When sex is a fact of life, why be prudish about depicting it in the media?

From Nitin:

A Bollywood movie producer argues that India has such a huge population which hasn’t come by moving a magic wand – it has come by sex. So if people are doing it in their bedrooms, why object to it being depicted in the movies?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Question. When sex is a fact of life, why does one need to be prudish about depicting it in the media? India has among the world’s largest population and that population has not come about by blowing of a magic wand.
It has come about by sex. So when sex is a fact of nature, why are Indians so prudish about sex being depicted in the movies, in the culture? Why do they raise such a hue and cry about it? When they are doing it privately in their bedroom, what is wrong in depicting it in the movie theaters? Answer. Yes, sex is a fact of life, but sex doesn’t have to be made the purpose of life.
Excessive glamorization and public depiction of sex makes people so hyper-obsessed with it that seeking sexual pleasure becomes the sole purpose of people’s existence. And that is undesirable, not just spiritually, but even materially. We have to understand purpose of life means what we live for.
Now, for many people, I think, especially in youth and nowadays, increasingly as people grow old also, still the sexual desire does not subside because it is being constantly stimulated and aggravated by external provocative images. So now, yes, again, the point is that what is the purpose of life? Today’s materialistic culture says that ultimately there is no purpose of life. We just live and then we die.
But then we intrinsically feel that our life is purposeful and within the short lifespan that we have, within whatever 60, 70, 80, 90 years we live, within that we try to make our life purposeful and meaningful. We may do that by getting a job, getting a sense of identity, having a family and raising our children. The point is, we all try to bring some meaning and purpose into our life.
But what is the ultimate purpose? So sex, basically, obsession with sex just makes us blind to everything else and it makes us forget all other higher purposes of life. It just makes us obsessed with that one particular activity of seeking bodily pleasure and that bodily pleasure ultimately doesn’t satisfy the heart. It is just a temporary titillating pleasure.
We long for constant happiness. And how much can the body give pleasure? Just temporary, few moments and it’s over after that. So dreams and fantasies that people can cultivate for hours and years, they just get dissipated in a few moments of indulgence and it’s all over.
And because of the propagation by the imagination, then people start thinking that, oh, you know, maybe I did it in the wrong way. I would try it in some other way, maybe with some other person, maybe in a violent, forceful way or whatever. And in that way, people start keeping imagining, imagining, imagining.
And there is no satisfaction in that. Because ultimately, no matter what drugs one takes, what postures one tries, what orientation one experiments with, whatever one tries to do, the body’s capacity to enjoy is limited and that cannot be altered by anything. And that’s why sexual gratification is not the way to happiness.
It is actually not the way to satisfaction, it is the way to frustration. Even it is pursued as life’s primary way to happiness, which is what happens for most people because of the excessive sexually provocative propaganda in today’s society. So the Indian culture is traditionally among the world’s most spiritual culture.
And spiritual culture means that it focuses on awakening our spiritual consciousness. So beyond the body, within the body, different from the body is the soul. And we are actually souls.
And the soul can get eternal happiness when it awakens its spiritual nature. The soul is sat-chit-ananda. So when we come to the spiritual level of reality, then we experience unending happiness because the soul is eternal and the soul has an eternal relationship of love with God.
And that has the happiness that we are all meant to achieve. So when we are too caught up with the dreams and schemes of bodily pleasures, then we can’t think of the spiritual level of reality. Just like say a person is too caught up in watching a movie, then the Prime Minister of India has come to the movie theater sitting next to him and waiting to meet and shake hands with him.
But the person is so caught watching the movie that doesn’t notice him. So similarly, we get so caught up in the bodily level of enjoyment that we don’t think of higher level realities at all. We don’t think of spiritual reality.
And so now at the bodily level, what we get is just a drop of pleasure. Although the media may glamorize that sexual pleasure is like an unending ocean, it is just a drop. There is some pleasure and once the body’s capacity is exhausted, then we can’t enjoy even if we have the desire to.
So in contrast, the happiness at the spiritual level in devotion to God, in devotion to Krishna is like an ocean. And when there is external regulation, when there is no public aggravation of the sexual imagination of people, then people don’t get unduly excited about the drop. Yes, there is lust and people will enjoy.
But then within the dharmic framework through marriage, people gratify their lust and then they turn towards, okay, what more is there in life? Then they turn towards higher happiness. And that’s how people actually rise from Dharma, Artha, Kama and then from Kama people go towards Moksha. People seek higher happiness when the imagination about there being greater pleasure at the physical level in sex is calmed down.
So the arrangement of sexual regulation through a culture, which involves chaste clothing and non-agitating depictions, and then there is marriage, then by that there is gradual subsiding of the wild sexual imagination of the mind. And then one is able to turn towards higher happiness, for the pursuit of higher happiness. And therein, it’s like, say, we are like fish out of water and we are constantly craving, craving, craving for pleasure.
And the propaganda makes us think, the sexually provocative propaganda makes us think that through sex we will become satisfied. But what we get there is barely a drop, nothing more than that. We need to return back to the ocean.
That means the soul has to return back to the spiritual level of reality. Where there is eternal happiness. So now if the spiritual purpose is forgotten or neglected, then the moral regulations may seem especially restrictive, regressive.
All this is old-fashioned. This is a spoiled sport. This is kill joy.
Why are we being checked like this? But actually, even at that level also, at a material level, order is maintained when there is regulation. And some amount of regulation is required even at the material level for society to function. So when there is no morality, then even big, big civilizations can collapse.
So the Roman civilization collapsed when there was wide-scale immorality in society. Sexual immorality and other forms of immorality also. So now, Western civilization was also actually a real civilization.
