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April 14, 2019

Book Review- Cyber Sexy : Rethinking Pornography by Richa Kaul Padte


          Pornography is something which everyone Loves to watch/read but no one openly admits in the public. Richa Kaul Padte's 'Cyber Sexy' is a book on Pornography, a bit 'scientific' one at that. In what can be termed as a nuanced account of the evolution of porn, 'Cyber Sexy' tries to look at the various aspects of 'pleasure'.
         Well, this is the kind of book which is quite difficult to review.Obviously, a somewhat authentic account of the hitory of pornography was what I was hoping for when I picked up this book.But to say that the book entirely lived up to my expectations would be a bit of an overstatement.First and foremost, though the efforts of the author to take up a subject like this for her debut work as an author is laudable, the way it has turned out leaves a lot to be desired.May be a little bit of humour in the narrative might have did the trick.
          The book opens with the writer's first encounter with 'porn' and soon goes on to discuss more serious topics like consent, pornography in literature,exhibitionism,mass intimacy and so on.
          The basic problem which I felt with this book is that though it deals with a topic which is hardly boring, the way it is narrated makes this work of non-fiction quite bland and even uninteresting at times. The book has references about some of the biggest online MMS scandals which shook the country in the early 2000s and later, but it never rises above the numerous discussions happening in the online platforms like reddit and quora on a daily basis. The last couple of chapters delves into consensual porn and non consensual sex. As I mentioned before, the basic problem I felt with the book is the jumbled narrative. Instead of discussing one issue at a time and taking it into it's logical conclusion/ writer's opinion on the same, the debutant author jumps from one thing to the other citing 'experiences' of random people.

On the whole, I'm giving this work a 2.75 out of 5.

-nikhimenon

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