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Internet Regulation and Sexual Politics in Brazil

June 2012
Development 55(2)

DOI:10.1057/dev.2012.4

Authors:

Associação Brasileira Interdisciplinar de AIDS

In Brazil, the agitation of public anxieties about child pornography has become pivotal for recent legal initiatives to control Internet traffic, which affect Internet users’ privacy and freedom of expression. However, cyber activist protests against those measures and alternative regulation proposals have not reverberated to feminist and LGBT interests in the Internet. Sonia Corrêa, Horacio S&inodot;´vori and Bruno Zilli argue that evidence of sexual community building on social networking platforms calls for new approaches to the exercise of sexual freedom online and off-line.

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Editor

Jac sm Kee

Authors

Manjima Bhattacharjya

Sonia Corrêa

Melissa Ditmore

Kevicha Echols

Maya Indira Ganesh

Marina Maria

Nicolene McLean

Nadine Moawad

Relebohile Moletsane

Jeanne Prinsloo

Tamara Qiblawi

Jandira Queiroz

Horacio Sívori

Bruno Zilli

Reviewers

Gus Hosein

Heike Jensen

Pramada Menon

Katharine Sarikakis

Clarissa Smith

Language editor and proofreading

Lori Nordstrom

Publication production

Karen Higgs, Analía Lavin

Graphic design

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Phone: +598 2400 1685

Cover design

Ezrena Marwan

Reference editing

Soledad Bervejillo

Álvaro Queiruga

EROTICS: Sex, rights and the internet

Published by APC

2011

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Some rights reserved.

ISBN 978-92-95096-11-0

APC-201107-WNSP-R-EN-PDF-0102

EROTICS: Sex, rights and the internet

An exploratory research study

APC would like to thank the Ford Foundation

for their support of this innovative research.

Table of contents
About the authors  ................................................................................................... 5
Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis  ................................................ 6
Brazil
Internet regulation and sexual politics in Brazil  .................................................. 19
SONIA CORRÊA, MARINA MARIA and JANDIRA QUEIROZ (Sexuality Policy Watch) 
and
 BRUNO DALLACORT ZILLI and HORACIO FEDERICO SÍVORI 
(Latin American Center on Sexuality and Human Rights, CLAM)
India
Negotiating intimacy and harm: Female internet users in Mumbai  .................. 66
MANJIMA BHATTACHARJYA and MAYA INDIRA GANESH
Lebanon
Who’s afraid of the big bad internet?  ............................................................... 109
NADINE MOAWAD and TAMARA QIBLAW
South Africa
The internet and sexual identities: Exploring transgender and lesbian  
use of the internet in South Africa  ..................................................................... 135
JEANNE PRINSLOO and NICOLENE C. MCLEAN (Rhodes University) 
and
 RELEBOHILE MOLETSANE (University of KwaZulu-Natal) 
United States
Restricted access to information: Youth and sexuality  ...................................... 176
KEVICHA ECHOLS and MELISSA DITMORE (Sex Work Awareness)

About the authors

The EROTICS network is comprised of researchers, aca-

demics, writers and activists in the ﬁelds of sexuality,

sexual rights, and internet and communication rights.

EROTICS editor and coordinator

Jac sm Kee is the Women’s Rights Advocacy coordi-

nator of APC, and heads the EROTICS research and

the Take Back the Tech! global campaign that con-

nects emerging communications technologies and

violence against women. Email: jac@apcwomen.org

EROTICS Brazil

The EROTICS research in Brazil is a collaborative ef-

fort by Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW), a global forum

of researchers and activists, and the Latin American

Center on Sexuality and Human Rights (CLAM), a

sexuality research regional resource centre. Sonia

Corrêa is the co-chair of SPW and associate research-

er at the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association

(ABIA). Jandira Queiroz is a journalist, LGBT and

feminist activist, and project assistant at the Brazilian

secretariat of SPW. Marina Maria is a journalist and

project assistant at the Brazilian secretariat of SPW.

She is currently doing her Master’s degree in Commu-

nication, Information and Health and is a member of

APC’s women’s programme (APC WNSP). Bruno Zilli

is a doctoral candidate in Social Sciences and CLAM

researcher. Horacio Sívori PhD is an anthropologist.

He is currently regional coordinator at CLAM and

post-doctoral fellow at the State University of Rio de

Janeiro’s Institute of Social Medicine.

Magaly Pazello advised the research team and

reviewed the paper. Magaly is a doctoral candidate

in Social Studies and a member of EMERGE-Research

Group for Communications and Emergence at Flu-

minense Federal University. She is also a member

of the APC WNSP and was actively involved in both

phases of the World Summit on the Information

Society.

EROTICS India

Maya Indira Ganesh and Manjima Bhattacharjya are

independent researchers based in Bangalore and

Mumbai. Both have a shared history of working in

the Indian women’s movement as researchers and

activists. Manjima holds a PhD in Sociology from Ja-

waharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. Maya

has an MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the

University of Sussex and works at the Tactical Tech-

nology Collective.

EROTICS Lebanon

Nadine Moawad and Tamara Qiblawi are writers and

activists based in Beirut, Lebanon. Nadine is active

with gender and tech initiatives and has co-founded

Nasawiya, a feminist collective. Tamara is a journal-

ist who writes about socioeconomic issues and is

working on starting up a gender resource centre at

Nasawiya.

EROTICS South Africa

Jeanne Prinsloo is a professor emeritus afﬁliated to

Rhodes University and an independent researcher

and lecturer with expertise in the ﬁelds of media,

gender, education and identity. Relebohile Mo-

letsane is a professor and JL Dube chair in Rural

Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She

has extensive experience in teaching and research in

the areas of curriculum studies and gender and edu-

cation, including gender-based violence and its links

to HIV/AIDS and AIDS-related stigma, body politics,

as well as on girlhood studies in Southern African

contexts. Nicolene McLean has recently completed

her Master’s in Media Studies at Rhodes University

and is currently lecturing at Cape Peninsula Univer-

sity of Technology. Her areas of interest include new

media technology, gender, representation and iden-

tity construction.

EROTICS USA

Melissa Ditmore holds a doctorate in Sociology and

a graduate certiﬁcate in Women’s Studies. She is

a noted scholar of sex work with three books and

numerous papers. Kevicha Echols is a doctoral candi-

date in the Human Sexuality programme at Widener

University.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET6 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

Introduction

Indeed, the Internet has become a key means by

which individuals can exercise their right to free-

dom of opinion and expression, as guaranteed by

article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights and the International Covenant on Civil

and Political Rights. (para. 20)

The right to freedom of opinion and expression

is as much a fundamental right on its own accord

as it is an “enabler” of other rights, including

economic, social and cultural rights, such as the

right to education and the right to take part in

cultural life and to enjoy the beneﬁts of scien-

tiﬁc progress and its applications, as well as civil

and political rights, such as the rights to freedom

of association and assembly. Thus, by acting as a

catalyst for individuals to exercise their right to

freedom of opinion and expression, the Internet

also facilitates the realization of a range of other

human rights. (para. 22)

REPORT OF THE SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR

ON THE PROMOTION AND PROTECTION OF THE RIGHT

TO FREEDOM OF OPINION AND EXPRESSION,

FRANK LA RUE, 16 MAY 2011, A/HRC/17/27

What is the value of the internet in the fulﬁlment of

rights? The rapid development and growth of internet

access and services in the past two decades indicate its

central role in many aspects of our lives. Much more

than a tool, we have formed relationships, gained

new knowledge, engaged in debate, sought income,

participated in culture and more in online spaces. The

internet’s potential to revitalise democratic delibera-

tion

and to transform hierarchical power structures

lies in its unique characteristics that allow immedi-

ate transmission of communication and information

across geographical boundaries at relatively low cost.

Its networked nature also facilitates interaction and

participation, especially with recent development of

web applications and platforms that prioritise users’

content creation and engagement.

The signiﬁcance of this is that the internet cre-

ates a space where diverse individuals with different

1 See the EROTICS Brazil report for a comprehensive analysis on the

potential of the internet to address democratic deﬁcits, analysed

through the concept of “communicative action” by Jürgen

Habermas.

needs and priorities are able to express their reali-

ties and perspectives without being conﬁned by the

sifting powers of institutions such as broadcast-

ing media. “Truth” becomes a dialogic negotiation

between multiple speakers, where active participa-

tion in contested and collective meaning-making is

made possible. This means that different kinds of

discourses are able to proliferate and norms that

discriminate against or silence marginalised sec-

tions of society can be challenged and dismantled.

It provides an environment where people with

shared interests and concerns are able to overcome

geographical and other limitations to come together

and share ideas, provide mutual support, exchange

information and organise for change. In this way,

the internet has become an increasingly critical

public sphere for the claiming of citizenship rights

and civil liberties. For those who have little access to

other kinds of “publics”

due to the multiple forms

of discrimination faced – including based on gender,

age, economic status and sexual identity – it can be a

particularly important space for the negotiation and

fulﬁllment of their rights.

However, this landscape is rapidly changing. The

internet is subjected to increasing forms of regula-

tion by both state and non-state actors, with existing

unequal power structures inﬂecting the deliberation.

From managing critical internet resources, to inter-

governmental cooperation in cyber crime issues, the

question of who governs the internet, under what

principles, and to whose interests becomes a shared

critical concern. Central to this is the debate on inter-

net content regulation. The free ﬂow of information

and communication that acts as the cornerstone

to the potentially liberatory impact of the internet

has become a subject of intense scrutiny and inter-

vention.

Multiple interests and discourses intersect

in this debate, including state sovereignty on the

2 “Publics” indicates a multiplicity of sites of engagement by civil

society in their participation in democratic debates and processes

to challenge and organise against discrimination and exclusion,

as opposed to a singular “public sphere” such as the media. See

the EROTICS South Africa report for a discussion of this concept in

relation to its research on lesbian and transgender sites.

3 There is a growing body of work that documents the extent and

forms of internet censorship and surveillance practices in different

countries. A good overview can be found on the OpenNet

Initiative’s Global Filtering Map (available online at map.opennet.

net). The movement to increase internet content regulation can

also be seen from the legal and policy analysis of the EROTICS

country reports.

Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

JAC SM KEE

EROTICS editor and coordinator

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET7 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

question of legal jurisdiction, national security and

cyber warfare, commercial protection, public morals

and civil liberties.

Sexuality traverses the debate on content regu-

lation in key, though invisible ways. Often, efforts

to regulate the free ﬂow of information, expression

and practices online are accompanied by the mobi-

lisation of anxieties and “dangers” around sexual

content and interaction – the most familiar being the

need to regulate or prohibit “pornography” and in-

creasingly, content or activities that are “harmful to

children”. Woven between and within these terms,

however, are complex concepts, multiple interests

and diverse realities that cannot, and should not, be

conﬂated into unproblematic assumptions. This is

especially true when laws and policy that regulate

internet content have the potential (and in many

cases, real) impact of limiting the fundamental rights

and freedoms of a diversity of people. For example,

the right to education, health, self-determination,

bodily integrity, freedom of association, participa-

tion in public and cultural life, privacy, and not least,

freedom of information and expression. This is com-

pounded by legal provisions that remain broad and

vaguely deﬁned, making them vulnerable to norma-

tive prejudices.

A further consideration is on the existing gender

bias and assumption of heteronormativity

in the

regulation of sexual speech and conduct. The dispar-

ity in decision-making power in public institutions

including politics, media and religion that privileges

particular perspectives and construction of gender

order, identity and relations can result in discussions

that negate or deprioritise marginalised perspec-

tives. It is precisely at this point where the internet

can provide an important space for the negotiation

of sexual citizenship

that is under threat. As noted

in the International Council on Human Rights Poli-

cy discussion paper, “members of society need to

contribute to the meanings their society gives to

sexual activity. It is through participation in making

meaning, including through rights of expression,

association and assembly that ‘citizens’ – including

marginalised people and members of minorities –

can inﬂuence and enrich law and policy.”

4 See for example the debates at the Internet Governance Forums

under the thematic area of security, privacy and openness,

available at www.intgovforum.org

5 “Heteronormativity” refers to the privileging of heterosexuality

through institutions, structures of understanding and practical

orientations. See Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner “Sex in

Public” Critical Inquiry 24, 2 (1998): 548

6 “Sexual citizenship” refers to the extent to which individuals can

participate in public and political life due to their conformity to

or difference from sexual norms. See Alice M. Miller Sexuality and

Human Rights: Discussion Paper (Versoix: International Council on

Human Rights Policy, 2009)

7 Ibid. 24

To ensure the continued vibrancy of the inter-

net in enabling a broad range of rights, feminist

analysis and the engagement of women’s rights,

gender equality and sexual rights advocates are

critically needed to inform and shape this debate.

More importantly, and resonating with the partici-

patory nature of the internet, the perspectives of

users themselves on how they are using the inter-

net in the exercise of their sexual rights and the

possible implications of online content regulation

measures on this ability are vital. However, both

are rarely present and considered in policy and

legislative processes related to internet content

regulation. Reasons for this muted participation

are numerous and varied, from the fragmenta-

tion of civil society advocacy in this issue area, the

pace and processes in which decision making takes

place, and the biases as mentioned earlier, to the

technical language that requires some level of fa-

miliarity and politicisation.

The EROTICS (Exploratory Research on Sexual-

ity and the Internet) research project was initiated

in 2008 as an exploratory step to meet this need

and bridge the gap between policy and legislative

measures that regulate content and practice on the

internet, and the actual lived practices, experiences

and concerns of internet users in the exercise of their

sexual rights. It aims to promote evidence-based pol-

icy making by engaging in on-the-ground research

with a range of internet users – especially those most

affected by internet regulation measures, including

young women and people of diverse sexualities – to

inform and guide policy making for a more account-

able process of decision making. The project was

coordinated by the Association for Progressive Com-

munications (APC) and conducted with local partners

comprising feminist academics and activists in ﬁve

countries, namely Brazil, India, Lebanon, South Af-

rica and the United States.

This paper presents an overview of the project

and draws out some of the emerging issues that are

threaded between the ﬁve country papers, with an

aim to stimulate further research and discussion. The

ﬁrst section summarises the overall goal, approach

and methodological issues of the research. The sec-

ond and third sections look at the current landscape

of sexual and internet rights, and the value of the

internet in the exercise of rights by people of di-

verse sexualities that were surfaced in the country

research. The fourth section outlines the different

forms of challenges, threats and restrictions to the

free ﬂow of information and engagement online

that emerged, and the key actors involved. The ﬁ-

nal section raises aspects that are missing from the

debates, with recommendations for further research

and ways forward.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET8 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

Scope and methodology

The EROTICS project took place between June 2008

and June 2011. The primary research goal was to re-

spond to the question:

s How may emerging debates and the growing

practice of online content regulation either im-

pede or facilitate the different ways women use

the internet and the impact on their sexual ex-

pression, sexualities and sexual health practices,

and the assertion of their sexual rights?

Or expressed differently:

s How does the internet facilitate the exercise of

sexual rights and the expression of sexualities,

particularly of women living in different socio-

political, economic and cultural contexts?

s How does emerging regulation online affect this

ability?

The ﬁrst stage of the research encompassed a policy

review and a literature review to map the current

landscape of the issue. Amongst its ﬁndings, the lit-

erature review revealed a scarcity of research that

directly connects sexuality and internet censorship,

content policy and regulation, while the policy

review noted the relative absence of active engage-

ment by women’s rights, gender equality and sexual

rights movements in related policy debates and

processes.

This gave a positive indication on the

timeliness and need for the EROTICS research sub-

ject. It also helped provide a global context of the

issue, and a starting point to focus the country-level

investigation.

The ﬁve research countries were identiﬁed from

the policy review, and demonstrated conditions that

the project wanted to investigate, including reason-

able and/or growing rates of internet access, extent

of internet ﬁltering practices, the availability of

research partners and the prevalence of public de-

bates on sexual rights and internet regulation issues.

Except for the United States,

developing countries

were chosen in line with the project’s intention to

privilege lesser heard perspectives in these debates.

