the story helped them communicate their needs to their partner.” She is hopeful about the genre of audio erotic stories creating a space to platform the female gaze in conversations of sex and desire in the country. Her work addresses taboo subjects and she is glad for the support Storytel India has lent her in developing her work. Writing erotic content publicly on the internet, without a pseudonym, comes with raised eyebrows and questions of morality. Kedar shrugs it off, “As a married woman, people bring up certain expectations. I think it’s completely unnecessary. When I am in the mood, I give them sarcastic answers and sometimes I’ll just ignore them.”</h1>
<h1 class="left">The lines between erotica and romance are often blurred on websites hosting audio and literotica content online, making it difficult to pinpoint what story launches into heaving, hot sex and what comes to a close at a steamy kiss. The language is often softened to be evocative without being explicit but for most readers it does the job. Owing to the anonymity guaranteed by the internet, greater smartphone accessibility across Indian cities and towns, and stories written in regional languages, the ease of consuming erotic fiction online is heightened. While the guarantee of privacy for female audiences remains uncertain, That’s Personal’s 2020 India Uncovered report revealed that 30% of traffic on porn websites from India are female-identifying audiences. It was also stated that while first-time buyers of sex toys and other intimate products are male, women place more repeat orders with a basket size 33% larger than that of men. Platforms hosting audio erotic stories are in search of female writers to bring their experiences forth. Through it all, however, the unabashed expression of female sexuality remains a threat; a tale as old as time. Ismat Chughtai, the iconic author was dragged to court in 1946 for her suggestive depiction of same-sex desire between women in her Urdu novel, Lihaaf for accusations of obscenity; one that she denied and defended herself against until the end. The continued rebellion of women in the country, like Chughtai, has allowed for the mere existence of erotica in regional languages written by women.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Somehow, in tiny pockets of the internet, in the privacy of listening devices plugged into smartphones, on drunken bar tables, and in communal porn-viewing parties hosted in a girls' hostel, women in the country momentarily exist as sexual beings.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Credits:</h1>
<h1 class="left">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>
<h1 class="left">Words by: Meghna Yesudas</h1>
<h1 class="left">Illustrations by: Jahnavi Amarnani</h1>
<h1 class="left">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>
<h1 class="left">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>
<h1 class="left">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>
<h1 class="left">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>
<h1 class="full">A girl at the bar table next to us has matter-of-factly announced to her group of girlfriends that her porn category of choice is Old and Young; it’s something about a gnarly, wrinkly ball sack tired of thrusting in perfect synchrony to perky tits and pesky mouth telling daddy she wants more.</h1>
<h1 class="full">She clarifies that the category only works when it features a visibly old man simply happy to be there and let the woman have all control. It has to be amateurly shot and have shitty lighting; high production nullifies all raw feelings. Lastly, she believes there is some terrible beauty in fucking an old dude— it is her way of allowing him the opportunity to rage, rage against the dying of the light. And that it’s hot. The table lets out a collective ew and an eye roll, chortling affectionately at their friend’s earnest confession. They spend the rest of their time divulging intricate details about who likes to be thrown about in bed, who wrote Zayn Malik Wattpad smut as a teenager, and who watched YouTube soft porn in Hindi and learnt six new metaphors that describe ejaculation from a lund [penis]. She remembers ganne ka ras [sugarcane juice] coming up most often.</h1>
<h1 class="full">After the women have graciously invited us to the next table to offer our opinion, after we’ve exchanged Instagram handles and every last anecdote of having sex in the city, I step out of the bar giddily grateful for my experience of female friendships and feminist movements. Had I a Cosmopolitan, a cigarette, and a crippling Carrie Bradshaw-esque tendency to make everything about myself, I couldn’t help but wonder: In what spaces are Indian women afforded the opportunity to be unabashed about their sexuality? And will a drunk text be the proper way to insinuate that I want to be picked up and thrown about properly?</h1>
<h1 class="full">In the privacy of my home and incognito search tabs, I look up softporn in Hindi on YouTube and find playlist after playlist of “desi [Indian] girl naughty sexy” compilations and “aunty ko mera kela chahiye” [aunty wants my banana] abominations. Indian heterosexual porn, like most others, is rife with crudity. Women being taken forcefully, in the kitchen, in a hotel room, over a workplace desk, without much notion of consent. She is a desperate bhabhi [sister-in-law] with breasts bursting out of an unbuttoned saree blouse with an appetite for her brother-in-law’s throbbing, meaty cock, an expert in the art of seduction of flashing an untimely belly button. She is a lonely housewife who dolls up night after night for the mere satisfaction of her hardworking husband throwing a boner her way and fucking his stress away. She is never the recipient of oral sex but is more than willing to choos a lund [suck a penis] until all his precious ganne ka ras flows out.</h1>
