Porn consumption in India lives in the margins

Indians have never lacked desire. They have lacked comfort with acknowledging it. Even after legal attempts—from bans to the taking down of websites—have been made since the mid-2010s to curb online pornography, it continues to proliferate in both public and private life in India. 

Porn consumption in India has not diminished so much as it has dispersed. Beyond statistics and graphs, lived experiences suggest that it is neither uniform nor accompanied by shame. In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, the content that circulates has largely been shaped by long-standing social realities alongside the expanded access enabled by smartphones and affordable mobile network plans. Together, they offer a revealing view into how desire, intimacy, and power are negotiated today. 

Censorship and access: How porn circulates now

The debate around regulating porn consumption in India has unfolded in cycles of bans, reversals, and judicial caution for over a decade. The regulatory ability to control its supply remains limited, at times bordering on perfunctory or performative. In 2025, restrictions were announced on certain OTT platforms accused of showcasing "soft porn", prompting the Supreme Court of India to caution against the consequences of blanket bans and to note how young adults might respond to such measures. These interventions, argues sociologist and an Assistant Professor at the Manipal Institute of Social Sciences Humanities and Arts, Ketaki Chowkhani, are a result of  moral panic and focused entirely on male viewers. “They don’t take into account that women also consume porn,” she says, drawing from her own research on women’s porn viewing habits, what they reveal about preferences, and the dangers of surfing such content online. 

Richa Kaul Padte, author of Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography  (2018), a rare book on the subject written from an Indian perspective, echoes this sentiment. “Indian women are watching straight porn and lesbian porn, romance porn and BDSM porn, and all the while, they’re looking for pleasure: pleasure for the woman on screen and, by extension, pleasure for themselves. Except all efforts to curb or ban porn—in India or abroad—totally ignore this reality,” she writes. Chowkhani and Kaul Padte’s research tell us this: What legal interventions regulate is not desire, but rather its visibility.

Who gets to access desire

While women are routinely excluded from how pornography is imagined in public discourse, their preferences for it vary. Through her research, Chowkhani, learnt that cis-women—even heterosexual women—liked watching women being pleasured on screen. 

“I don't know about cis-men, but for women there is clearly a greater fluidity when it comes to their sexuality. The six women I interviewed (between the ages of 25-30 years of varying sexual preferences, living in Mumbai) preferred watching women being touched, caressed, and cared for by men. And even though they were watching heterosexual porn, they clearly preferred a queer erotic of surfaces and touch rather than merely penetration,” says Chowkhani.

For many women, particularly outside urban centres, porn consumption is constrained long before questions of taste or desire arise; access to porn is shaped by a number of factors. Rural women’s access is closely tied to their limited access to both smartphones and mobile data. While a nearly equal number of men and women use smartphones across India, a significant gap persists in ownership. The divide deepens in poorer, rural districts. 

“There’s a deep distrust of handing over phones to teenage girls and young women,” says Reena Khatoon, who has worked in sexuality education and gender sensitisation for over 15 years. “And even if phones are purchased for them, it’s unlikely they’ll have data access.”  

The ability to have a phone, and then a private spot within the household within which to watch porn, depends on far more than desire. Across her work in Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, and rural districts in other north Indian states, Khatoon observed a male preference for content where women submit to dominating men. This has worried sex educators, not because porn exists, but because of how it is interpreted. She observed, men are using videos as scripts to emulate rather than tools for masturbation. “But this is not true of the female participants I came across. Nudity, excessive or otherwise, puts them off, especially those who have no exposure to porn at all. Sex is so stigmatised in some villages that even the mention of genitals and their diagrams make women uncomfortable,” explains Khatoon. 

Privacy, too, is unevenly made available to men and women. The ability to watch porn often depends on securing a phone to oneself and a corner of the house free from observation. Pleasure, in this context, becomes something navigated around scrutiny rather than sought openly. 

Porn consumption patterns in rural India

Access alone does not determine what people watch. So does technological fluency, including knowing what to search for. Kehkasha, a sex educator who has worked across Delhi NCR, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, notes that common English terms like ‘boobs’, ‘tits’, ‘sucking’, and ‘BJ’ have gradually entered rural pornographic vocabulary. “But viewers are likely still looking up porn in regional dialects and languages like Bhojpuri, or Hindi, since English is often not their first or even second language.” 

Porn itself is still described as ‘sex videos’ or ‘blue films’ in many rural districts. Hence, search results often surface content where both the language spoken and the social context feels local.

If urban porn consumption tends to be private, individualised, or shared with a sexual partner or two, viewing rituals can take a markedly different form elsewhere. “During workshops, teenage male participants have described their early experiences of watching porn in small groups of friends, often by a roadside or the corner of a home where they are unlikely to be surveilled,” says Khatoon.

The collective viewing is shaped as much by scarcity as by curiosity. Limited access to smartphones and data plans means videos are downloaded, forwarded through WhatsApp groups, or already stored on an older relative’s phone. Porn, in these settings, becomes a shared experience rather than a solitary one. 

Beyond the evergreen fascination for Savita Bhabhi, ‘chachi-bhabhi’ content remains popular in rural India. Shot using basic phone setups, these videos stage familiar family roles: nephews and aunts, or brothers- and sisters-in-law respectively. Khatoon suggests their popularity says more about interactions between genders  rather than deviance. In the absence of active dating cultures and limited interactions with female friends and peers, young men often sexualise the women closest to them. When acted upon, these fantasies can turn violent and abusive, too.