Country partners were selected from an open call

based on their experience and knowledge in either

research on sexuality or on internet rights issues from

8 Mabel Bianco and Andrea Mariño EROTICS: An Exploratory

Research on Sexuality & The Internet - Policy Review APC, 2009

www.genderit.org/content/erotics-exploratory-research-sexuality-

internet-policy-review; Manjima Bhattacharjya and Maya Indira

Ganesh EROTICS: An Exploratory Research on Sexuality & The

Internet - Literature Review APC, 2009 www.genderit.org/content/

erotics-exploratory-research-sexuality-internet-literature-review

9 The United States was also identiﬁed based on the Ford

Foundation’s area of focus in this country, which related directly

to the research question considering that many inﬂuential and

popular online companies are based there.

a feminist or gendered analysis. The EROTICS re-

search was also conceived as an advocacy platform to

initiate discussions and linkages with related rights-

based actors through the research process. As such,

country partners were also selected based on their

networking with local rights-based organisations or

advocates. The country research team members are:

s Brazil: Sonia Corrêa, Marina Maria and Jandira

Queiroz (Sexuality Policy Watch) and Bruno Zilli

and Horacio Sívori (Latin American Center on

Sexuality and Human Rights, CLAM)

s India: Manjima Bhattacharjya and Maya Indira

Ganesh (independent researchers)

s Lebanon: Nadine Moawad and Tamara Qiblawi

(Nasawiya)

s South Africa: Jeanne Prinsloo and Nicolene

McLean (Rhodes University) and Relebohile Mo-

letsane (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

s United States: Melissa Ditmore and Kevicha

Echols (Sex Work Awareness)

From the outset, the scoping of the research universe

proved to be a challenge. Through a participa-

tory and collaborative approach, the EROTICS team

outlined the potential areas of enquiry at the ﬁrst

workshop, and explored concepts and frameworks

that were necessary to guide the project. Through-

out the project, peer discussions and feedback were

central to the research development and resource

persons in particular areas were consulted to provide

key insights to the study.

This included a second

workshop where initial ﬁndings and methodologi-

cal challenges were discussed, and ﬁrst drafts of the

research papers being sent to external reviewers for

comments.

Due to the diversity of the countries, includ-

ing social, political and legislative contexts, access

and infrastructure, historical development of re-

lated rights-based movements and the in/visibility

of sexuality and sexual rights discourse, we decided

to conduct in-depth analysis in each of the countries

based on local priorities and realities as opposed to

a strictly comparative study. This included who to in-

terview and speak with as key stakeholders in the

issue, whether as user or advocate, particular online

10 In particular, Professor Chan Lean Heng (University Sains Malaysia)

on gender research and participatory research methodology,

Bobby Soriano on the technical layer of internet content

regulation and surveillance, Professor Katharine Sarikakis (Leeds

University, UK) on international media policy and its impact on

women, Pramada Menon (CREA, India) on sexuality research

and advocacy, Dr. Clarissa Smith (Onscenity network) on media

and cultural studies focusing on audience engagement with

pornography, Dr. Gus Hosein (Privacy International) on privacy

policy and analysis, and Dr. Heike Jensen (Humboldt University,

Berlin) on a gender research framework on internet censorship

and surveillance.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET9 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

sites, and direction of focus. The main research goal

acted as a common framework to guide the speciﬁc

country studies, and each report included a detailed

look at user experience and perspectives as well as

an analysis of the legal and policy context. From

there, common threads and emerging issues are to

be drawn up through this synthesis paper.

This approach resulted in a rich body of work

that provided a deep engagement with diverse sec-

tions of society and communities, including young

women (India), library users and particularly young

people among them (US), transgender people (South

Africa), lesbian women (Lebanon, India and Brazil),

sexual rights advocates (Lebanon and Brazil), social

networking users (all countries) and men who ad-

vocate for intergenerational relationships (Brazil).

It also brought forward a range of methodological

approaches that were speciﬁc to each context and

area of study. This included critical analysis of laws,

policy and literature, quantitative surveys, in-depth

interviews, critical textual analysis, auto-ethnogra-

phy, online ethnography, onsite technical tests and

crowdsourcing.

The research is informed by feminist analysis,

epistemology and research methodology. As such,

the research was guided through the following

shared principles:

s Critical awareness and analysis of unequal pow-

er structures and relations, including on the

basis of gender, sexuality, age, economic status

and other axes of socially constructed position

or identity.

s Privileging socially and/or politically marginalised

perspectives and voices.

s Reﬂexivity and location of the researcher as

relevant and key components in approach and

analysis.

s Participatory in approach, where “informants”

are located as key partners and stakeholders in

the research.

s Ethical consideration of safety where focused

efforts are made to minimise harm when partici-

pating in the research.

s Research as a political endeavour with an aim

towards social justice and to challenge discrimi-

nation, i.e. not “research for research’s sake”.

Considering the complex and often intimately bound

characteristic of sexuality as a knowledge-building

subject, some methodological challenges were faced

during the research project. Two main points raised

in this regard were:

Hidden population

The subject of the research aims to centre sections

of community who are socially and politically ex-

cluded, and face discrimination or violence due to

their sexual identity, beliefs or practices. This is also

probably the reason they turn to the internet as a

“safer” space due to its ability to provide relative

anonymity and control over moments of interaction.

However, this presented difﬁculty for researchers

who were not themselves “insiders” of the commu-

nity, or did not share the same identity. In particular,

both efforts to reach out to online lesbian communi-

ties in Brazil and South Africa failed to yield much

response despite efforts to connect through “insid-

ers” who were allies of the EROTICS initiative. This

itself is noteworthy and compels further discussion of

the particular (and gendered) concerns that lesbians

might have over online interaction and community

building, and the strategies necessary to maintain

the safety of their spaces. The EROTICS India research

provides a glimpse into the detailed process that is

undertaken by a lesbian mailing list in this regard.

It is also worth noting that the Lebanon research

focused on lesbians who use the internet for queer

advocacy, but faced lesser challenges due to their

key positions within some of the communities and

employment of auto-ethnography as part of their

research methodology. Nonetheless, both the Brazil

and South Africa research teams evolved their ap-

proach to generate equally important analysis by

examining online discourses that defended lesbo-

phobic speech and mapping the lesbian web sphere,

respectively, and exploring their signiﬁcance to the

advancement of the rights of lesbians.

Young people and sexuality

The prominence of child pornography arguments in

internet content regulation debates meant that chil-

dren were key stakeholders in this issue. However,

research with children, particularly on the area of

sexuality, is a contentious issue. Children’s right to

participate in research is often subjected to a pro-

tectionist approach, with conﬂicted positions on

their competency and vulnerability in meeting the

criteria of informed consent by their adult gatekeep-

ers, ethics committees and researchers themselves.

The EROTICS team discussed the ethical and meth-

odological dimensions of this issue extensively at the

ﬁrst workshop. One established way of mitigating

the concerns (although not without facing similar

problems of protectionist assumptions) is to submit

the research proposal through an ethics committee

11 Mary Ann Powell and Anne B. Smith “Children’s Participation

Rights in Research” Childhood 16,1 (2009): 124-142

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET10 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

at an academic institution for review.

However, this

was not a viable option since not all EROTICS team

members are based in universities and due to the

limitations of time and resources. As such, the re-

search was not able to directly speak with children or

young people about their use of the internet in the

exercise of their sexual rights, but instead, looked at

how policies that target young people might affect

them, as in the case of the EROTICS research in the

US. Nonetheless, it is stressed that this is an existing

gap in knowledge and an important area of research

that needs to be undertaken to recognise the right

of children and young people to have a say in issues

that affect them directly, and to recognise their right

to participation. The category of “children” as a

social construction that differs in meaning across cul-

tural, legal and political contexts needs to be taken

into consideration, moving beyond an overarching

protectionist approach to an approach that recog-

nises the fulﬁlment of their rights.

Sexuality and the internet:

Evolving a rights framework

It is only relatively recently that both “sexual rights”

and “internet rights” gained currency as a way to

frame and analyse the signiﬁcant ways that sexual-

ity and internet access, development and application

affect multiple aspects of human life. The term “sex-

ual rights” emerged as a broad unifying term in the

last decade to encapsulate the diverse issues related

to sexuality and rights, including violence against

women, sexual and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS,

and queer activism, amongst others. Unravelling and

clarifying the principles and concepts behind this

term is an ongoing process.

The most commonly cited deﬁnition of sexual

rights stems from the World Health Organization

(WHO), which states:

Sexual rights embrace human rights that are al-

ready recognized in national laws, international

human rights documents and other consensus

statements. They include the right of all persons,

free of coercion, discrimination and violence, to:

s the highest attainable standard of sexual

health, including access to sexual and repro-

ductive health care services;

s seek, receive and impart information related

to sexuality;

s sexuality education;

12 Ibid.

13 See Miller Sexuality and Human Rights

14 www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/gender_rights/sexual_

health/en

s respect for bodily integrity;

s choose their partner;

s decide to be sexually active or not;

s consensual sexual relations;

s consensual marriage;

s decide whether or not, and when, to have

children; and

s pursue a satisfying, safe and pleasurable sexu-

al life.

The responsible exercise of human rights requires

that all persons respect the rights of others.

The claim to sexual rights is not a call for a new set of

rights that relate to sexuality, but rather for applying

existing standards and principles to how constructions

of sexuality and gender act as determining factors in

the enjoyment and fulﬁlment of fundamental human

rights. The development of the Yogyakarta Principles

by a group of international human rights experts who

analysed and applied binding international legal in-

struments and standards to sexual orientation and

gender identity is an important contribution to this ef-

fort, and covers a range of issues including extrajudicial

executions, violence and torture, non-discrimination,

privacy, access to justice, health, employment, educa-

tion, public participation and more.

On 14 June 2011, the UN Human Rights Council

adopted its ﬁrst resolution on the human rights of

people of diverse sexualities and gender identity, and

called for an end to discriminatory laws and violence.

This is a signiﬁcant and historical moment in the rec-

ognition of sexuality issues from the framework of

rights. At the same 17th Human Rights Council session,

the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of

opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, focused on the

internet in his report.

It was the ﬁrst time that the

internet was being examined on the right to freedom

of expression and information at this forum, and con-

stitutes a major step forward in centring both the key

role of the internet in enabling these rights, as well as

the framing of human rights principles in addressing

internet governance in this area.

Similar to the struggle for sexual rights, advo-

cacy on rights related to the internet looked to the

application of existing human rights principles to

the internet’s sphere of inﬂuence. The APC Internet

15 www.yogyakartaprinciples.org

16 United Nations General Assembly Human rights, sexual orientation

and gender identity A/HRC/RES/17/19, 14 July 2011 ap.ohchr.org/

documents/alldocs.aspx

17 United Nations General Assembly Report of the Special Rapporteur

on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of

opinion and expression A/HRC/17/27, 16 May 2011 www2.ohchr.

org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET11 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

Rights Charter

is one of the earliest expressions of

the way human rights relate to internet issues, focus-

ing on seven broad thematic areas which were seen

as particularly key to developing countries.

It was

also partly aimed to circumvent potentially polarising

debates that raised the question of whether the huge

impact of the internet brought with it new forms

of rights such as the right to internet access – an is-

sue which still resonates in current communications

policy movements.

In that way, it became a valuable

strategy and platform to directly engage the rights

language and framework into advocacy work on the

internet, and enable continuous analysis of the rap-

idly changing internet landscape. The APC Internet

Rights Charter laid the groundwork for the more re-

cent formulation of the Charter of Human Rights and

Principles for the Internet

in 2010, by the Internet

Rights and Principles (IRP) Dynamic Coalition of the

Internet Governance Forum process. The IRP charter is

also envisaged as a continuously evolving document,

and lists an expanded twenty areas of rights.

The ﬁrst World Summit on the Information Soci-

ety (WSIS) was convened by the United Nations (UN)

in 2003, with participation by governments, civil soci-

ety and the private sector. Unlike most global policy

processes, those related to internet governance de-

veloped open and multi-stakeholder participatory

models and processes, where different actors with a

stake in the issue are able to come together and dia-

logue on important policy issues on relatively equal

grounds. This is in part due to the historical devel-

opment of the internet, where its open architecture

fostered innovation and resisted singular ownership

and control at the most basic level. The multiplic-

ity of actors involved in the internet’s development

through time, including members of the technical

community, academia, civil society actors, govern-

ments and the private sector, created a setting where

no single party is able to conclusively decide on how

the internet should be governed.

18 The APC Internet Rights Charter was collectively developed

in 2001, building from the People’s Communication Charter

that was part of the Communication Rights in the Information

Society (CRIS) campaign. It is intended to provide a baseline for

information and communications technology (ICT) policy advocacy,

and functions as a “living document” that undergoes changes

and review as the ICT landscape changes. The APC Internet

Rights Charter can be found at www.apc.org/en/node/5677

and the People’s Communication Charter at web.archive.org/

web/20060208112147/www.pccharter.net/charteren.html

19 Natasha Primo “APC Internet Rights Charter, 2002+: An overview”

APC, 2002 www.slideshare.net/natashaprimo/apc-internet-rights-

charter-an-overview-presented-by-natasha-primo

20 For an overview of the debate on new rights for the internet

see Max Senges and Lisa Horner Values, principles and rights in

internet governance: Paper for the Freedom of Expression Project

(Freedom of Expression Project, 2009), Annex A

21 Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet: Beta

Version 1.1 (2010) internetrightsandprinciples.org/node/367

22 Jovan Kurbalija An introduction to internet governance (Msida &

Geneva: DiploFoundation, 2010)

The WSIS Declaration of Principles afﬁrms hu-

man rights in the common vision for the information

society:

We, the representatives of the peoples of the

world, assembled in Geneva from 10-12 De-

cember 2003 for the ﬁrst phase of the World

Summit on the Information Society, declare

our common desire and commitment to build

a people-centred, inclusive and development-

oriented Information Society, where everyone

can create, access, utilize and share information

and knowledge, enabling individuals, communi-

ties and peoples to achieve their full potential

in promoting their sustainable development and

improving their quality of life, premised on the

purposes and principles of the Charter of the

United Nations and respecting fully and uphold-

ing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(Article 1)

The negotiation and process undertaken to achieve

consensus and its adoption by the 175 participating

states make it an important ﬁrst step towards com-

mitment to human rights on internet-related issues.

At the second WSIS in Tunisia in 2005, the Internet

Governance Forum (IGF) was established under the

auspices of the UN Secretary General.

The IGF, which

takes place yearly, has functioned as a robust multi-

stakeholder platform that provides a critical process

for different actors to converge on a relatively equal

platform to dialogue and share best practices on

emerging key internet governance policy issues, and

has been an inﬂuential space in informing policy

development by the private sector and intergovern-

mental bodies as well as governments.

The IGF is

organised around ﬁve to six main thematic areas,

including “openness”, a topic which is wide ranging

and encompasses issues including privacy, security,

network neutrality and content regulation. Despite

the WSIS Declaration of Principles, discussions on hu-

man rights and the internet are primarily limited to

this thematic area, and rarely feature as a central is-

sue at the IGF.

23 Declaration of Principles. Building the Information Society: a

global challenge in the new Millennium, Document WSIS-03/

GENEVA/DOC/4-E www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/ofﬁcial/dop.html

24 See “About the Internet Governance Forum” www.intgovforum.

org/cms/aboutigf

25 For example, Lee Hibbard from the Council of Europe was quoted

as stating, “Without the Internet Governance Forum over the last

years, I don’t think that the Council of Europe would have been

able to be as reactive in developing many tools and guidelines in

the ﬁeld of human rights, for example, as it has been.” In Monika

Ermert “One (Almost) Happy Multi-stakeholder Family At The

Annual Internet Governance Forum” Intellectual Property Watch

24 November 2009 www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/11/24/one-

almost-happy-multi-stakeholder-family-at-the-annual-internet-

governance-forum

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET12 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

The EROTICS project was founded through APC’s

engagement in the “openness” thematic area. The

IGF has been a challenging space for both women’s

rights advocates and for broader constituencies

engaged in advocacy for gender equality and sex-

uality-related rights for reasons mentioned above.

Participation in numbers is low, with little visibility

of debates that included gendered perspectives and

a framing of sexuality-related issues under human

rights principles.

Sexuality ﬁgures primarily within a discourse of

“danger”, especially in relation to children, with

numerous workshops and presentations organised

around best practices and strategies to protect mi-

nors from sexual exploitation and the potential harm

of sexually inappropriate content. The sensitivity of

discussing (and arguably, lack of familiarity with)

the issue of young people’s sexuality meant that it

was difﬁcult for the majority of IGF participants to

navigate the debate from a framework of rights, ex-

cept in situations of competing rights and interests

in measures that may limit the broader population’s

right to information and expression. The perspective

of young people’s rights to health, education, partic-

ipation, expression, information, privacy and sexual

autonomy, bearing in mind their evolving capacities

with parental rights to guidance, was critically miss-

ing in these debates.

