Who's Sunny Leone to say no one wants to be a porn star?
In the mindless celebration of Sunny Leone's apparently "holding her ground" in the face of the obnoxious and offensive questions put to her by the self-identified hypocrite Bhupendra Chaubey, we actually overlook the fact that both of them were uncomfortably similar in their conservative, heteronormative and unthinking views.
Sunny Leone did not make a case for pornography at all. Asked about which young person dreams to be a porn star, she said "No one". Who is Sunny Leone to decide that no one would want to be a porn star? Millions of people would like to be porn stars and it is only Sunny Leone's own middle-class, normative ideology that made her offer that answer. Yet she claims she saw women porn stars as "sexy, beautiful and free".
She says she is not haunted or held back by her history in the porn industry, yet she says it is firmly something that belongs to her past. She also says she would still do what she did. So why is it firmly in the past? She has also famously said she has sex in porn only with her husband which proves that not only is porn not just a matter of the past for her, but also it is okay only when you are sleeping with your husband in it, upholding the institution of marriage above all else.
Sunny Leone upheld the institution of marriage in the most conventional way. She said every husband and wife should have a "beautiful relationship", should have a "secure life" and be exclusive so that no one else matters. What naive idea of marriage is this?
Apart from the heteronormativity, the monogamy and the unquestioning acceptance of the institution, what sensitivity does it show to the unmarried, the sexually deprived and the sexually marginalised? Or to women in pornography or sex work who do not have the privileges of marriage?
Of course, that answer was in relation to Indian housewives but why did she not seize that opportunity to expose the hollowness of marriage as an institution if Indian married men are lusting after her? Instead, she patronisingly put down Indian housewives by reassuring them that she is not interested in their husbands.
"I am a woman," she says, so, of course, I get upset. And that she does not show anyone that she is upset. What is the model of femininity here? Why is it that she needs to say that she is a woman for her to be upset? Are men never upset? And why is there the denial of being upset or pretending over and over that she does not care? Why did she not take on Chaubey's hypocrisy, apart from that one snide remark and fake laugh about his negativity?
Entertainment is about "fantasy", she said and viewers "should look at me how they want to look at me". Yet she also says five minutes of a "normal conversation" might change a person's view of her. So she sees herself as in need of approval as a person different from the fantasy portrayal of her. Why the need to prove that? And what is the role of fantasy here? Does it exist in complete non-relation to the real?
If only she had stuck her ground about who she really is which is in her own words "just a girl who wants to work", and spoken about how working in the Hindi film industry is much worse than working in the porn industry. And not just for her but for every woman.
Sunny Leone did not hold her ground. Nor did she hold the ground for the porn industry or women in the film industry or women in general.