<h1 class="full">In the mid-80s, pre-internet pornography, the introduction of pulp magazines like Mastram fanned skewed ideas about the female body and genitalia, giving the Indian (male) reader of erotic content much fodder for his fantasies. Popular tropes and protagonists emerged in those 3-rupee-raptures, sold cautiously at railway station platforms and roadside stalls across Northern India: a busty, trusty teacher who leaned over the chalkboard invitingly, a secretary who gave more in the office than just her time, a ghost-seductress in need of erotic exorcisms. Those titillating, illustrated sexual escapades provided its readers with detailed storylines in comic book style, written in the familiar tongue of Hindi, and slapped scantily clad women on its covers amidst a famine of imagery relating to the female body.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Mastram and similar publications feature themes of force, violence, and voyeurism to appeal to a consumer whose idea of pleasure and power revolves primarily around stripping away female agency. These books were often purchased discreetly and read not-so-discreetly by young boys and men: an attempt at making sense of sexuality, written off as an innocent indulgence. Any enjoyment of erotic literature for women was confined to imaginations and romance novels where a strong-but-soft hero sweeps a rosebud-cheeked clueless heroine off her feet to make sweet love to her between dog-eared pages 189-193. No illustrated horny husbands or desperate daddies starred shirtless in trashy comic covers.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Manisha Jha, a writer of Hindi erotica (who prefers to call herself a porn writer) for platforms on the internet does what she does as a result of being introduced to magazines like Mastram as a teenager. “My younger brother would buy the magazines and bring them home but never allowed me to read them. It would be considered shameful if I did. When I managed to get my hands on them, I guiltily enjoyed the violence in those comics but I knew that they were never written with me in mind.” Privacy for women in the country is a costly affair. “I lost the years I could’ve explored my teenage sexuality due to vague ideas of morality and so I began writing sex stories for my own satisfaction,” she says. When Jha moved to New Delhi as a college student, she remembers partaking in a little act of rebellion by joining the girls in her hostel as they pooled money to rent porn cassette tapes and a VCR player for a night. The girls all gathered around a tiny TV for a communal porn-viewing party and watched with amusement as men with moustaches and women with full bushes fucked.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Jha began her career as a screenplay writer for popular primetime television shows and later received an offer from a soft porn OTT content streaming platform newly attempting to present ‘the female perspective’ in their porn storylines. “One of the earliest stories I wrote was called ‘Chameli ki Saheli’ [Chameli’s friend] about a woman who takes on a job as a sex toy tester after an intensely stressful period in her life. The producers told her then to make the important clarification that Chameli’s stress was induced by the death of her husband causing a lapse in judgment that led her to this sinful path of testing toys and pleasuring herself. To think that even a fictional female character’s trajectory in pornography has to be determined by a dead husband,” she scoffs. When Jha switched over to writing audio erotic stories in Hindi for podcast platforms on the internet, she discovered very quickly that an audio story could pack all the sleaze and lust and heaving bust that video formats tastefully could not. “We have some very talented female voiceover artists in the industry who will capture the excitement of a sex scene unfolding in all its rawness. The editors will very ridiculously have a writer describe a vagina as a honey pot while writing something like ‘usne apne hoth mere honey pot pe rakh diya’ [he placed his lips on my honey pot] but the voiceover artist will do a wonderful, sensual job narrating it,” she informs me. Jha is exasperated with the prudery of it all, “Just call the vagina what it is. If you’re okay with calling a penis a ling, we’ve got to stop beating around the bush of the vagina,” she says plainly.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Despite the saccharine honey pot-ness of it all, audio storytelling websites and apps present an interesting space for erotica writers in the country working independently and writing in regional languages to platform their work— cutting out meddling middleman and male producers eager to work out what ‘the female perspective’ really entails in porn storylines. Here, in the depths of internet waters, buried in plump, tight-lipped oysters or other absurd vagina metaphors, there exists the rare pearl of an idea that women in heterosexual sexual relationships do indeed have a vagina that exists for their own pleasure. And these women do indeed like the occasional hoth [lips] placed on it.</h1>