Also absent is discussion on the sexual rights of

women and of marginalised sections of society, and

the internet’s key enabling role in transforming un-

equal gender relations and discriminatory norms and

practices. Debates on internet content regulation,

surveillance and privacy are rarely informed by the

hard lessons learnt from feminist movements, such as

the conceptual complexities of private/public in the

criminalisation of domestic violence

and the polic-

ing of sexual behaviour and identity on the basis of

public morality and national order. There is a need

for these insights and perspectives to inform the

debates on clarifying limits to contesting rights and

interests, and what principles they are decided upon.

This is especially relevant when current approaches to

content regulation in relation to sexuality are from a

protectionist standpoint on the basis of “harm” to

either private individuals or public morals. How is

“harm” measured, on what value system, and how

does this empower or further constrain already mar-

ginalised sections of society? In what ways can we

26 Jac sm Kee, Namita Malhotra and EROTICS team Internet

Governance Issues on Sexuality and Women’s Rights (APC WNSP,

Alternative Law Forum and APC EROTICS Project, 2010) www.

genderit.org/articles/internet-governance-issues-sexuality-and-

womens-rights

27 For example, see Martha Nussbaum “Is privacy bad for women?”

Boston Review April/May 2000 bostonreview.net/BR25.2/nussbaum.

html

approach internet regulation to instead create the

conditions necessary to provide for the protection

and fulﬁlment of the rights of a diversity of people,

towards inclusion and equality?

The politics of sexual speech/act

Examining the issue of content regulation from the

perspective of sexuality and sexual rights is impor-

tant for two related reasons: 1) the recurrence and

centrality of sexual regulation in arguments for in-

ternet regulation, whether in the form of moral

arguments or protection from actual or potential

harm; 2) sexuality and the way it is constructed and

valued in society plays a determining role in the ex-

tent to which an individual is able to participate as a

full member of her/his society.

The regulation of sexual speech and actions

through internet regulation measures contributes

to deﬁning what is permissible or “legitimate”

sexuality and what is prohibited or “illegitimate”

sexuality. This in turn contributes to the construc-

tion of “sexual hierarchies”, explained by Gay Rubin

as the way in which sexual identities, communities,

practices and expressions are organised.

Sexual

hierarchies are intimately bound with other forms

of social stratiﬁcation, including gender, class, age,

ethnicity, able-bodiedness and so on, and carry with

them accompanying privileges, resources and cen-

sure (for example, through laws and policies related

to marriage, inheritance, social welfare, rape and

abortion). As such, the constitution of sexual hierar-

chies or differentiation between citizen-subjects on

the basis of sexuality is politically linked to how a

nation-state or society is organised and imagined,

and solidiﬁed through the exchange of symbolism,

culture, discourse and norms through institutions

such as the family, schools, law enforcement and the

media.

The internet, because of its unique characteris-

tics, has provided a critical space for the proliferation

of multiple discourses that can act to challenge and

rupture normative ideals of sexual hierarchies. It has

become an important avenue to interrogate existing

standards of sexual legitimacy, and to raise broader

questions around justice, equality and non-discrim-

ination. Due to its relatively low barriers to access

and dissemination (as compared to, for example,

traditional mainstream media), the internet enables

perspectives and voices from the margins to infuse

and trouble dominant discourses that anchor norma-

tive sexual hierarchies. The in-depth research with

28 Gayle Rubin “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the

Politics of Sexuality”, in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female

Sexuality ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984)

29 See Anne McClintock Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality

in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995)

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET13 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

diverse communities and individuals who use the

internet in the expression, articulation, exploration

and realisation of their sexualities in the ﬁve EROT-

ICS countries demonstrates the key function of the

internet in the exercise of sexual citizenship and the

advancement of sexual rights.

Right to public participation,

association and assembly

Both the Brazil and South Africa reports refer to the

internet as an important “public sphere” for political

contestation where different actors, struggles and

concerns are able to converge to inform or transform

norms, public opinion and in turn, policy. It is a site

where transitional or long-term alliances are forged

in the form of informal social groupings, communi-

ties of shared interests or communication spaces for

action. The internet is an especially vital “public”

for individuals and communities who face multiple

forms of barriers to access more traditional forms

of publics like the media or political representation,

due to their sexual identity or gender orientation.

The South Africa research notes that “websites

can serve as spheres for different ‘publics’ or coun-

ter-publics and so enable those whose voices tend

to be dismissed or marginalised generally to engage

and act.”

It examines in detail how transgendered

women and men converge at a popular transgender

site to share their struggles in transitioning, includ-

ing treatment options, celebration of achieved

milestones and exchange of experiences in discrimi-

nation faced. In Lebanon, the current visibility and

dynamism of its queer activism was directly attribut-

ed to the emergence and availability of the internet

in the country. The registration of www.gaylebanon.

com – also the only known website to face legal pros-

ecution in the country – was recognised as marking

the beginning of an organised movement.

The ability to form communities and discuss

shared concerns and issues is a core facilitating

component to the right to public participation. In

contexts where particular issues have little recogni-

tion or are fraught with risks to personal safety, such

as the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgen-

der (LGBT) rights in Lebanon, the internet becomes

a space where communities can be forged towards

a shared identity, vision or struggle. As highlighted

by the coordinator of Helem Girls, one of the oldest

queer women’s movements in the country, “Lesbians

back then and still right now are scared to have a

face-to-face meeting right away with someone from

the community. So to have a person on your [online

messenger] contacts list who you can talk to and ex-

press your fears to and someone who can convince

30 See page 147

you to come to the meetings – I think it was a very

powerful tool. This was the tool used to gather all

the girls and get the numbers.”

The Brazilian experience of the “Mega No” on-

line campaign against a proposed law that could

signiﬁcantly hamper the free ﬂow of information

online demonstrates the potency of civil society en-

gagement and mass mobilisation of support through

the internet. The ﬁrst part of the campaign can-

vassed 13,000 signatures within a month, while the

second gained more than 150,000 signatures. It con-

tributed signiﬁcantly to a series of events that led

towards a halting of the problematic bill to be re-

placed by a civil law framework that is grounded in

human rights principles, and importantly, enabled a

protectionist and criminal justice approach to be suc-

cessfully challenged.

However, it is important to note that access alone

is not sufﬁcient to enable meaningful participation.

The success in Brazil, for example, is also due in large

part to the already existing and hard-fought history

and mechanisms in place for public debate and in-

put into legislative processes. In Lebanon and South

Africa, the ability for internet users to feel safe in

their online interaction through the anonymity and

social codes provided is a signiﬁcant factor that

contributes to its meaningful use. The question for

public policy raised here is, what kind of conditions

and processes are necessary to provide for meaning-

ful participation in public and political life by diverse

sections of society, including those most affected or

at risk, to maximise the democratising potential of

the internet?

Right to freedom of expression,

opinion and information

As noted by La Rue in his report to the HRC, the right

to freedom of opinion and expression is critically

facilitated by the internet, and is both a fundamen-

tal right on its own as well as an enabler of a broad

range of human rights. In terms of the heavily

regulated realm of sexual speech, the internet at

present provides a relatively more open space for

non-normative expressions, subaltern histories and

less readily accessible information to proliferate. This

can have an important impact of participating in the

shaping of culture, to make informed decisions in-

cluding consent and to exercise self-autonomy.

In India, the research uncovers the complex ways

in which young women engage with self-expression,

identity and risk management, and the formation of

relationships through dating, matrimonial and so-

cial networking sites. Through this, they are able to

push the boundaries of cultural and social barriers

31 See page 124

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET14 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

that place intense scrutiny on the sexuality of wom-

en and girls. Young women experiment with ideas

of “sexy” through self-representation online, while

mothers create popular blog sites that provide peer

support, information and commentary on contem-

porary issues, challenging the traditional discourse in

India that holds motherhood in a sacred and moral

position.

The Brazil research examined a community of

men on Orkut, a popular social networking platform,

who argue for the legitimisation of intergenerational

relationships. Despite its discomﬁting topic, it ena-

bles a rare counter-discourse to emerge and debate

on the deeply emotive subject of online paedophilia,

especially given its dominance in internet content

regulation discussions in the country. Through the

conversations, community members deconstruct the

often conﬂated idea of paedophilia, and discuss the

differences between adolescents and children, child

sexual abuse and emotional and sexual attraction

to adolescents, and raise the possibility of informed

consent and sexual agency by young people. Apart

from civil rights activists, it was also the only online

community that publicly addressed the proposed in-

ternet regulation bill that catalysed the “Mega No”

campaign mentioned above.

In Lebanon, an important strategy of the queer

feminist movement is in writing, documenting and

analysing personal and political accounts of their

activism and sexuality. This serves to infuse a queer

perspective into issues that affect the Arab region,

to provide a living archive of evolving strategies on

LGBT organising, as well as, importantly, to resist

colonisation of perspectives and knowledge. As put

by one of the members of Meem, a queer feminist

network in Lebanon, “The documentation of his-

tory bears signiﬁcance not only for posterity but also

serves as a current useful guide for LGBTs continuing

to organise in different ways in other Arab countries.

It also fosters the habit of writing one’s own history,

rather than leaving it to researchers, historians and

professionals.”

The internet has also become a controversial site

for sex education on a range of topics, including HIV/

AIDS, contraception, menopause, sexual pleasure

and experiential accounts of medical procedures on

pregnancy and gender transitioning. It meets an im-

portant information gap faced by young people in

schools, where sex education is being regarded with

alarm and moralistic terms, with India banning sex

education in twelve states and the US emphasising

abstinence-only sex education. It also helps individu-

als to mitigate the social costs of searching for and

accessing information on sexuality. As shared by

32 See page 130

Punita, one of the respondents in the India research,

“There are some things they don’t teach you about

and which you need to ﬁnd out about. Like one of

my friends, for example, did some stuff with her

boyfriend and she wanted to know how to use emer-

gency contraception – you know those ads you see

for the i-pill. So we went to the internet and looked

for it, found out what are the effects of it, that it has

some bad side effects, and should avoid it. A lot of

people look online for these things, where else will

they go? You can’t ask friends, as they will spread it

around. You don’t trust anybody in these things, and

you have to think thousand times before asking. You

don’t want others to know you want to know about

these things.”

The unruly wealth of content related to sexual-

ity online means that one of the major sources of

information is pornographic sites. The common re-

sponse towards pornography is its harmful impact,

rendering it immediately subject to circumscrip-

tion. However, in analysis and policy advocacy and

formulation, the assumptions of harm need to be

questioned, particularly when it also meets an in-

formation gap albeit in uncomfortable terms. Is it

the exploitative dimensions of the pornographic

industry that is problematic, or is there something

inherently harmful in the explicit depiction of sexual-

ised bodies? How then do we draw the line between,

for example, artistic expression (which has a long his-

tory of censorship), fantasy (the Children’s Internet

Protection Act in the US also prohibits illustrations

and animation), and potentially harmful representa-

tion? Should the approach shift from limiting sexual

content, including pornography, to increasing educa-

tion and literacy so that people of all ages are able to

critically engage with the information they access?

As an important ﬁrst step of analysis, Miller raises

the need “to examine the extent to which existing

national regulation of material with sexual content

draws on conservative, historical notions of gender

roles, chastity and morality. If sex is not intrinsically

harmful but abuse of power is, a rights-based analy-

sis would carefully articulate a notion of harm that

would not only rely upon or revive gendered or chas-

tity-based criteria for protection.”

Right to self-determination, bodily

integrity and security of the person

Sexuality is a universal and fundamental aspect of

human beings. Every person, regardless of differenc-

es, has the right to exercise autonomy and decision

making about their own bodies, including on health,

social and cultural development, employment and

33 See page 83

34 Miller Sexuality and Human Rights, 42

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET15 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

sexual and interpersonal relations. However, the re-

ality of sexual hierarchies means that people who

occupy different axes of social subjectivity face differ-

ent forms of barriers in the exercise of these rights.

Overwhelmingly, young people and children are

presumed incapable of making informed decisions

about their own bodies and sexuality. In the US,

young people under the age of seventeen are un-

able to access unﬁltered content in publicly funded

libraries. Added to the lack of comprehensive sex

education in schools, this has an impact of signiﬁ-

cantly limiting their right and capacity to exercise

agency and decision making about a critical compo-

nent of their development, especially when the law

does not distinguish between different categories of

young people and their evolving capacities. Further,

as highlighted by the report, such a policy can act to

disproportionately affect poorer sections of society

who rely on public access points such as libraries for

their internet access.

Meaningful access to the internet and engage-

ment with online spaces and communities can

greatly enable the capacity of individuals who face

discrimination and inequality to exercise their right

to self-determination and bodily integrity. The South

Africa report demonstrates how transgender peo-

ple turn to the online forum space not only to share

information and support, but also as a safe site to

rehearse or inhabit gender codes and identities in

the process of transitioning. In India, where arranged

marriages are commonly practised, young women

are able to gain greater control over their choices

of life partners through a range of online matrimo-

nial sites, a booming industry that is expected to

reach more than 20 million users in 2011. The careful

construction of personal proﬁles – sometimes with

participation from the entire family – and capacity to

assess and select prospective partners through their

online proﬁles provide them with a greater sense of

autonomy and empowerment in this important life

decision. Online chatting also narrows the social and

cultural distances that exist in other spaces for inter-

personal interaction, and enables young women to

overcome the restrictions to their physical mobility,

explore their own ideas of intimacy and desire, and

manage strategies for taking the relationship to the

next step on their own terms. Central to the value of

online spaces in this regard is their ability to create

a communicative and interactive environment that is

relatively safe and secure. Privacy and anonymity are

important components to this.

Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and her list of

ten areas of human life are a useful framework to

guide public policy on human development in the

area of sexual justice, and to assess and develop

strategies that are necessary to create conditions

where all human beings are able to meaningfully

exercise decision making about one’s own life. They

include i) life, ii) bodily health, iii) bodily integrity,

including safety iv) senses, imagination and thought,

v) emotions and emotional relations, vi) practical rea-

son and critical reﬂection, vii) afﬁliation, including

social interaction, compassion and digniﬁed treat-

ment, viii) living in concern with other species and

the world of nature, ix) having the ability to play,

and x) having control over one’s political and mate-

rial environment.

Control and regulation of the internet

It is without question that the internet is increas-

ingly subjected to different forms of regulation in

all parts of the world. As we become more reliant

on the internet for multiple aspects of our everyday

life, questions of rights, duties and obligations arise

in terms of how the internet should be governed,

by whom, and on what grounds or principles. The

EROTICS research examined the rapidly changing

landscape of online content regulation in each of the

ﬁve countries, and the different ways in which access

and expression in online spaces are being limited,

regulated and threatened. They demonstrate that

regulation measures are complex and not always

straightforward, and are enacted and forwarded by

a range of actors, both state and non-state, in formal

and informal ways. From the research, internet con-

tent regulation is being enforced in four different

layers: i) access and infrastructure, ii) law and policy,

iii) markets and economic forces, and iv) culture and

social norms.

Access and infrastructure

At the most basic level, there is a persistent gender

digital divide.

Despite rapidly increasing levels of

internet penetration in all countries studied, par-

ticularly through the use of mobile phones, literacy

levels in terms of language (such as the lack of con-

tent in Arabic) and technical skills and cost are still

signiﬁcant determining factors in internet access.

Given the gendered dimension of technology, eco-

nomic empowerment and control over resources,

these act as barriers to equal access and engagement

with internet technologies. It is notable that in all

the countries examined, and in the statistics collected

by the International Telecommunication Union,

few

gender-disaggregated data on internet penetration

35 Martha C. Nussbaum Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1999)

36 See for example Nancy J. Hafkin “Some thoughts on gender and

telecommunications/ICT statistics and indicators” (International

Telecommunications Union Document WGGI-2/7-E, 2003) www.itu.

int/ITU-D/pdf/5196-007-en.pdf

37 International Telecommunication Union “The World in 2010: ICT Facts

and Figures” www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/material/FactsFigures2010.pdf

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET16 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

were available. This in itself indicates a troubling

lack of consideration of the gendered dimension of

internet access in national and international policy

development.

