Why are Pakistanis such Gay Porn addicts?

Yes, Pakistanis watch porn. This is fact. That they watch it more than anyone else, however, is a racist smear!

Josh Shahryar June 15, 2013
As if the shameful articles accusing Pakistan of being “Pornistan” wasn’t enough a few years ago, there’s a new article out in a Western publication that belongs in the same category. If you read this article in Mother Jones, you’d think Pakistanis are THE most flaming homosexuals in the world. 

The headline is telling of what’s inside:

“Why Is Gay Porn So Popular in Pakistan?”

While it starts off with a Pew Research Poll that shows Pakistan is among the least tolerant countries towards homosexuality, the author wants to prove that Pakistan isn’t just anti-homosexuality, its people love gay porn more than any other people in the world.

And like a pro, he uses Google search terms to conclude this:
“As of this writing, Pakistan is by volume the world leader for Google searches of the terms ‘shemale sex’, ‘teen anal sex’, and ‘man fucking man’, according to Google Trends. Pakistan also ranks second in the world (after similarly gay-intolerant Kenya) for volume of searches for the search term ‘gay sex pics’.”

This is just an outrageous insinuation as the Pornistan articles from 2010; those, published in several Western media outlets, showed Pakistanis - as well as Indians - as the world leaders in consuming massive amounts of pornography - including bestiality - also relied unsurprisingly on Google search terms.

This is how it works:

Google compiles data on how many times a term has been searched using its services and then you can access that data by looking for the specific terms on Google Trends. By and large the results of Google’s compilation are pretty accurate. There is no question about that. And yes, if you search for those terms, Pakistan does appear at the top.

The question is,
“Are the number of times porn terms are searched on Google a clear indicator of the target population’s porn consumption compared to the rest of the world?”

It would be if every person on the planet consumed porn by Googling for it. Or even a large majority did.

That is not the case and here’s why:

I live in the America - one of the most porn hungry countries in the world. Porn is so popular here that it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry. But here, people rarely “Google” porn. Maybe now and then when they need “variety” but for the most part, once they find a website they like, they bookmark it.

The overwhelming majority of Americans have access to the internet and own a computer in their homes. Once they find a good porn site, they simply bookmark it on their browser for later use.

And there aren’t that many websites to choose from. You could literally memorise the names of three or four and you’ll have access to thousands upon thousands of free, half an hour long explicit videos. You can either type that name or Google the name of the porn site and you’re there. Then you can do all your searches for specific terms inside the website.

So while Americans consume a lot of porn on average, specific term searches won’t show up on Google Trends because they access the porn websites directly not via Google so it appears as though they didn’t.

The reason Pakistanis appear so high on Google Trends is because only about 20% of Pakistanis have access to the internet - one of the worst rates of access in the world’s sixth largest country by population. Most Pakistanis are forced to use internet cafes for access. So each time, the chances are the cafe customer will be on a new computer and has to start his quest for porn anew. This means one thing: Googling.

Yes, Pakistanis do watch porn, but who doesn’t? This is fact. That they watch it more than anyone else, however, is a racist smear.

To prove it, run a Google search for “list of most popular porn sites”. Now, go to “Google Trends” and search for the name of each website and scroll down to see the popularity of said site in different countries. Pakistan will appear much lower than many other countries on every single site, including the United States and Britain. This is whether you look for gay porn or straight porn.

That, however, won’t stop people from trying to use something as nonsensical such as ‘Google search terms’ as an argument, which by no means tell us anything concrete to conclude that Pakistanis are world leaders in porn consumption in a quest to shame ordinary Pakistanis.

However, the drive to portray Pakistanis, Indians, Kenyans and men from any other developing country as sex-crazed is pretty old. Portraying the man of colour as a lesser being than the White man to justify the colonisation of their lands started centuries ago and is quite well-documented.

The current attempts are just leftovers from those racist times and need to be thrown back in the dustbin of history.

Follow Josh on Twitter @JShahryar 
WRITTEN BY:
Josh Shahryar A US-based reporter and blogger, covering human rights in South Asia and the larger Middle East. He tweets @JShahryar (https://twitter.com/JShahryar)
The views expressed by the writer and the reader comments do not necassarily reflect the views and policies of the Express Tribune.

COMMENTS (70)

anonymous | 10 years ago | Reply @Noman Ansari: Exactly, what the writer started off with eventually ended up with something totally different.
Adolf | 10 years ago | Reply Have you ever wondered why people are against gay rights? It's because being gay is NOT a physical imbalance or chemical anomaly in the brain. It is just deviance, turned into a belief because of social and cultural anomalies. Gay men and women are mostly "straight" people who for some reason believe they are different and refuse to explore that feeling. Some have either had traumatic experiences with the other gender as kids, or never had much exposure of their own gender (fatherless sons or ones whose fathers never had time for family may end up being gay because of a lack of male love in their childhood etc, having a peer group of the opposite gender throughout early life can do this too). The point here is that homosexuality is not as much a physiological malformation as a psychological disorder.
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