Another pattern cuts across rural and urban settings. Kehkasha points to the persistent demand for videos featuring minors. “Men actively search for ‘Under 18’ content or ‘minor sex’ since sexualising teenage girls in one’s area has been an unfortunately normalised reality,” she says. Though this may seem like deviant behaviour at an individual level, Kehkasha adds that it is intricately tied to how male users perceive young women in the real world. “Like in porn, there's an obsessive focus on the innocence of young girls, their bodies, and them being virgins. There's a belief that their lack of agency and awareness can easily be exploited and manipulated by winning their trust. Watching ‘under 18’ porn only amplifies this belief.”

When fantasy escalates

Among queer men in Varanasi, particularly those in their twenties, there’s an oft-repeated punchline about the super-human stamina in the porn videos that thrill them. Threesomes, orgies, rough sex and hyper-stylised bodies dominate search histories, even as they remain largely absent from lived sexual experiences. 

These men aren’t looking for familiar plotlines or realistic moves. “Porn yahaan pleasure se zyaada fantasy escalation ban chuka hai” (“Porn has less to do with pleasure than fantasies”),” says Arya, a 25-year-old transman and activist associated with the Banaras Queer Pride.

In recent years, Arya has watched the conversation about queer porn in Varanasi evolve into one that is normalised. Mentions of ‘MachoTube’ and other reliable websites are made as suggestions. Slowburn, consensual content has lost traction. Videos that foreground a power imbalance between partners, or “halki zabardasti” (“light coercion/dominance”) circulate more widely, reflecting a broader trend where novelty and intensity outweigh intimacy. 

Arya’s observations might provide answers to questions that India seems to have neatly swept under the rug, but which are impossible to ignore. Until a few years ago, Pornhub’s annual ‘Year in Review’ data dump—a spectacular breakdown of top searches, emerging keywords and time spent on average per video—had a distinct way of making headlines. In 2018, India ranked third in the list of countries with the highest daily traffic to the website. In 2019, we slinked down 12 positions, in part due to a ban on Pornhub by the central government. Ever since, India has been conspicuously absent from this yearly review by the porn giant, as users migrate to other mediums like messaging apps and employ VPNs to access forbidden fruit.

But, as Arya explains, India’s hunger for porn is thriving. 

Made in India, but not always desired

Research from both Chowkhani and Kehkasha highlights a common sentiment: Many Indians don’t want to watch porn made in India (or the subcontinent), featuring Indians. The reasons for this are several, ranging from the nature of the content, the non-professional, far-from-slick ways in which it is shot, to racial stereotypes.

“Many women I interviewed said that the primary reason they don’t seek out South Asian porn is because it often doesn’t look like the woman on screen wants to be having sex or be filmed or have the video uploaded,” writes Kaul Padte in Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography. “As one woman says, ‘Is there even South Asian porn that isn’t ridiculously misogynistic and terrible? I haven’t found any.’”

Non-consensual porn—rape porn or taped videos uploaded without the permission of either/both partners—remains widely popular in India. Even as the nuances of ‘consensual non-consensual’ kink are discussed and debated globally, those who work on the ground worry for women’s safety. 

Kehkasha, on the other hand, notes that preference in urban settings often tilt towards Western porn, particularly content featuring white actors, a tendency she links to bias rather than taste alone. “People correlate white bodies and genitals to a greater sense of hygiene and cleanliness as opposed to Indian bodies,” she says. 

At the same time, there is a discomfort with the highly choreographed, airbrushed performances that dominate much of Western porn. India is considered a hotbed for amateur porn, writes Kaul Padte in a chapter titled ‘Homemade’ in her book, and the demand for it comes from viewers seeking something that feels recognisable rather than aspirational. The appeal lies in the absence of polished scripts: bodies that look ordinary, couples that appear emotionally connected, and sexual encounters that do not rely on exaggerated tropes. Even the scenarios in home-made porn or bhabhi-chachi videos feel more legible to Indian audiences than the stock pizza delivery or plumber-on-a-repair-job tropes that defined Western porn. 

A 2020 survey by Agents of Ishq, a multimedia project about love, sex, and desire, revealed that people longed for elements they found entirely missing—from smiles and laughter, to vulnerable male characters, to the presence of pubic hair—suggesting that many Indians are perhaps settling for the content they can find. 

Though conclusions may be drawn about what India is watching, individual choices remain distinct and unique; no two people watch porn the same way or for the same reasons. Paromita Vohra, a writer, filmmaker, and the founder of Agents of Ishq, recalls an account on the platform written by a queer person who enjoyed heterosexual porn—something that may be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of their politics or identity. “They enjoyed watching heterosexual porn because they identified with the male actor,” says Vohra, “The manner in which desire surfaces is very unpredictable. Culture, which includes media, art and porn, elicits from us our innermost selves and desires.”

In India, porn has never been solely about sex or masturbation. In a society where exposure to sex education is limited and a vocabulary for desire is only slowly growing, it becomes an idiom and embodiment of what is lusted after—born out of individual preference and social conditioning. But even beyond the limitations of the reach of sex education, porn offers much more: a way to talk about, experience, and share that which is forbidden, surprisingly appealing, aspirational—or even meant only for watching, not emulating. In the search terms typed and videos saved and forwarded lies an articulation of the things which cannot be said out loud.