Notably in Lebanon, otherwise unﬁltered ac-

cess to internet content was being signiﬁcantly

hampered by expensive and slow internet connec-

tions. This was seen as due to the state’s monopoly

on internet architecture, and a lack of political will

to respond to claims for affordable bandwidth and

connectivity. Measures to improve infrastructure are

also encumbered with the threat of surveillance, and

the importation of policy concerns. In February 2009,

USAID funded the Lebanese Telecommunications

Regulatory Authority with USD 3 million to improve

its spectrum management system and service. How-

ever, this came with recommended programmes and

ﬁltering technologies for the protection of children

online, which, as noted by the research authors,

“stand in strong contrast to the situation on the

ground, where there are no intentions or measures

to limit access to harmful content online, nor to as-

sess what harmful content entails.”

Shared or public internet access points such as

schools, libraries or cybercafés present a limited so-

lution to access. As mentioned earlier, the only law

that mandates restrictions to internet content in the

US applies to publicly funded libraries, which affects

approximately 77 million users.

In India, cybercafés

are dominated by men and the culture of masculini-

ties, with increasing state regulation placed on their

operation, including collection and storing of us-

ers’ personal data and restrictions on their physical

arrangement and locality, in part for reasons of con-

trolling consumption of pornography. Women are

more likely to access the internet from their homes.

Shared internet access points also inevitably mean a

trade-off with privacy, which has a signiﬁcant impact

on the use of online spaces for sexual expression and

engagement.

Law and policy

In each of the ﬁve countries, new laws were passed

or introduced in a bid to regulate the free ﬂow of

information on the internet. In South Africa, existing

laws that limited speech and expression on tradi-

tional forms of media were increasingly extended

to include the internet within their ambit, following

the rationale that whatever applies ofﬂine similarly

applies online. This logic is similar to the approach in

38 See page 118

39 Samantha Becker et al. Opportunity for All: How the American

Public Beneﬁts from Internet Access at US Libraries (University

of Washington Information School and the Institute of Museum

and Library Services, 2010) tascha.uw.edu/usimpact/documents/

OPP4ALL_FinalReport.pdf

India, as the state grapples with convergence of mul-

timedia technologies in expanding the category of

“obscenity”. Such an approach understandably com-

promises the value of the internet in providing an

avenue for non-normative and counter-discourses,

especially when it comes to sexuality.

Another notable feature is the speed with which

new laws are passed or introduced, often with little

consultation with civil society. The Film and Publica-

tions Act in South Africa was amended four times

between 1996 and 2009, to include sexual content

and child pornography on the internet. In Lebanon,

an outdated bill on internet regulation drafted in

2003 was suddenly pulled out and presented for a

vote in Parliament (without comment allowed) in

2010, but was halted through an alert cyber activist

community who voiced their concerns and scepti-

cism over its content and process. Cybercafés in India

face increasing proposals for regulation, resulting

in a rapid drop in users between 2003 and 2009.

From 1996, three different versions of legislation

to regulate internet content that is deemed harm-

ful to minors were forwarded in the US before the

Children’s Internet Protection Act was ﬁnally passed

in Congress in 2000. In Brazil, amendments to an ex-

isting law to include child pornography were passed

in record time in 2008, while another proposed law

with wide-ranging impact on internet privacy, sur-

veillance and open access was paused only through

a mass mobilisation of protest by communication

rights advocates.

There are several points of concern about this

trend. First, laws are proposed with little research

and study on the actual area of harm that is meant

to be regulated, and to understand their impact

and limitations on a broad range of rights. Second,

except in the case of Brazil where there is an exist-

ing practice and mechanism for public participation,

there is little consultation with civil society on the

proposed laws which on the whole have great im-

plications for privacy and communication rights. The

lack of transparency behind discussions compounded

by the speed of proposed laws can obfuscate in-

vested parties and stakeholders in the proposal of

internet regulation laws. For example, even in the

case of Brazil, the initial bill proposed was intended

to address electronic fraud concerns of the banking

industry, which saw little public support. The con-

tents of the bill were subsequently morphed and

adapted into the new law that canvassed a more

emotive support through the discourse of paedo-

philia and child protection. Third, there appears to

be a borrowing or importation of principles and

premises for the enactment of new laws, particularly

the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime

and on the issue of child pornography. The question

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET17 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

needs to be raised in terms of their applicability and

relevance in addressing an actual concern or issue

faced in the country, and if these measures that fo-

cus on the internet are in fact distracting resources

and prioritisation from addressing the material re-

ality of child sexual abuse that takes place ofﬂine.

Fourth, accompanying the laws are the creation of

new enforcement and investigation agencies that in-

clude private-public and international cooperation.

This creates new structures and institutions of power

that compel interrogation in terms of clarifying du-

ties and obligations and the protection of rights by

the different actors involved. And ﬁnally, the pre-

dominant approach to internet content regulation

measures takes the form of criminalisation and puni-

tive measures, instead of addressing the issue from

the framework of the protection of rights. This can

act to further disempower citizens by positioning

them as vulnerable subjects in need of patriarchal

state protection, instead of a recognition of the

state’s duty and obligation to ensure the fulﬁlment

of fundamental civil liberties.

Markets and economic forces

The private sector holds immense power in internet

regulation measures. They are often invited by the

state as key stakeholders to provide input on internet

regulatory measures, and sit as inﬂuential actors in

national multi-stakeholder forums. In particular, the

concerns of the entertainment and music industry in-

form the strengthening of intellectual property rights

laws and copyright protection in India and Brazil.

In many countries, privacy and data protection laws

are either unavailable or inadequate. This provides

little protection against data collection and market

proﬁling practices by internet corporate giants like

Facebook and Google, as examined in the US report.

These companies are also able to restrict access

to speciﬁc types of content through their corpo-

rate policies, which can differ across countries. For

example, Google prohibits advertisements for

abortion-related information and services in ﬁfteen

countries on its Google Adwords service,

while Mi-

crosoft Bing ﬁlters out sex-related keywords in four

Arab countries.

This is in large part due to internet

content legislation in some countries that renders

internet service and content providers liable for il-

legal content. This creates a “chilling effect”, where

companies err on the side of caution and too readily

40 Women on Waves “Letter to Google concerning Restricting

Advertisements that Promote Abortion Services” 30 June 2009

www.womenonwaves.org/set-2015-en.html

41 Helmi Noman Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft

Bing in the “Arabian Countries” (OpenNet Initiative, 2010)

opennet.net/sex-social-mores-and-keyword-ﬁltering-microsoft-

bing-arabian-countries

remove potentially suspect content to avoid legal li-

ability. For this reason, La Rue’s report to the HRC

recommends that internet intermediaries should not

be held liable for content posted by third parties.

Nonetheless, there is a need to clarify the principles

behind addressing the issue of intermediary liability,

and the development of mechanisms and processes

to inform private sector terms of use and corporate

policy that can have wide-ranging effects on the

large population of internet users, guided by the

framework of rights.

The mapping of the lesbian web sphere in South

Africa and Brazil also indicated a stronger visibility

of sites that had a commercial and entertainment

emphasis, as compared to more established forms of

activism. This raises questions about the possibility of

slippage from communities into consumerism, and

from political engagement into consumption. The

research in Brazil and India, however, indicates that

lesbian communities online are much more guarded

in terms of their privacy and criteria for access and

inclusion, with strong attention given to security

measures, which may be a potential reason for their

relative invisibility. Further, as seen through the paid

use of matrimonial sites by young women in India,

economic engagement with particular sites also car-

ries with it political and transformative potential.

The multiplicity of sites and communicative spaces

online means that activism is not always contained

within the conventional models and methods of

working, as can be seen through the strategies em-

ployed by the queer movement in Lebanon, and the

study of discursive resistance by diverse individuals

against lesbophobic speech on Orkut in Brazil.

Culture and social norms

The proposal and normative acceptance of internet

regulatory measures are often accompanied by the

mobilisation of anxieties around sexual dangers to

“others”. For male respondents in the India research,

the “others” were the women within their circle

of care (sisters, girlfriends, cousins), and for the fe-

male respondents, they were children. In content

regulation debates, the state positions itself as the

protector of public morals, ethical or cultural values

and vulnerable groups. Arguments of morality are

often backed up by religious or conservative groups

who hold great inﬂuence and power within the na-

tion, as can be seen in the case of Brazil, Lebanon and

the US, and whose roles and investment in the regu-

lation of sexual speech and publics need to be held

up for critical feminist interrogation. In particular,

how they rely on and act to reinforce discriminatory

or unequal ideas of gendered norms and hierarchies.

The dominance and inﬂuence of the discourse

on child protection in this area, as seen above, needs

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET18 Emerging threads and common gaps: A synthesis

close examination and research to comprehensively

understand the scale of the issue, the actors involved

and the different dimensions that technology brings

to the issue. The tendency for emotive conﬂation

of sexualised monstrosity to build moral outrage in

the mobilisation of support for punitive and wide-

ranging measures needs to be critically questioned,

and to link emerging efforts, actors and resources

to protect the rights of children with existing work,

advocacy and movements, including alliances with

women’s rights movements.

It bears reminding that even with the liberatory

potential of the internet, many women and girls still

need to negotiate existing cultural and social barriers

in their ability to fully and meaningfully engage with

online spaces. The research in India demonstrates

how the young women interviewed had to develop

strategies to avoid surveillance of their activities by

their social network and to manage the real risks and

dangers that they can face online, including that of

harassment, manipulation of photographs, and vio-

lations of their right to privacy.

The Brazil report also raised the impact of

“trolling” – discursive strategies aimed to disrupt

spaces and rules for engagement by luring others

into time-consuming and pointless debates through

provocative, insulting and personalised attacks – on

the exercise of the right to freedom of speech in on-

line communication spaces. Such strategies especially

affect more inexperienced internet users, including

those who are young, female or are members of mi-

nority groups. Hate speech or violent and abusive

comments and postings by other users can also result

in the creation of unsafe environments and self-cen-

sorship by the subject of the attacks. Education and

literacy in developing clear online communication

rules and terms of engagement are raised as effec-

tive strategies to respond to these threats, and to

create secure and respectful online spaces.

What’s missing? Ways forward

This chapter provides only a fragment of the rich

and insightful ﬁndings in the ﬁve country research

studies, and is an attempt to draw together some

commonalities and connections between the diverse

contexts. What they clearly demonstrate as a whole

is the key value and potential impact of the internet

in the advancement of sexual rights and sexual citi-

zenship. The research raises important insights into

patterns in the movement towards greater regula-

tion of online expression, content and interaction,

and draws important connections and analysis of

how the regulation of sexualities is intertwined at

the heart of this process.

Some areas for further research and analysis also

emerge through this study. A central concern and

key value is in the need to ensure greater protection

of the right to privacy and security. Content regula-

tion is almost always accompanied by surveillance

measures, and in the face of missing privacy protec-

tion, this raises serious questions about the vitality of

online spaces in advancing social justice. The trend

towards punishment and criminalisation anchored

by protectionist and moralistic approaches needs to

be shifted and transformed to a framework that is

grounded instead in human rights principles. The im-

portant lesson here is that it is the rights of people

that need protection, not individual subjects who are

constituted as vulnerable and limited in capacity.

The concept and reality of harm is another area

that compels deeper interrogation, and to widen the

current limited scope on child protection to also in-

clude the material and gendered forms of risks and

violence that are faced by a diversity of internet users.

This includes measures to address technology-related

violence against women, such as cyber stalking, on-

line harassment and sexualised violations of privacy.

The research also surfaces the numerous strategies

that are already being employed by different users

and civil society actors in managing, addressing and

navigating complex risks and issues. These are valua-

ble practices that can inform and guide development

of strategies for internet governance and regulation.

Finally, the research compellingly demonstrates the

need for greater literacy, education and capacity

building in both the area of technology as well as

in the issue of sexuality, to engender a robust inter-

net governance, social justice, and a rights-based

political movement that is inclusive of diversity, and

afﬁrming of equality.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET19 Brazil

Introduction

This report provides a syn-

thesis of ﬁndings and

analytical insights emerging

from the Brazilian case study

that is part of the EROTICS

exploratory research project. The Brazil case study

was conducted by a joint team of researchers from

Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW) and the Latin American

Center on Sexuality and Human Rights (CLAM). The

research, carried out between May 2009 and June

2010, combined two components: a mapping of re-

cent policy debates on internet regulation, and an

ethnographic study of internet practices by members

of web-based social networks engaged with sexual-

ity issues.

The study examined the background, dynamics

of political mobilisation, and policy debates trig-

gered by the partial approval, in 2008, of a cyber

crime bill (known as the Azeredo Bill, after the

federal senator who was its rapporteur). This leg-

islative debate and ensuing political mobilisation

against the bill resulted in the drafting of a Civil

Rights Framework to guide internet regulation.

Since the ﬁght against web-based child sexual

abuse (generally referred to as “child pornogra-

phy”) has been widely brought up in these debates

as a key argument justifying stricter state control

over the internet, the research also examined

the intersections between the regulatory debate

and this other policy domain.

Information was

gathered on the First National Conference on Com-

munication Policies, which discussed, among other

topics, media monopoly, media control, freedom of

expression and internet regulation itself. The study

also scanned perceptions about internet regula-

tion among feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual and

transgender (LGBT) rights activists.

This policy component, therefore, identiﬁed and

analysed key trends and actors at play, main arenas

of deliberation, the content of legal proposals being

1 The SPW team was responsible for the policy debates on

internet regulation. CLAM researchers conducted the online

ethnography.

2 We thank Laura Lowenkron, whose doctoral research on

legal and law enforcement measures and debates on child

pornography on the internet was one of the main sources for

our analysis.

tabled, controversies, consensus, and the location of

sexuality within this complex maze of discourses and

realities. In total, the study talked to 26 strategic actors

(individuals involved with internet debates, child pro-

tection, law enforcement, policy design, and feminism

and LGBT rights); fourteen in-depth interviews were

conducted; and 62 persons responded to a survey on

internet practices and perceptions on regulation.

The online ethnography focused on Orkut

communities. This online social networking site,

run by Google, is the most popular social network-

ing site in the country. It had been the focus of a

major legal controversy involving the disclosure of

users’ data for the investigation of child pornog-

raphy cases. After mapping and classifying a wide

range of ways sexuality is performed on the inter-

net, online spaces were located – so-called Orkut

“communities” – where issues connecting with the

policy regulation debates were addressed by users.

This strategy was based on the assumption that

web exchanges and performances have the virtue

of forming and reshaping not only subjectivities,

but also public opinion. Two speciﬁc groups were

selected and their discursive dynamics more close-

ly examined: a) an Orkut community that openly

advocates for the defence of sexual relationships

between adults and adolescents, while contest-

ing the category “paedophilia” as the descriptor

of their preferences; and b) the online activity of

women who, not yet necessarily organised under

an activist banner, actively and effectively contest

offensive anti-lesbian remarks, especially within

male-oriented Orkut communities.

Theoretical remarks on sexuality,

cyber politics and the public sphere

The data collected, although not yet fully proc-

essed, provides a rich empirical basis to examine and

analyse both Brazilian policy dynamics and the live

world of web-based online communities. This section

introduces the two conceptual frameworks inform-

ing the analysis of the meanings and directions of

cyber politics, the ready emergence of sexuality in

different debates around regulation, and the ways

in which web-based communication has provided a

space and medium for multiple sexual performances

and expressions, both legitimising and destabilising

gender and sexual identities.

BRAZIL

Internet regulation and sexual politics in Brazil

SONIA CORRÊA, MARINA MARIA and JANDIRA QUEIROZ (Sexuality Policy Watch)

and

BRUNO DALLACORT ZILLI and HORACIO FEDERICO SÍVORI (Latin American

Center on Sexuality and Human Rights, CLAM)

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET20 Brazil

Public spheres and democratic deliberation

The forces and trends observed in the intricate internet

regulatory debates evolving in Brazil since the 1990s

can be situated in relation to conceptual perspectives

that address the reconﬁguration of the public sphere

under the impact of the so-called information and

communications technology (ICT) revolution and the

related potential of the internet to ﬁll contemporary

democratic deﬁcits.

The vast literature on the subject

is quite heterogeneous and there are disagreements

amongst authors coming from different theoretical

traditions. Even so, conceptual and analytical insights

concerning the intersections between cyber informa-

tion and communication technologies, democracy and

the public sphere in particular are shared by many, in

particular, the overarching analysis, developed by Han-

nah Arendt

and by Jürgen Habermas,

that in modern

societies, the public sphere – where public opinion is

generated and strength to contest the state is gathered

– has lost vitality and political meaning. These authors

interpret this political void as the result of ongoing

privatisation (or marketisation) of social relations and

the increasing control of the public debate agenda by

3 While acknowledging the profuse international literature on this

subject, we have privileged Brazilian or Portuguese-speaking

authors whose views are informed by current international

debates on ICTs and the public sphere. Bruce Bimber Information

and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political

Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Manuel

Castells The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Manuel

Castells A era da informação: economia, sociedade e cultura. Vol.