<h1 class="full">I am prepared, once again, to dive into incognito tab tribulation. Instead of the usual sinister slew of sexy desi aunties dropping their sarees for naughty boys, I am greeted by filthy hot short sex stories with titles like Desperate Husband, Sex on the Beach, माझ्या बायकोचा बॉयफ्रेंड [My Wife’s Boyfriend], and Love with Genie— all featuring stock image covers of smiling, bright-eyed, presumably well-fucked women initiating sex with husbands and boyfriends and mythical beings. Suddenly, you’re on a bus with Preeti and Sunil who sit next to each other because all the other seats are taken up. The bus driver’s reckless braking has launched a horny, tingling Preeti right into Sunil’s lap. What does she do now, oh no. Does she kiss him, does she run her hoth listlessly on his neck right down to his ling, does she want a finger tracing up her thigh and feeling her wet warmth? We’ll find out!</h1>
<h1 class="full">In the audio erotic stories featured on storytelling platforms like Headfone, Storytel, and Pralipti women writing in regional languages like Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali have an avid fan base dedicatedly following the story unfolding in parts 1, 2, 3 and other upcoming releases the writer is teasing. The comment section under each story is littered with remarks left by (mostly) female-sounding names. Rutuja gives the story a generous 4 out of 5 stars and throws in a compliment: “Very nice and thrilling ...Angad made it more interesting to listen and kept hooked till the end. Good job by both author and reader.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">Themes of infidelity caused by sexual dissatisfaction in a heterosexual relationship seem to strike a chord amongst the female readership of erotic stories written by women. A male voice actor is heard begging for his woman to return to him and leave that boyfriend she spends all day sexting on her phone. She lets out a raspy laugh in the background, overlaid by sound effects of buzzing and text notifications. Her lover has her hot and heavy. Her husband, desperate to please her, slides his fingers softly over her dimpled stomach. The male protagonist(s) in every story seems to be deeply concerned with earning the affection of his lover and fulfilling her fantasies. Manisha Jha’s ‘Charamsukh,’ published on Storytel in 2022 is a Hindi erotica online story written in English that tells of how a husband and wife in a sexless marriage finally attain a happy charamsukh [orgasm] when he sees her in a threesome with two of his colleagues.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Sayali Kedar, author of popular audio stories written in Marathi like Desperate Husband and Sex on the Beach, hosted on Storytel tells me “I have had the chance to interact with a few of my female listeners and their reactions to my story are interesting. As my first series covered married couples, the story helped them communicate their needs to their partner.” She is hopeful about the genre of audio erotic stories creating a space to platform the female gaze in conversations of sex and desire in the country. Her work addresses taboo subjects and she is glad for the support Storytel India has lent her in developing her work. Writing erotic content publicly on the internet, without a pseudonym, comes with raised eyebrows and questions of morality. Kedar shrugs it off, “As a married woman, people bring up certain expectations. I think it’s completely unnecessary. When I am in the mood, I give them sarcastic answers and sometimes I’ll just ignore them.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">The lines between erotica and romance are often blurred on websites hosting audio and literotica content online, making it difficult to pinpoint what story launches into heaving, hot sex and what comes to a close at a steamy kiss. The language is often softened to be evocative without being explicit but for most readers it does the job. Owing to the anonymity guaranteed by the internet, greater smartphone accessibility across Indian cities and towns, and stories written in regional languages, the ease of consuming erotic fiction online is heightened. While the guarantee of privacy for female audiences remains uncertain, That’s Personal’s 2020 India Uncovered report revealed that 30% of traffic on porn websites from India are female-identifying audiences. It was also stated that while first-time buyers of sex toys and other intimate products are male, women place more repeat orders with a basket size 33% larger than that of men. Platforms hosting audio erotic stories are in search of female writers to bring their experiences forth. Through it all, however, the unabashed expression of female sexuality remains a threat; a tale as old as time. Ismat Chughtai, the iconic author was dragged to court in 1946 for her suggestive depiction of same-sex desire between women in her Urdu novel, Lihaaf for accusations of obscenity; one that she denied and defended herself against until the end. The continued rebellion of women in the country, like Chughtai, has allowed for the mere existence of erotica in regional languages written by women.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Somehow, in tiny pockets of the internet, in the privacy of listening devices plugged into smartphones, on drunken bar tables, and in communal porn-viewing parties hosted in a girls' hostel, women in the country momentarily exist as sexual beings.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Credits:</h1>
<h1 class="full">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>
<h1 class="full">Words by: Meghna Yesudas</h1>
<h1 class="full">Illustrations by: Jahnavi Amarnani</h1>
<h1 class="full">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>
<h1 class="full">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>
<h1 class="full">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>
<h1 class="full">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>