Because Christianity was quite strong till the 1940s, 1950s. But, or maybe till the start of the, since Sigmund Freud and other psychotherapists, they came up and they glamorized sexuality intellectually through their own ideas. So basically, there was a licentiousness which became the mainstream in Western culture.
I’m not talking about all of Western culture, but the image of Western culture that is propagated in societies which want to become Westernized, like India. So that is, that glamorized part of Western culture is the sexual licentiousness. A large part of it is only sexual licentiousness.
And that is debilitating even for the material survival of society. So divorces, then children being born outside of marriages, the crime rate, the prison population. If you see, there’s a book called the American Paradox, which talks about how, as compared to the 1950s to 2010, David Meyer has done research and has shown how the divorce rate has doubled.
The prison population has tripled, the violent crime rate has quadrupled. The teen suicide rate has tripled. The number of babies born outside marriages has tripled.
The depression rate has actually gone to 10 times above the pre-1950s level. So this last 50, 60 years have been a time when there’s excessive materialism centered around sexualization of culture. So that has had disastrous consequences, even at the material level.
And many people feel, although they have sex with many people, but ultimately they don’t have a love for anyone. They also know no one loves us, loves me. You know, I am using others and others are using me.
People feel desperately lonely. The Harvard Medical School did a research about the psychological condition of people who have free sex. They all feel haunted by feelings of loneliness and guilt.
Loneliness because they know that no one loves us and guilt because they know they’re using others. So the point is that the public depiction of sex and the glamorization of a culture of free sex that is done in the media, that doesn’t lead to some heaven of unlimited sexual pleasure, unrestricted sexual pleasure. That actually leads to a hell of individual and social breakdown.
And that’s what’s happening wherever excessive materialism comes up. So the part of the regulation that is there, the injunctions against public depiction of sexuality that are there in traditional Indian culture, they help to maintain the material order of society and further they help in promoting the spiritual progress of the individual and the situation of society on the path conducive to spiritual progress. So it’s not prudishness, it is prudence.
It is material and spiritual prudence. And yes, as far as India’s population is concerned, yes, India has a huge population and that’s because of procreation. So procreation is a natural biological function that is there.
But today when people do sex, it is not for procreation. It is largely for forgiving some sort of vent for their wildly aggravated imagination. And that wildly aggravated imagination leads to all forms of sexual violence also.
So the fact of life is not denied when we say that sex should not be depicted publicly. The fact of life is acknowledged and there is a whole system, dharma artha, kama, moksha. Kama is considered one of the purusharthas in Vedic culture.
So its place is acknowledged within human life. But what is the fact of life, it’s not denied in Vedic culture, but the fact of life should not be made into the purpose of life. When sex is made into the purpose of life, not only do we spiritually get lost.
etāṁ drṣṭiṁ avaśṭambhya naṣṭātmāno alpā buddhaya prabhavanti ugra karmāṇa kṣayāya jagato hitāḥ Krishna says in 16.9 in the Bhagavad Gita, etāṁ drṣṭiṁ avaśṭambhya, those who accept this worldview. What is that worldview? That is talked about in 16.8 that asatyam apatiṣṭham te jagadāhur anīśvaraṁ aparasparasambhūtaṁ kim anyath kāma haithukam that there is no higher dimension to life, there is no God and lust sex is the only purpose of life. So then with such a worldview, what happens? taṣṭātmāno, the soul gets destroyed.
People just can’t perceive any spiritual dimension of life. People cannot get real unending happiness, which is what they are looking for and which is what sex is promising. But it’s betraying because sex cannot offer us lasting happiness.
It’s just a few moments of titillation. So not only are we spiritually lost, naṣṭātmāno alpabuddhayaḥ prabhavanti ugra-karmāṇah kṣayāya jagato hitāḥ that also one ends up in doing ahita, unbeneficial works which are destructive, kṣayāya. So there is a breakdown when there is excessive glamorization of sex, then people are never satisfied with whatever facilities for sexual gratification that they have.
Once I had gone for a college program. So one boy had written on his school t-shirt that, you know, 99% of the world’s women are beautiful. The remaining 1% are in my college.
So what that means is that now it’s not true, but this is what the perception becomes. Because in the media who are portrayed, all the most attractive forms are portrayed. And then when all the most attractive forms are portrayed, then what happens both men and women, they start feeling deprived.
Women start feeling, oh, I have to look like these women, only then I will be noticed, only then I will be considered attractive. And then that causes so much psychological complex. There can be inferiority complex, there can be stress, there can be all sorts of artificial ways of trying to increase one’s beauty.
And it just leads to so much complication when such most beautiful forms are glamorized. And the men, they also start thinking, oh, this is the real standard of beauty, and that is not available for me. So what happens is the public glamorization of sex makes people perpetually dissatisfied.
So that with whatever one has, one is never satisfied. One wants more and more and more. Actually, what is depicted in the movies and the media is not the natural beauty.
It is the artificially and often expensively dressed up and made up beauty that is depicted. So it is not even real in real life for those people, what to speak of being real for most other people in life. So public depiction of sexuality will keep people perpetually sexually dissatisfied.
And that dissatisfaction will lead to sexual immorality in terms of infidelity in marriage, or it can lead to molestation and abuse. So we need to redirect our desire for happiness towards higher spiritual directions. And we need to regulate the sexual craving within civilized limits for having material order.
But excessive public depiction of sexuality will disrupt people spiritually and will destroy people’s spiritual prospects and will disrupt the individual peace, individual satisfaction and disrupt the social order also. And that is why it has to be stopped. As I said, it is not prudishness, it is prudence.
Thank you.