I A sociedade em rede, 5th ed. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2001);

Jia-Lu Cheng “On Control Societies: A Deleuzian Postscript”

(paper presented at The Unthinkable – Thinking Beyond the

Limits of Culture, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan,

China, 13-14 December 2008) www.ioe.sinica.edu.tw/chinese/

seminar/081213/qcheng2_Jia-Lu%20Cheng.pdf; João C. Correia

“Novos media e esfera pública: as profecias cyber-democráticas no

contexto da democracia deliberativa” Estudos em Comunicação

4 (2008): 81-100 www.ec.ubi.pt/ec/04/pdf/06-correia-novos-

media-esfera-publica.pdf; Peter Dahlgren “The Public Sphere

and the Net”, in Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future

of Democracy ed. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman, 33-55

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jodi Dean “Why

the Net is not a Public Sphere” ConstellationsP 20

10 (2003): 95-112; Wilson Gomes “Esfera pública politica e media: con

Habermas, contra Habermas”, in Comunicaçào e sociabilidade

nas culturas contemporâneas ed. Antônio Canelas, Ione Ghislene

and Milton Pinto (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1998); Wilson Gomes

“Internet e participação política em sociedades democráticas” V

ENLEPICC (n.d.) www.gepicc.ufba.br/enlepicc/pdf/WilsonGomes.

pdf; Mark Poster “Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public

Sphere”, in Internet Culture ed. David Porter, 201-18 (New York/

London: Routledge, 1997) www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/

writings/democ.html; Mark Poster “The Information Empire”

Comparative Literature Studies 41, 3 (2004); Roza Tsagarousianou

“Electronic Democracy and the Public Sphere: Opportunities and

Challenges”, in Cyberdemocracy: Technology, Cities and Civic

Networks ed. Roza Tsagarousianou, Damian Tambini and Cathy

Bryan, 167-178 (London: Routledge, 1998)

4 Hannah Arendt The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago

University Press, 1986)

5 Jürgen Habermas The Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Jürgen Habermas “O caos

da esfera pública” Folha de São Paulo 13 August 2006 www.

acessa.com/gramsci/?page=visualizar&id=561; Jürgen Habermas

“Further Reﬂections on the Public Sphere”, in Habermas and the

Public Sphere ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993)

powerful economic groups. Such conditions explain

the democratic deﬁcit of contemporary politics.

Habermas’ conceptual frame, a core reference in

cyber politics, can be portrayed as a continuous effort

to move beyond this pessimistic assessment of con-

temporary politics. In Habermas’ view, under speciﬁc

normative and procedural conditions, the reconstruc-

tion of communication (communicative action) can

revitalise the public spheres and reinvigorate demo-

cratic deliberation, thus reducing the democratic

deﬁcit. His ﬁrst conceptual frame projected a uniﬁed,

centralised and homogeneous vision of the public

sphere.

It also emphasised the normative dimensions

(the rule of procedures of democratic deliberation)

and assumed a clear and sharp division between pub-

lic and private. In his later writings, however, and in

the analyses developed by others who were inspired

by his thinking, his classic original frame was recast.

Revised perspectives on public spheres take into

account that their conﬁguration is not merely nor-

mative, but traversed by power ﬂuxes.

They also

recognise that public opinion and transformative

politics are also generated in other spaces, located at

the intersection between public and private, such as

cafés, street markets, academic circles, or the arenas

conformed by unions, as well as professional and com-

munity associations. This expanded and complexiﬁed

public sphere comprises not only the zone condensed

around the state – whose dynamics are determined

mostly by the effects of mainstream media and their

distortions – but also a multiplicity of fragmented yet

connected spaces of conversation and debate that ir-

radiate discourses and claims in multiple directions.

While this fragmentation may expose the par-

ticipants of ongoing conversations and exchanges to

power effects, in terms of exclusion or distorted com-

munication, it also enhances communicative action

in spaces or arenas that are less prone to coercion. In

these multiple loci, discourse on “new” issues, prob-

lems, identities and needs circulate and get legitimised.

As these streams of communicative action intensify

and circulate, the perceptions and ideas they produce

may coalesce into public opinion and policy proposi-

tions aimed at transforming existing norms, and force

the state to respond to citizens’ demands. A number

of authors who analyse the processes underway in this

multiplied public sphere identify the reconstruction of

6 Many authors underline how deeply the ideal image of the

Greek agora, as the public sphere par excellence, informs

Arendt’s and Habermas’ thinking.

7 Poster “Cyberdemocracy”; Kevin A. Hill and John E. Hughes

“Web Sites, Interest Groups and Politics”, in Cyberpolitics:

Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet, 133-178 (Lanham,

MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1998); Leonardo Avritzer “Teoria

crítica e teoria democrática: do diagnóstico da impossibilidade

da democracia ao conceito de esfera pública” Novos Estudos

Cebrap 57 (1999) es.scribd.com/doc/53190338/Avritzer-

Leonardo-Teoria-critica-e-teoria-democratica

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET21 Brazil

gender and sexuality discourses and identities – and

related claims for rights – as compelling signs that the

public sphere and democratic deliberation can, in fact,

be invigorated and transformed.

The centrality of communication in Habermas’ po-

litical theory and the multiple loci of deliberation of

revised frames on public spheres constitute a horizon

that converges with conceptualisations and research

on the meanings and effects of information technol-

ogy, most particularly after the establishment of the

World Wide Web in the early 1990s. A wide range of

these theorists, researchers and activists developed and

explored conceptual links between the “cyber revolu-

tions” underway and the potential reconﬁguration of

public spheres and transformation of democracy.

The features of the internet usually listed as po-

tentially invigorating public spheres and democracy

comprise: a) the free ﬂow of information from all

sources; b) its characteristics as an open forum where

free citizens can discuss their lives and the world with-

out fear of coercion or control by sovereign authorities;

c) horizontal and vertical interactivity; d) the possibil-

ity the internet opens for citizens to engage in public

conversation not as passive recipients of “received wis-

dom”, but as active participants; e) the breaking

through borders and institutions of the nation state;

and f) the contestation of proprietary logic (copyright

and intellectual property rights) that restricts access to

knowledge, information and cultural goods.

The ﬁrst waves of these streams of thought were

markedly optimistic, not to say radically utopian. In

the words of Correia:

The new media, especially the internet, appeared

as a light at the end of the tunnel, i.e. as a space,

an opportunity to recreate the ideal conditions

of the public sphere and deepen democracy. […]

[The myth informing this vision was that] democ-

racy is a noble but imperfect idea whose limits

can be overcome through communication and

information and therefore the internet could be

thought as an ideal instrument to overcome the

so-called democratic deﬁcit. […] In other words

the promise of a global, social and anti-sovereign

space submerged in intellectual freedom that

could undo all the powers of the earth.

Later research and theory crafted more balanced, not to

say sober, views on the transformative political effects

of the internet. Among the various critiques or caution-

ary notes found in this later literature, a key one is the

8 Seyla Benhabib “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic

Legitimacy”, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the

Boundaries of the Political ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1996); Nancy Fraser “Rethinking Public

Sphere” Social Text 25/26 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990)

9 Correia “Novos media e esfera pública” (translated by the

authors)

critique of technological determinism (or technophilia)

characterising much of the ﬁrst wave of cyber political

thinking and still alive in activism. Today, a number of

authors consider that the positive effects of the cyber

prosthesis on the decaying body of democracy are not

automatic as predicted.

Benkler’s analysis portrays the

utopian imagination of so-called cyber technophiles as

a sort of mirror image of the technophobia of those

who see the internet as a sombre source of cyber porn,

cyber crime, or cyber terrorism.

This bulk of literature stresses that the political,

cultural and institutional tissues in which cyber com-

munication is grafted must be brought back into the

picture as enabling (or disabling) factors that may (or

not) enhance the reconﬁguration of the public spheres

and deepen democracy. Public spheres, even when to-

tally modiﬁed by technology, are not constituted by

tools, but rather by institutions and social practices

which may or may not be transformed by technology.

Poster,

quite early in time, explored the complexities

at play at these novel intersections in ways that are

particularly productive to explore the interplay of gen-

der and sexuality with potentially transformed public

spheres. He emphasises how the internet de-material-

ises communicative ﬂows, transforms subject positions

and installs new regimes of relations between humans,

and between technology and culture:

It is not just that the classical notions of active and

passive subjects of communication have been left

behind, it is also that individuals and groups re-

construct or ﬁx their identities in the context of

relationality, of ongoing conversations and not

anymore as acts of pure consciousness.

Another effect of these ongoing transformations, as

identiﬁed by Poster and other authors,

is that face-to-

face communication – which constituted a cornerstone

of democratic deliberation in its classical formats – is

now being reconﬁgured by the use of digital technol-

ogy and internet communication. Questions must

therefore be asked about how to ensure that, under

10 Yochai Benkler The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production

Transform Markets and Freedom (New Haven/London: Yale

University Press, 2006); Correia “Novos media e esfera pública”;

Gomes “Internet e participação política”

11 Benkler The Wealth of Networks

12 Ibid.

13 Poster “Cyberdemocracy”

14 Correia “Novos media e esfera pública”; Erotilde H. Silva

and Juliano C. Oliveira “Esfera pública e internet: limites e

possibilidades para as deliberações políticas na rede” (paper

presented at the 5th National Meeting of Researchers on

Journalism, Federal University of Sergipe, Maceió, Brazil, 15-17

November 2007) sbpjor.kamotini.kinghost.net/sbpjor/admjor/

arquivos/ind_._erotilde_hon%BErio_silva.pdf; Rousiley C. M. Maia

“Democracia e a internet como esfera pública virtual: aproximando

as condições do discurso e da deliberação” (paper presented at

the Congresso Internacional Internet, Democracia e Bens públicos

- FAFICH/UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 6-9 November 2000) vsites.

unb.br/fac/comunicacaoepolitica/Rousiley2001.pdf

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET22 Brazil

these new conditions, the public sphere can be ex-

panded and improved as the space where citizens

deliberate about their public affairs. What precondi-

tions are required to enable increasingly fragmented

online conversations to coalesce into denser clusters

of public opinion? Is it or is it not possible to ground

egalitarian access to spaces where relevant democratic

deliberation evolves, which are not the same and can

be more dispersed than they have been in the past?

What language is to be used in these exchanges to pre-

vent distortions of communication? How do the new

cyber loci of the public sphere connect (or not) with the

conventional arenas of political deliberation (parlia-

ments, judicial systems, existing mechanisms of direct

participation in policy design and monitoring)?

A related caveat or challenge explored by some

of these analysts is that meaningful democratic delib-

eration supposes that a large number of citizens are

subjectively and politically motivated to engage in the

conversation. Empirical observation suggests, howev-

er, that information technology per se does not infuse

this motivation in large groups of people. Cyber poli-

tics has intensiﬁed and ampliﬁed the motivation and

impact of individuals and groups already engaged in

public debates and rights claims, and has facilitated

political mobilising in speciﬁc circumstances. But the

impact of new information technologies in politics

does not always translate into a major leap forward

in terms of the massive engagement of citizens in a

reinvigorated public sphere. On the other hand the

web, with its plethora of cyber niches, is deeply tra-

versed by market forces and private interests.

This more recent literature also examines the pro-

liferation, since the late 1990s, of legal initiatives aimed

at the surveillance and disciplining of internet informa-

tion ﬂows. The cyber crime bill debated in Brazil is just

one illustration in a much longer list of efforts aimed

at controlling the internet. The mainstream press and

cyber activism have given, in recent years, high visibility

to internet control implemented by authoritarian po-

litical regimes like China or Iran. But the reality is that

Northern liberal democracies were the ﬁrst to adopt

restrictive norms to regulate communication ﬂows

and particularly the internet, as exempliﬁed by the US

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, tel-

ecommunication norms adopted in Europe in the same

period, and the later European Convention on Cyber-

crime, adopted in 2001.

15 In Benkler’s words: “Between 1995 and 1998, the United States

completely overhauled its telecommunications law for the ﬁrst

time in sixty years. […] [It] revolutionized the scope and focus of

trademark law, lengthened the term of copyright, criminalized

individual user infringement, and created new para-copyright

powers for rights holders. […] Europe covered similar ground

on telecommunications. […] Both the United States and the

European Union drove for internationalization of the norms

they adopted, through the new World Intellectual Property

Organization (WIPO) treaties.”

Benkler

assessed this ﬁrst wave of legislation as

mainly reactive and fundamentally concerned with

ownership rights. But it is worth noting that these

early regulatory frames aimed at protecting copy-

right and other intellectual property rights already

included criminalisation of conducts. In addition, the

global climate of “insecurity” that pervasively ex-

panded throughout the 1990s would crystallise after

11 September 2001, installing a wider and deeper

logic of public security, a pre-emptive logic of state

action, control and criminalisation. This would inevi-

tably impact on subsequent debates and on internet

regulatory initiatives, as well as on the development

of technological devices for content and conduct

control, culminating in current debates and propos-

als of stringent regulation propelled by the 2010

Wikileaks episodes.

Intersections between these global trends in the

domain of legal reform and public security and the

dynamics at play in Brazilian cyber politics are quite

palpable. They encompass the subtle inﬂuence of the

European Convention on Cybercrime – which covers

much broader criminal grounds than the protection

of property rights, including a detailed chapter on

child pornography – on Brazilian legislators and

other actors; pressure from the US and European

countries in relation to pirating and copyright; as

well as the consolidation and expansion of partner-

ships between law enforcement agencies in efforts

to ﬁght cyber crime.

Eruption and disruption: Sexuality

and regulation in shifting landscapes

The internet and the virtualisation processes it

engenders can be characterised as mechanisms in-

trinsically related to capitalist society and relations.

The internet materialised as part of the series of

individualising processes that transformed power re-

lations with the advent of modernity, as described

by Foucault.

This report highlights the role of this

technology as a technique for the incitement to dis-

course about the self, which Foucault identiﬁed with

the operation of the sexuality device. The internet

becomes a source for the production of truth about

the self, and for the production of true discourses on

sex. This approach is correlated to the characterisa-

tion of the internet as a paradigm of free expression

– as an anarchic realm, resistant to regulation. Both

sexuality and the internet promise pleasure and

represent danger, as appropriated by actors with

16 Benkler The Wealth of Networks

17 As examined below, the restructuring and upgrading of a

Federal Police Cyber Crime Division and Brazil’s new ambitions

as a global player have positioned the country and its initiatives

high in these processes of reconﬁguration.

18 Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to

Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1990)

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET23 Brazil

different moral engagements. In other words, the

internet is a space propitious to non-(hetero)norma-

tive expressions

The cultural impact of online social networking

may be assessed by looking at its effects on the sym-

bolic and social exchanges that take place by means

of innovative information technologies. The virtual

and the “real” cannot be separated, from the actor’s

point of view, as discrete spheres of social activity,

dialectically related. Online and ofﬂine interactions

and experiences are seamless. However, virtual com-

munication lends itself to unique uses, indicating

new directions and possibilities of self- and collective

representation.

Online events and interactions produce substan-

tive social effects. There is a correlation between

virtual experience and rules of ofﬂine sociability. The

latter are reproduced or enhanced according to new

virtual possibilities. Virtual communities have thus

become privileged sites of sexual expression, where

sexual messages, interactions and subjects take form,

circulate, are legitimated or contested, generating

and becoming targets of conventions. Sexual mes-

sages, interactions and expressions are iteratively

stimulated, become regulated, and are banned or

facilitated in the virtual environment.

The virtual takes a particularly meaningful role

in the convergence of (sexual) expressions, as the in-

ternet brings a potential for the emergence of new

forms of sociability and personhood. A person earns

new existence by transferring their self-representa-

tion to speciﬁc identities for the virtual environment.

Since co-presence is not a requirement for online

interaction, self-representations may be chosen in

response to multiple contextual possibilities, restric-

tions and desires. Thus, anonymity and interactivity

are deﬁning features of certain types of online so-

ciability, facilitating meaningful engagements and

generating precious opportunities for marginalised

subjects, such as youth, women and sexual minorities,

to elaborate ideas and identities. The internet has

become a privileged site for the expression, construc-

tion and subversion of hegemonic and subaltern,

established and emergent discourses. Furthermore,

online activity is crucial for the articulation and ne-

gotiation of public issues that are barred, tabooed,

restricted, or subject to regulation ofﬂine.

In concluding these introductory remarks, it is

worth mentioning a theoretical point for further

elaboration in the light of the contexts and ﬁndings

shown. An epistemological caveat is often expressed

about the possibilities of dialogue between sexuality

scholarship grounded in Foucaultian conceptions of

governamentality and biopower, on the one hand,

and theories of democracy on the other, as both have

been deployed for the analysis of intersections and

paradoxes in the ﬁeld of sexuality, politics and the

internet. Our analysis of internet discursive sociabil-

ity does not involve a full incorporation of Foucault’s

whole theoretical apparatus, but relies exclusively on

his insights on the productive nature of the sexual-

ity device, as a form of “incitement for discourses”

on sex and the self. However, based on further theo-

retical concerns on power and resistance, some of his

commentators are sceptical about the Habermasian

approach to “democracy”. The combination of both

approaches remains a challenge not only to this re-

search project, but to any research investment aimed

at examining the intersection of sexuality, politics and

communication. This case study is also a contribution

to a possible dialogue between those two approaches.

Sexual and cyber politics in the Brazilian

democratic trajectory: Legacies

and challenges

To grasp the complexities of internet regulation de-

bates, and the multiple layers of their intersection

with sexualities, it is worth brieﬂy recapturing recent

Brazilian political history. The country was governed

by a military dictatorship between 1965 and 1985,

when a civilian government was elected indirectly

through an electoral college. While the ﬁrst direct

presidential elections had to wait until 1989, the

public sphere had experienced reinvigoration even

before 1985. This continued after the indirect elec-

tion, and in 1988 a new constitution was adopted.

This experience differs somewhat from the realities

of established liberal democracies, as conceptualised

by theorists of democracy, because not far back the

public sphere had been completely void. Its reopen-

ing also meant its revitalisation.

In Brazil, as informal circles and communities

started mobilising against the military regime – from

the late 1970s into the 1980s – spaces blossomed

where public affairs were discussed and new issues

became public. The majority of these initiatives

called for political rights, basic needs, workers’ and

peasants’ rights. But groups also mobilised around

dimensions of the live world and issues that had not

been politicised before they gained legitimacy, such

as children’s rights, disability issues, the environment,

race, ethnicity and, not surprisingly, gender and sex-

uality. In the 1980s, these dispersed and fragmented

conversations and demands started interacting with

the new emerging political parties and were inevita-

bly drawn into the 1988 constitutional reform.

19 Similar processes took place in Spain, Portugal and Greece,

therefore this type of trajectory should not be portrayed as

typical of Latin America, or of developing countries.

20 As democracy expanded, civil society initiatives would meet,

dispute or align with the agendas of broader and more

powerful constituencies and lobbies, as in the case of the

Catholic Church, trade unions and the private sector.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET24 Brazil

Despite challenges, the constitutional reform de-

livered a consistent, up-to-date bill of rights, solidly

grounded in human rights and democratic principles

of non-discrimination, freedom, equality and equity,

rights to privacy, and fair prosecutorial and justice

treatment. A paragraph included in the Preamble of

the Constitution states that all international treaties

ratiﬁed by Brazil are automatically implementable.

The text has established robust norms of gender

equality and enshrined a wide spectrum of speciﬁc

rights in the case of children, indigenous people, and

persons living with disabilities.

It also deﬁned precise rules for constitutional

control that, as elsewhere, are the main jurisdiction

of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Tribunal of

Justice. But it should be noted that constitutional

control responsibilities are also granted to the Public

Prosecutors’ Ofﬁce (Ministério Público – MP). Today

in addition to conventional prosecutorial responsi-

bilities in the domain of criminal justice, this Ofﬁce

has a broad array of roles in the defence of society’s

collective interests, including the rights of children,

of consumers, environmental protection, as well

as the consistent implementation of international

norms ratiﬁed by Brazil.

As democracy evolves, the

relevance and meaning of constitutional premises as

the main reference for granting new rights claims

and solving conﬂicts of social regulation keep gain-

ing legitimacy and density.

Another key legacy of democratisation is a

complex architecture enabling citizens’ participa-

tion. Starting in the 1980s in the domains of health,

children’s and women’s rights, accountability mecha-

nisms in the form of councils and periodical public

consultations – in the form of national conferenc-

es involving state and civil society – have spread

through the Brazilian policy machinery. Today “par-

ticipation” in various modalities is part of the policy

routine in practically all sectors of the federal, state

and municipal administration.

This ongoing trend

has intensiﬁed since 2003 after the victory of the

Workers’ Party in the 2002 presidential election. In

2009 and 2010, participatory consultations occurred,

21 Despite a strong mobilisation in favour of the call for inclusion

of a clause of non-discrimination on the basis of sexual

orientation, led by a gay organisation, it was not adopted in

the text of the constitution. This failure remained an open

challenge to the protection of LGBT rights. Since then, they

have been claimed by means of speciﬁc bills at the federal, state

and municipal level, as well as numerous court cases, and public

policies executed by mayors’, governors’ and the president’s

ofﬁces.

22 The role of the Ministério Público (MP) is highlighted here

because it is a key institutional actor in the current discussions

around internet regulation and human rights-related abuses.

23 The exception is ﬁnance and planning. However, the Lula

administration (2003-2011) established a high-level council

on social and economic development, directly attached to the

president’s ofﬁce, where macroeconomic and infrastructure

issues are systematically debated.

for the ﬁrst time, in relation to two policy areas at

the focus of this case study: the First National Con-

ference on LGBT Public Policies (June 2009) and the

First National Conference on Communication Policies

(CONFECOM, December 2009).

This architecture

enhances face-to-face conversations, debates and

conﬂicts around policy issues. The conference proc-

esses involve thousands of citizens.

These features

of the Brazilian political environment must be tak-

en into account when assessing the meanings and

impact of new information technologies on the re-

invigoration of the public sphere and the renewal of

the democratic fabric.

Sexual politics: Multiple engagements

at play in the public sphere

As mentioned above, gender and sexuality issues have

been moulded into political issues since the early days

of democratisation. Women’s and homosexual rights

claims started to be discussed in informal groups in

the 1970s. Feminist groups were mainly concerned

with gender-based violence, unequal wages and

women’s health, including abortion, while homosexu-

al groups challenged discrimination and stigma. These

initiatives gained political visibility in the 1980s, and

acquired political legitimacy in the 1990s and 2000s.

But the pace was different in each case.

The feminist agenda and advocacy for gender

equality experienced a ﬁrst wave of institutionali-

sation in the 1980s, when the ﬁrst women’s rights

NGOs were created, a National Council on Women’s

Rights was established, and systematic interactions

between civil society and the state began, which in-

ﬂuenced the outcomes of the constitutional reform

process as well. Since then, states and municipali-

ties have also gradually established women’s rights

councils and programmes. This trend kept its pace

into the 1990s, when intersections between na-

tional and international debates blossomed under

the impact of the UN conferences, particularly Cairo

and Beijing. Brazil dropped its reservations in rela-

tion to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All

Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),

strongly supported the adoption of the Inter-Ameri-

can Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and

Eradication of Violence Against Women, and played

24 Participatory models, although already existing in various

areas, have become the trademark of the Workers’ Party

administration at municipal and state levels, and were

transported to the federal administration during the eight years

of the Lula administration.

25 Just as examples, the last Conference on Women’s Public

Policies (2007) involved more than 20,000 participants, from

the preparatory process to the end. In the cases of the LGBT

rights conference and the CONFECOM, ﬁgures are similar: it is

estimated that 30,000 people participated in all phases of the

CONFECOM, resulting in 1,684 elected delegates from all over

the country; the national LGBT conference had 1,100 elected

delegates participating in the ﬁnal stage of the process.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET25 Brazil

a very progressive role in other related global ne-

gotiations. The institutional framework for gender

equality was further strengthened after the estab-

lishment of the National Secretariat for Women’s

Public Policy (2003). Concurrently, the feminist and

women’s movement greatly diversiﬁed in terms of

class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, location and

political proﬁles.

Sexuality and abortion had since the early days

featured high on the feminist agenda. As time

passed, however, while the call for abortion rights

remained a priority, the focus on sexuality lost

ground until recently, when it started to be ﬂared by

lesbian feminist groups. The latest phase of gender

mainstreaming in law and policy has made domestic

violence its ﬂagship. In 2006, the Maria da Penha Bill

to prevent gender-based and domestic violence was

approved (Law 11340 of 7 August 2006) and a broad

institutional network was established at multiple

levels to ensure its implementation. Today, in Brazil,

a wide consensus has coalesced both in society and

state institutions around the unacceptability of all

forms of gender violence.

Despite these cumulative gains, a number of

gender equality issues addressed in public debates

for many years have not yet received sufﬁcient poli-

cy response, as in the case of women’s sexual rights,

particularly non-reproductive ones, wage gaps, and

the economic implications and effects on gender

relations of patterns of social reproduction and the

sexual division of labour.

Abortion remains crimi-

nalised (except in the case of rape and when the

pregnancy represents a risk to the woman’s life). Be-

tween the 1970s and late 1990s, gradual gains have

been made in legislative debates and in terms of the

guarantee of access to abortion in cases permitted

by the law, as well as jurisprudence authorising abor-

tion in the case of grave foetal abnormalities. But in

recent years major setbacks have been observed in

the legislative agenda, public policy, and the public

debate itself.

LGBT rights claims also surfaced in the late 1970s

but expanded and gained legitimacy later under

26 Adriana Vianna “Os sujeitos do perigo e os perigos do sujeito:

considerações sobre a trajetória dos direitos sexuais” (paper

presented at the XXIV Reunião Brasileira de Antropologia,

UFPE, 2004)

27 José E. Alves and Sônia Corrêa “Igualdade e desigualdade

de gênero no Brasil. Um panorama preliminar, 15 anos

depois do Cairo”, in Brasil, 15 anos após a Conferência do

Cairo (Campinas: ABEP, 2009) www.abep.org.br/usuario/

GerenciaNavegacao.php?texto_id=4538&

28 Washington Castilhos The Pope’s visit to Brazil: Context and

effects (Rio de Janeiro: Sexuality Policy Watch, 2008) www.

sxpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/wp_2008_ing-ﬁnal.

pdf; Sônia Corrêa, Richard Parker and Rosalind Petchesky

Sexuality, Health and Human Rights (New York/London:

Routledge, 2008)

the paradoxical impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In the 2000s, the visibility of the movement skyrock-

eted, as can be measured by the size and number

of LGBT Pride Parades around the country.

In 2004,

the federal government launched the Brazil Without

Homophobia Programme, whose guidelines cover a

wide array of policy areas: education, health, labour

and, most principally, human rights. The programme

is hosted at the National Secretary for Human Rights

and in 2010 a Council for LGBT Policy was created.

Despite these evident gains in terms of cultural

change and public policy at federal and other levels,

since the constitutional debates (see footnote 21),

legislative achievements in relation to LGBT rights

have been meagre and currently face a deadlock. The

two ﬂagship bills promoted by the LGBT movement,

one for same-sex civil unions (PL 1151/1995) and the

other criminalising homophobia (PLC 122/2006), are

paralysed in Congress.

However, in order to properly map the back-

ground elements that can illuminate the conﬂicts at

play at the intersections of sexual and cyber politics,

the trajectory of children’s and adolescents’ rights

laws and policies should also be reviewed. The 1988

Constitution gave high priority to the protection of

children’s rights.

This was further stressed after the

29 The Brazilian response to HIV/AIDS was designed under a

participatory policy framework, solidly grounded in anti-

discrimination and human rights premises. This opened the

space for the gay and, later, the travesti movement to act in

prevention work, interacting systematically with the state, and

participating in accountability mechanisms.

30 By 12 July 2010, the Brazilian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Travesti

and Transgender Association (ABGLT) reported 201 LGBT pride

parades and pride-related events in 2010 alone. Since 2006,

the São Paulo LGBT Pride Parade is mentioned in the Guinness

Book of Records as the largest in the world. In 2010 it attracted

3.2 million people. Wikipedia “São Paulo Gay Pride Parade”

accessed 11 August 2010 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_

Paulo_Gay_Pride_Parade; ABGLT website www.abglt.org.br/

port/paradas2010.php

31 This deadlock has pushed the LGBT movement and its allies

to shift their advocacy focus to the judiciary, arguing that the

denial of rights to LGBTs constitutes a violation of constitutional

premises. A decision regarding a constitutional challenge on

the basis of the equal right to marry is pending at the Supreme

Court. Adriana Vianna and Sérgio Carrara “Sexual Politics and

Sexual Rights in Brazil: A Case Study”, in SexPolitics: Reports

from the Front Line ed. Richard Parker, Rosalind Petchesky

and Robert Sember, 27-51 (Sexuality Policy Watch, n.d.) www.

sxpolitics.org/frontlines/book/index.php; Vianna “Os sujeitos

do perigo”; Magaly Pazello “Internet: campo de batalha dos

direitos sexuais e da liberdade de expressão” (paper presented

at the 2010 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association,

Toronto, Canada, 6-9 October 2010) www.genderit.org/sites/

default/upload/internet._campo_de_batalha_dos_direitos_

sexuais_e_da_liberdade_de_expressao.pdf

32 Article 227 reads as follows: “It is the duty of the family, of

society and the State, to ensure children and adolescents,

with absolute priority, the right to life, health, nourishment,

education, leisure, professional training, culture, dignity,

respect, freedom, family, and community life, as well as to

guard them from all forms of negligence, discrimination,

exploitation, violence, cruelty and oppression.” The

1988 Federal Constitution is available in English at:

pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Brazil/english96.

html#mozTocId89810

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET26 Brazil

ratiﬁcation of the UN Convention on the Rights of

the Child (1989). The premises of both the constitu-

tion and the convention were rapidly translated into

speciﬁc legislation: the Child and Adolescent Statute

(ECA/1990). A broad and diverse constituency was

behind this strong push for the protection of chil-

dren’s and adolescents’ rights. As feminists and LGBT

activists, many of these groups were originally infor-

mal and dispersed, and included acknowledged civil

society leaders from the democratisation period.

But unlike calls for gender equality and LGBT rights,

which have always faced cultural resistance, child

protection rights have historically been supported

by a wide social consensus. As is the case with the

broader ﬁeld of human rights, this particular policy

area has been and remains strongly inﬂuenced by

the Catholic Church.

At the Congress level, the sexual abuse and ex-

ploitation of children and adolescents started to

receive special attention when the ﬁrst Parliamen-

tary Inquiry Commission on Child Prostitution was

established (1993-1994), and gained greater leverage

later, with the work of a Joint Parliamentary Inquiry

Commission on Sexual Exploitation of Children and

Adolescents,

led by the Parliamentary Front for

Children and Adolescents (2003-2004). In parallel,

since the late 1990s, sexual abuse and exploitation

of children and adolescents on the internet has also

become visible as a policy and criminal problem. A

number of factors enhanced this visibility: a) the

growing expansion of internet access in Brazil, which

also implied the expansion of “child pornography”

networks; b) a series of law enforcement operations

performed in collaboration with Interpol and Euro-

pean police forces to investigate these networks in

Brazil; c) the ratiﬁcation, in 2004, of the Optional

Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child

on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child

Pornography, which contains a speciﬁc provision on

web-based child pornography.

While ofﬂine “child pornography” was already

deﬁned as a crime by the ECA, after 2004, a number

of efforts were implemented to increase media and

social visibility of web-based child pornography, pro-

moting the reform of existing legislation. A spiral

ensued, combining public speeches, law enforcement

33 One example is Hebert de Souza, known as Betinho, who was

also a key leader of the movement for a progressive response to

HIV in Brazil.

34 Until the late 1980s, this inﬂuence had a progressive content, as

the Catholic Church was committed to the cause of social and

economic justice, although reluctant with regard to gender and

sexuality. However, as the 1980s elapsed, Brazilian progressive

Catholic leadership was systematically eroded by the Vatican.

Since then, Catholic inﬂuence means strong moral views on

gender, sexuality and abortion.

35 Joint Parliamentary Commissions are composed by members of

both the Senate (upper house) and Chamber of Deputies (lower

house).

operations, legal suits, inﬂuence by international

advocacy groups, legislative debates, and projects

monitoring child pornography in the internet, all

of which had a deep impact on public debate. This

resulted as well in a reform of the ECA, approved

in November 2008, which added a precise deﬁnition

of online child pornography. Among other elements,

under Brazilian law today, possession of child por-

nography is considered a criminal offence. This later

wave of policy debates on the sexual abuse of chil-

dren and adolescents traversed and overlapped in

complex ways with emerging internet regulation

debates, and with ongoing transformations and ten-

sions in the domain of sexuality and sexual rights.

Although three currents of contemporary sexual

politics in Brazil – women’s/feminist, LGBT and child

protection – intersect in relation to child pornogra-

phy, as well as to other controversies, dialogue across

them has been scarce and dispersed. Few concrete

connections exist between feminist organisations

and children’s rights groups in relation to sexual

violence and abuse. Conversations between feminist

and LGBT activists have increased in recent years,

particularly in the domains of lesbian issues and

abortion, while occasional intersections between

these two constituencies and children’s rights groups

have also evolved, for example, for communication

strategies and sexuality education. But, by and large,

fragmentation prevails in terms of agendas and poli-

cy frameworks, which makes it difﬁcult for feminists,

LGBT activists and child protection groups to engage

in systematic dialogue on issues that might trigger

conﬂicts amongst them. Such is the case with their

engagement to regulate consent and, most particu-

larly, the age of consent, as well as the control of

“abusive” language and messages and images de-

ployed by the media and advertising.

The cyberpolitics landscape

In December 2009, 67.5 million people in Brazil had

internet access. In recent years usage has increased

mainly among women, teenagers and children.

Among Brazilians, participation in social network-

ing platforms such as Orkut is particularly signiﬁcant.

In 2008, roughly 50% of Orkut’s worldwide mem-

bership was Brazilian (around 23 million people),

according Orkut’s demographic site. The internet

36 Laura Lowenkron “Abuso sexual infantil, exploração sexual de

crianças, pedoﬁlia: diferentes nomes, diferentes problemas?”

Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad - Revista Latinoamericana

5 (2010): 9-29 www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/

SexualidadSaludySociedad/article/view/394/804

37 Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics (IBOPE)

“Número de usuários ativos da internet cresceu 1,8% em maio”

18 June 2010 www.ibope.com.br/calandraWeb/servlet/Calandra

Redirect?temp=6&proj=PortalIBOPE&pub=T&db=caldb&comp=

pesquisa_leitura&nivel=null&docid=17CCD8DF3C83101C832577

460057D746

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET27 Brazil

today has a structural signiﬁcance and role for ﬁ-

nance, commerce and trade, science and technology,

and governance, but also politics. As said before, the

internet has multiplied and ampliﬁed the capacity of

the most diverse groups to get information, engage

in exchanges, politically mobilise and overcome the

passive mode of reception that characterised the

past logic of public sphere dynamics. Brazil shows a

remarkable trend in connectivity. In 2010, 29 million

new mobile phone lines raised the total number of

mobile lines to 202.9 million (which is greater than

the total population of the country, according to the

2010 census). By the end of the year, sixteen Brazilian

states already had more than one mobile phone line

per person, and there was an increase of 138% in 3G

mobile internet connections (reaching a total of 20.6

million 3G connections in 2010).

As in other countries, the introduction and

expansion of internet was the outcome of the con-

vergence of investments made by a heterogeneous

– at times contradictory – gamut of actors and in-

terests: activists, academics, state institutions and

private companies from all sectors. In any case, civil

society groups engaged with democratisation have

played a palpable and relevant role in the early stag-

es of internet development in the country.

They

contributed to shape a “public good” framework,

which presently guides internet governance policies,

and have also inﬂuenced the wider and more com-

plex landscape of cyber activism which developed

after the World Wide Web became a reality in the

mid-1990s.

Today, a myriad of organisations, individual

researchers and collective academic projects have

materialised and are engaged with a wide range

of issues relevant for democratising access to infor-

mation, improving state accountability, and further

revitalising the public sphere. The advocacy and

policy areas of cyber activism include debates and

projects around the digital divide, free and open

source software and open access to knowledge

and cultural goods; interventions to improve public

sector transparency and accountability (including

hacking); systematic contestation of the informa-

tion provided by mainstream media (through blogs,

alternative media and other means); and mobilisa-

tion against censorship and surveillance, in relation

38 ANATEL website www.anatel.gov.br

39 The projects conducted by IBASE and Alternex – in partnership

with the APC network – were pioneering not only in investing

to make new information technology widely available to

Brazilian society, particularly to civil society organisations, but

also in building partnerships with academic and state actors.

Those investments would establish the initial conditions for the

expansion of the internet at the country level.

to both national and international norms.

Within

this broad spectrum of activism, attention and action

have primarily focused on three domains in recent

years: democratisation of information; free and open

source software and open access; and opposition to

censorship, surveillance and vigilantism. Between

2008 and 2010, constituencies strongly mobilised

and resisted the cyber crime bill, and intensively and

productively engaged with the discussions around

the Civil Rights Framework for Internet Regulation.

Although additional information would be re-

quired to fully construct the proﬁle of Brazilian cyber

activism, it is safe to say that it differs from the po-

litical culture prevailing in feminist and LGBT rights

communities, not merely in relation to the use of

technology, but also in their conceptions about the

law, regulation, and state-society relations. A sketchy

proﬁle of the activist communities mobilising around

these issues indicates that they are mostly composed

of a young generation, whose political experience

and activism has matured and evolved from the late

1990s onward, when the country was already experi-

encing well-established democratic conditions. These

groups and individuals engage in public deliberation

through novel modalities of mobilisation and activ-

ism. Many of them were strongly inspired by cyber

utopian views and, even today, are extremely critical

of existing institutional rules and suspicious of “the

state”.

Struggles around information and communica-

tion technologies also led to the establishment of

new governance and regulatory institutions and

government programmes.

From the point of view

of topics and dynamics analysed in this case study,

one key institution is the Brazilian Internet Steering

Committee, known as CGI.br, which is the main na-

tional internet governance body. CGI.br was created

by Inter-ministerial Ordinance Nº 147 (of 31 May

1995), and modiﬁed by Presidential Ordinance Nº

4,829 (of 3 September 2003). It is a multi-stakeholder

organisation, composed of 21 representatives from

government, the private sector, civil society organi-

sations and the academic community. In this sense,

it is fully in line with the participatory model that

has matured in Brazil since the 1980s. Unlike other

similar bodies, CGI.br is not placed within, but out-

side the state framework. In order to perform its

40 Brazilian activists oppose the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade

Agreement (ACTA) and other international regulatory proposals

under negotiation.

41 Some aspects of internet service regulation are under the

responsibility of the National Telecommunication Agency.

Over the past eight years, the Ministry of Culture has invested

substantially in free access to cultural goods; the Ministry of

Education has initiated projects to overcome the digital divide

in the educational system; and the Ministry of Communications

is now in charge of a publicly funded macro programme for the

expansion of internet infrastructure.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET28 Brazil

activities and to implement its decisions and projects

the CGI.br created a non-proﬁt civil organisation, the

Brazilian Network Information Center (NIC.br), a fea-

ture that allows for greater autonomy from political

injunctions and inﬂuences. Its core mandates are

the managing and administration of .br domains,

and the promotion of technical quality, innovation

and dissemination of the internet. But its mission

potentially encompasses a soft regulatory function

concerning content.

Brazilian democratic paradoxes

Despite the reinvigoration of the public sphere and

the normative and institutional reconstruction ex-

perienced in Brazil since the late 1970s, democratic

deﬁcits persist. According to the 2010 edition of the

Latinobarómetro annual survey on the experience and

quality of democracy in Latin America,

challenges to

democracy include sharp socioeconomic inequalities,

corruption, crime and public insecurity.

In Brazil, as

in the whole region, praise for democracy is increas-

ing steadily. In 2010, 54% of respondents preferred

democracy above any other system of government.

This rate evolved from 20% in 1996 and 30% in 2007.

In addition, between 2009 and 2010, conﬁdence in

the parliament and the judiciary increased from 32%

to 44% and 42% to 51% respectively. However, the

degree of overall satisfaction with the political sys-

tem is a bit lower, at just over 49%, while roughly

50% do not fully trust the system and its institutions.

In addition, for many years, more than 70% of Brazil-

ians have declared not to trust political parties and,

in 2010, about 43% said that democracy can survive

without parties and parliaments.

Trust in “people in general” is low, at 10%, be-

low the regional average.

This indicator implies a

compromise of the potential for democratic deliber-

ation and consensus building. In terms of sources of

political information, 78% mention TV as their main

source, but 53% rely on their family, just above the

radio, at 48%, and three times more than the inter-

net, at 18%. Lastly, Latinobarómetro data illuminate

sharp ambivalences about democratic principles and

procedures: 55% declared that, in a difﬁcult political

42 Corporación Latinobarometro (www.latinobarometro.org) is a

not-for-proﬁt organisation based in Santiago, Chile. The 2010

survey had 20,204 respondents. Interviews were conducted

between 4 September and 6 October in eighteen countries.

Consistent socio-demographically stratiﬁed samples were

constructed, with a margin of error of approximately 3%.

43 In 2010, 80% of Brazilian respondents considered the current

distribution of wealth to be unjust, and 66% said that

government actions beneﬁted mainly “a few”. In 2009, 34% of

Brazilian interviewees declared they were aware of corruption

cases, as compared to a 10% regional average. Only 7% said

that they expected never to become the victim of a crime, while

21% praise existing public security policy.

44 The regional average is 20%. In a few countries, such as

Uruguay, it rises to over 40%.

situation, the law can be violated by those in power.

Moreover, while 72% fully support the freedom of

the press, 44% would agree if a president decided to

control the press “in case that is needed”.

Since the 1980s, media concentration and media

monopolies have been identiﬁed as key obstacles

to the improvement of Brazilian democracy. This is-

sue remains high on the agenda in public debates

and policy discussions. Contestation and proposals

concerning media concentration and monopolies,

cross-ownership and control of communication com-

panies, the rules regarding public concessions, and

their implications in relation to media convergence,

are highly visible and key hot topics of Brazilian

political debates today. These debates also include

aspects concerning the right to information, social

monitoring of media content, community radio and

internet expansion and regulation. The spectrum of

constituencies engaged range from large media con-

glomerates and telecom companies, to unions and

political parties, cyber and community activists, but

also the Afro-Brazilian movement, indigenous com-

munities, persons with disabilities, and feminist and

LGBT organisations concerned with distorted images

and discriminatory and degrading content being cir-

culated by the mainstream media. These complex,

often conﬂicting interests, heterogeneous constitu-

encies, and heavy economic interests were drawn

into the First National Conference on Communica-

tion Policies, observed for this case study, where the

newly proposed legal framework for internet regu-

lation was discussed and approved.

Political culture: Recurrences and shifts

A few other aspects of the Brazilian political culture

must also be borne in mind when the data collected

by the case studies are more closely examined. One

of them is the placement and role of the state in

both the political imagination and policy-making

realities. In Brazil, as in other Latin American coun-

tries that experienced relatively robust welfare state

experiences over the 20th century, instead of plain

suspicion, the views and expectations about the

state are less negative and more complex. While citi-

zens contest draconian state control and violations

of rights such as those perpetrated by dictatorships,

the state is also perceived as a protector, benefactor,

provider of security and granter of rights.

According to Latinobarómetro 2010, 82% of Bra-

zilians believe the state has the necessary means to

resolve society’s problems, but just 20% think it can ef-

fectively resolve all of them. Despite distrust of state

administration, throughout the democratisation proc-

ess, social demands have predominantly been framed

in terms of claims to the state (beneﬁts, social and pub-

lic security and rights). This implies a strong appraisal of

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET29 Brazil

welfare models, in contrast to political cultures whose

dominant discourses privilege private solutions to so-

cial problems. On the other hand, these expectations

tend to restrict the space for systemic critiques in rela-

tion to state devices of control and disciplining.

This positive appraisal of state protection is not

disconnected from the high level of personal dis-

trust detected by Latinobarómetro. It has increased

as democracy consolidated, not necessarily because

rights and beneﬁts have been granted, but also be-

cause criminality rates have skyrocketed and public

discourses have taken hold claiming that security

conditions have deteriorated.

Thus, for instance,

while rejecting the return of a military regime,

79% of Brazilians polled in a 2008 national survey

highly trust and appraise the armed forces, probably

because they retained an image of being able to

provide security. In the same poll, 70% of respond-

ents declared to fully trust the Federal Police.

The

Federal Police was fully reformed after the 1988 con-

stitution. Having been technically upgraded, it has

achieved a great deal of positive visibility over the

past decade, as one key agency in charge of the ﬁght

against crime and political corruption.

Not surprisingly, a strong emphasis on the pro-

tective role of the state is also found in the discourse

and practice of state institutions and actors. Arantes,

who analysed operations performed by the Federal

Police and the Ministério Público (MP) to investigate

and punish political corruption, identiﬁes a high

level of voluntarism among ofﬁcials involved, a sen-

timent that seems to be sanctioned by the general

acceptance of state power to control and protect. Par-

ticularly in respect to the MP, his assessment is that its

45 Important exceptions include longstanding criticism and distrust

of regular police forces (under the responsibility of individual

states) and contestation against signs of censorship. More subtly,

since the 1980s, a wealth of research, theory and advocacy has

evolved in relation to the effects of biomedical discourses and

practices in the overall domain of public health. However, this

has not been transported to other domains or spelled out more

explicitly and publicly as a contestation of state control per se.

46 Data published by the National Census Bureau in 2010 reveal

that, between 2000 and 2007, 50,000 people were murdered in

Brazil (5% of the victims were women). Latinobarómetro 2010

reports that 25% of respondents have been victims of criminal

offences.

47 The poll was sponsored by the Brazilian Association of

Magistrates to assess perceptions regarding the judiciary in

relation to other state and society institutions.

48 In the words of the Minister of Justice, between 2003 and 2007,

“The Federal Police I found was an institution that no longer

deserved respect. It was ill-equipped, hugely understaffed and

under-equipped. Within four years, almost 400 operations

were carried out to ﬁght organised crime. [We have] equipped

it to use modern techniques, such as telephone monitoring,

intensive intelligence, strategic planning, temporary arrests.”

49 Information on the Federal Prosecutors’ Ofﬁce and the Federal

Police was synthesised from the paper “The Brazilian Feds”,

written by Rogério Arantes, included in the book by Timothy J.

Power and Matthew M. Taylor, eds. Corruption and Democracy

in Brazil: The Struggle for Accountability (Notre Dame, IL: Notre

Dame University Press, 2011)

members are more than often pessimistic in respect to

the ability of society to defend itself and idealise the

institution as the best defender of a “weak society”

(when compared to inept politicians and bureaucra-

cies that fail to enforce the law).

The culture of state protective powers also re-

lates with paradoxical perspectives on criminal law.

The power to punish, as a pillar of state formation,

is a strong legacy of the Brazilian colonial experi-

ence. From the 19th century on, however, as in most

of Latin America, the absorption of liberal political

and legal ideas led to the early abolition of colonial

criminal laws, as in the case of sodomy (1830) and

capital punishment (1889). Later on, 20th century

sequential experiences of authoritarianism and de-

mocratisation contributed to build, in some circles,

a critique of state control and policing. However, in

society at large, there has been continued support

for draconian criminal law as a social pedagogic tool,

which has also gained greater appeal under the im-

pact of dominant discourses on personal insecurity.

In the last twenty years, support for capital punish-

ment and the reduction of the age at which minors

can be charged as adults has expanded. Social move-

ments have also called for the use of criminal justice

to respond to violence and discrimination based on

gender, race and sexual orientation.

Finally, one major development to be high-

lighted in Brazilian society and political institutions

in the course of the past three decades is the rapid

expansion and “politicisation” of religious conserva-

tive forces. Since the establishment of the Republic

in the late 19th century, rules of laicité and religious

freedom have been included in all democratic consti-

tutional reforms (1934, 1946, 1988).

Despite these

secular norms, the Catholic Church had a wide range

of means to inﬂuence politics and the state. Priests

could be elected to legislative bodies and the Church

hierarchy had direct access and inﬂuence on politi-

cians and high-level state ofﬁcials, and intervened

in politics on many occasions. For instance, during

the military regime, progressive Catholic priests and

grassroots communities, as well as Protestants, were

key actors in the struggle for political rights and

basic needs. They often collaborated with feminist

organisations.

By the mid-1980s, when the conservative shift

of the Vatican was already deeply felt in the Bra-

zilian Church, sharp conﬂicts between feminists

and Catholic conservatives started to erupt. In the

50 The term laicité is favoured due to the inﬂuence of French

models on Brazilian and Latin American secular traditions.

51 Despite the strong commitments to citizens’ rights and social

justice that create convergences between progressive Catholic

communities and feminist groups, tensions and conﬂicts have

occurred with regard to abortion, which in some cases fractured

the women’s movement itself.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET30 Brazil

constitutional reform process, the Catholic Church

proposed the inclusion of a legally binding right to

life as of conception, which was defeated as a re-

sult of feminist mobilisation in alliance with other

sectors. Subsequently a series of battles ensued be-

tween Catholic Church ofﬁcials, the state and civil

society groups, about issues such as contraception

and condoms and, most particularly, abortion. Bra-

zil has received the Pope in 1979, 1980, 1991, 1997

and 2007. In the latter two papal visits, sexuality and

abortion were openly spelled out as the Vatican’s

main concerns with regard to Brazilian society and

public policy.

Most importantly, in 2009, for the ﬁrst

time in history, Brazil signed an agreement with the

Holy See, crafted in near secrecy, without any public

participation or debate with society at large.

Concurrently, the country has experienced the

rapid growth of Protestant evangelical churches,

whose members now comprise 26% of respond-

ents self-identiﬁed as religious in the 2000 census.

While the Catholic and evangelical churches pres-

ently compete for the Brazilian spiritual market,

dogmatic Catholics and evangelical Protestants

converge in their repudiation of same-sex relations

and abortion. Both groups have also strongly in-

vested in media control.

According to a survey by

the National Film Agency (Ancine), in 2009, 24.1%

of open TV programming in Brazil was dedicated to

teleshopping and religion.

Both Catholic and evan-

gelical Protestant regressive forces have invested in

inﬂuencing electoral results through the recruitment

52 The Vatican’s moral conservative agenda was radicalised after the

2005 consecration of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope. Washington

Castilhos The Pope’s visit to Brazil: Context and effects (Rio de

Janeiro: Sexuality Policy Watch, 2008) www.sxpolitics.org/wp-

content/uploads/2009/03/wp_2008_ing-ﬁnal.pdf

53 See the debate session on TV Cultura and TV Brasil, at www.

concordatwatch.eu/showtopic.php?org_id=15311&kb_header_

id=37851, accessed 24 January 2011

54 Cecília L. Mariz and Maria D. Machado “Mudanças recentes no

campo religioso brasileiro” Antropolítica 5 (1998): 21-43; Paula

Montero “Religião, pluralismo e esfera pública no Brasil” Novos

Estudos - CEBRAP 74 (2006): 47-65; Paula Montero “Jürgen

Habermas: religião, diversidade cultural e publicidade” Novos

Estudos - CEBRAP 84 (2009); Paula Montero “Secularização

e espaço público: a reinvenção do pluralismo religioso no

Brasil” Etnográﬁca 13, 1 (2009); Marcelo Natividade and

Leandro Oliveira “Religião e intolerância à homossexualidade:

tendências contemporâneas no Brasil”, in Impactos do

neopentecostalismo no campo religioso afro-brasileiro ed.

Vagner G. Silva (São Paulo: Edusp, 2007); Antônio F. Pierucci

“Religião e liberdade, religiões e liberdades” Revista São Paulo

em Perspectiva 8, 3 (1994): 29-36

55 In recent years, the Vatican became strongly involved in

communication policy debates at the global level, including a

strong presence at WSIS negotiations. Magaly Pazello “Internet:

campo de batalha dos direitos sexuais e da liberdade de

expressão” (paper presented at the 2010 Congress of the Latin

American Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, 6-9 October

2010) www.genderit.org/sites/default/upload/internet._campo_

de_batalha_dos_direitos_sexuais_e_da_liberdade_de_expressao.

pdf

56 Available at oglobo.globo.com/tecnologia/mat/2010/12/16/

mais-de-24-da-programacao-das-tvs-abertas-sao-de-compras-

religiao-923301975.asp, accessed 24 January 2011

of voters and blacklisting based on issues such as

abortion, homosexuality, drug use, prostitution and

paedophilia. Evangelicals have also systematically

struggled for and achieved large representation in

federal, state and municipal legislative bodies. Today

a large number of pastors occupy government seats

where they propose and approve bills. Since the

early 2000s, conservative Catholics and evangelical

Protestants have joined forces in the National Con-

gress to ﬁght virulently against the legalisation of

abortion, same-sex relations, and family and educa-

tion bills not aligned with their dogmatic views.

The political strength gained by religious con-

servatism over the past ten years was evident in the

2010 general elections, when “moral” issues – mainly

abortion and same-sex relations – took over a signiﬁ-

cant portion of the leading candidates’ presidential

campaigns. Religious conservatives have also openly

aligned themselves with candidates. A number of

evangelical Protestant pastors drummed up votes for

presidential candidate Marina Silva, herself an evan-

gelical Christian, while a sector of Catholic bishops

publicly expressed their support for candidate José

Serra. Other religious leaders called on then candi-

date Dilma Rousseff to make a stand for their moral

agenda.

These conservative religious forces have

also elected large numbers of representatives at all

levels. In the newly elected federal Congress, the

evangelical caucus is the “third force” in the lower

house (the Chamber of Deputies). Brazilian electoral

and congressional politics have become increasingly

similar to what has been witnessed in the US since

the 1970s.

These forces were active in the recent

debates and controversies around internet regula-

tion, and nothing indicates that they will abandon

the stage in the next rounds. Their moral positions,

discourses and interests interweave and overlap with

issues of sexuality, communication and information

regulatory frameworks, and freedom of expression.

Internet regulation: Shifting the terms

of the debate

Brazil privatised its telecommunications system in

1995, therefore adopting a full new regulatory frame-

work for the sector. However, internet regulation was

left aside from those measures. More intense discus-

sions on the matter started in Brazil in the second half

of the 1990s, when the issue of how .br domains would

be administered emerged. Calls for democratisation of

57 Sônia Corrêa “Abortion and Human Rights: Will Brazil be

the next Nicaragua?” RH Reality Check 15 June 2010 www.

rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/06/13/abortion-human-rights-

current-controversy-brazil; Collective text “Manifesto against

the way abortion was treated during the last electoral period

in Brazil 2010” Sexuality Policy Watch, 13 January 2011 www.

sxpolitics.org/?p=5726

58 Corrêa “Abortion and Human Rights”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET31 Brazil

internet access were becoming more visible, and bills

were drafted and debated in the press and among civ-

il society actors, who addressed issues such as privacy,

service provider responsibility, and consumer protec-

tion.

Among other measures, the Brazilian Internet

Steering Committee (CGI.br) was created in 1995, to

ﬁll the mandate of domain administration, a function

that would take full effect only after 2003, when the

body was granted complete autonomy and an insti-

tutional infrastructure, and gained the strength to

engage in other aspects of internet regulation.

Between these two moments, calls for stricter

internet legal regulation had intensiﬁed worldwide,

motivated by the growing evidence of conduct

labelled as unlawful, such as the breaching of copy-

right and other intellectual property rights (pirating),

ﬁnancial fraud, virus spreading and hacking, trafﬁck-

ing of persons and child pornography. These calls led

to the adoption of new legislation in the US and Eu-

rope: the DMCA approved in 1998 and the European

Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention)

approved in 2001, normative frameworks that had

been framed as criminal justice instruments. The Eu-

ropean Convention, in particular, includes a detailed

article on web-based child pornography.

Inevitably, similar concerns would rapidly reach

Brazil, among other reasons, because European leg-

islators have been quite proactive in disseminating

their new legal approaches and calling for adhesion

from other countries.

Lemos et al.,

who analysed

59 Ronaldo Lemos et al. Proposta de Alteração do PLC 84/99/

PLC 89/03 (Crimes Digitais) e estudo sobre história legislativa

e marco regulatório da Internet no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro:

Escola de Direito da Fundação Getulio Vargas, 2005) www.

researchgate.net/publication/36409068_Proposta_de_alterao_

ao_PLC_8499__PLC_8903_%28Crimes_Digitais%29

60 Article 9 of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime – Offences

related to child pornography: “(1) Each Party shall adopt such

legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish

as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed

intentionally and without right, the following conduct: a.

producing child pornography for the purpose of its distribution

through a computer system; b. offering or making available

child pornography through a computer system; c. distributing

or transmitting child pornography through a computer system;

d. procuring child pornography through a computer system for

oneself or for another person; e. possessing child pornography

in a computer system or on a computer-data storage medium.

(2) For the purpose of paragraph 1 above, the term ‘child

pornography’ shall include pornographic material that visually

depicts: a. a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct; b. a

person appearing to be a minor engaged in sexually explicit

conduct; c. realistic images representing a minor engaged in

sexually explicit conduct. (3) For the purpose of paragraph

2 above, the term ‘minor’ shall include all persons under 18

years of age. A Party may, however, require a lower age-limit,

which shall be not less than 16 years. (4) Each Party may reserve

the right not to apply, in whole or in part, paragraphs 1, sub-

paragraphs d. and e, and 2, sub-paragraphs b. and c.”

61 Mabel Bianco and Andrea Mariño EROTICS: An Exploratory

Research on Sexuality and the Internet. Policy Review

(Association for Progressive Communications Women’s

Networking Support Program, 2008) www.genderit.org/content/

erotics-exploratory-research-sexuality-internet-policy-review

62 Lemos et al. Proposta de Alteração

Brazilian regulatory debate in the mid-2000s, un-

derline how the civil law proposals that had been

drafted in the 1990s in relation to internet regula-

tion were progressively abandoned in favour of a

normative agenda exclusively informed by criminal

law. Although, until mid-2010, Brazil had refused to

join the Budapest Convention, between 1999 and

2000 three bills were submitted to Congress (one to

the lower house and two to the Senate), which were

clearly inspired by the Convention, as they opted for

a criminal approach to regulation and aimed at crim-

inalising a number of conducts that in general lines

coincided with the content of the European law.

These various bills would become the basis

of a new draft processed at Senate level in 2003,

nicknamed after its rapporteur Senator Eduardo

Azeredo. The debates around it evolved slowly

and were fraught with controversies, but ﬁnally, in

July 2008, the new bill was approved by the Senate

and sent back to the Chamber of Deputies for ﬁnal

clearance. The new law altered existing legislation

on a wide range of areas in order to more precisely

deﬁne a long list of cyber crimes – such as fraud,

unauthorised access, use and dissemination of data,

illicit conduct in the domain of military equipment

and national security, child pornography, but also

racist speech and images.

When the processing of

the bill was reaching its last stage, similar initiatives

were also proliferating at the global level. In par-

ticular, the French bill which became known as the

HADOPI Law gained high visibility in the Brazilian

public debate.

In Brazil, as in France, the pressures of the music

industry and other sectors concerned with intellec-

tual property rights were one key factor behind the

legislative initiatives. However, as the bill was being

discussed, innovative proposals in the domains of

free and open source software and open access to

cultural goods were gradually incorporated in the

policy agenda of the Ministry of Culture. This move

seems to have restricted the manoeuvring space

63 Chamber of Deputies PL 89/1999, Senate PL 137/2000 and PL

76/2000. PL 76/2000 differs slightly from the Convention text in

that it does not mention child pornography speciﬁcally, but uses

the notion of crime against public morality. Web-based attacks

against the sexual orientation of individuals are also considered

a crime.

64 In more detail, the topics contained in the law are as follows:

a) unauthorised access to computer networks; b) unauthorised

access to or delivery of data and information; c) to make public

or undue use of personal data; d) introduction of malicious

codes in communications, information and computer networks;

e) cyber fraud; f) attacks against public services; f) interruption

or disturbance of telecommunication, computer and cyber

networks; g) falsiﬁcation of data or private documents; h) a

series of provisions regarding unauthorised access, interruption,

disturbance or attack on military data banks, equipment and

systems of information; i) treason; j) suspension of publication

or transmission of images and discourses implying the crime

of racism; k) web-based child pornography; l) a series of rules

regarding the responsibility of service providers, including the

retentions of users’ data (logs) for three years.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET32 Brazil

of actors more directly connected with the phono-

graphic industry. In the perception of most actors

closely involved in the discussions around the cyber

crime law, the main trigger for it to be tabled and

approved was ﬁnancial fraud. In 2001, a state-of-the-

art secure system of digital certiﬁcation was adopted

to protect ﬁnancial transactions in Brazil, but this

did not totally eradicate issues of bank fraud, iden-

tity theft, phishing and credit card cloning. Under

Brazilian law, ﬁnancial institutions are liable for

losses experienced by clients who fall victim to these

frauds, and must pay back the costs they imply. Con-

sequently the banks started to pressure legislators to

ﬁnd ways to reduce their liability costs.

The ﬁnal text of the bill suggests that the military

also supported the legislation on the basis of national

security rationales. In the later stages of the debate,

the Afro-Brazilian movement was also engaged,

call-

ing for the inclusion of an anti-racism clause. Last

but not least, a diverse group of actors engaged in

anti-paedophilia campaigning and child protection

against online exploitation – including well-known

religious conservative leaders – were also key actors in

the legislative and public debate processes.

In the perception of many interviewees, the

strong call for criminalisation of web-based child

pornography, which spiralled around the Azeredo

Bill and related policy initiatives, had a catalysing

effect on the overlapping undercurrent of compet-

ing interests that led to the approval of the law.

The reason is that while neither the banks’ demands

over ﬁnancial losses nor anti-pirating interests could

easily gather political support, child pornography

is an acknowledged crime with a strong moral and

public appeal. The documentation examined in the

case study supports this interpretation, as it shows

that the speciﬁc provision against child pornogra-

phy had been included in and excluded from the

draft text several times. It was left out of the ﬁnal

draft presented by the rapporteur in late June 2009,

to be reintroduced later in the last text debated by

senators.

Sexuality erupts

In Brazil, child protection concerns did not emerge

as a policy issue as an effect of internet expansion.

Since the early 1990s laws and policies have been

adopted addressing the sexual abuse of children and

adolescents and the issue achieved increasing social

and political visibility. From 1999 on, the Federal Po-

lice became directly engaged in the investigation of

ofﬂine cases. In 2003-2004, in connection with the

second Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on the

subject, the agency performed a national mapping

of child prostitution (Operation Tamar). That same

year the National Secretary on Human Rights and the

Federal Police signed a joint protocol to investigate

and punish online child pornography and CGI.br was

invited to collaborate. In 2003, before the Optional

Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child

on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child

Pornography was ratiﬁed, special units to ﬁght cyber

crime were created both at the Federal Prosecutors’

Ofﬁce (MPF) and Federal Police.

The ﬁrst operations performed by the Federal

Police in relation to web-based “child pornography”

took place in 2005-2006, at the request of the Span-

ish police, when three investigations on peer-to-peer

ﬁle sharing were conducted.

In 2007, a criminal ex-

pert from the Federal Police in São Paulo developed

a tool for tracking IP addresses to identify this type

of ﬁle sharing.

The tool would be used, that same

year, in the ﬁrst round of international investiga-

tions directly coordinated by the Brazilian agency:

Operations Carrossel I and II, which issued 215 search

warrants across the country.

In May 2009, when EROTICS Brazil was in its

early stages, an investigation of child pornography

in Orkut was launched in ten different states: the

Turko “mega operation”.

In preparing for it, 92

criminal warrants had been issued to allow for the

search of computers and at its end ten individuals

were indicted. In a radio interview in the aftermath

of the operation, three people talked to the press:

Dr. Sérgio Suiama, representing the MPF Special Unit

from São Paulo; Senator Magno Malta, who pre-

sided over a Parliamentarian Inquiry Commission on

Paedophilia; and Thiago Tavares, the director of Saf-

erNet Brasil, an NGO engaged in the protection and

promotion of human rights on the web. A female

journalist asked if a person could be indicted when

child pornography was found on his or her spam or

email system. Dr. Suiama responded afﬁrmatively,

and explained that possession of child pornography

had been a crime in Brazil since November 2008.

65 The MPF unit is named Grupo de Combate aos Crimes

Cibernéticos (Combat Unit Against Cybernetic Crimes) na

Procuradoria da República do Estado de São Paulo. The Federal

Police unit that was originally named Núcleo de Combate a

Pedoﬁlia na Internet (Unit to Fight Pedophilia on the Internet)

is now called the Special Group to Fight Hate Crimes and Child

Pornography on the Internet.

66 The operations were named Anjo da Guarda (“Guardian

Angel”) I and II (2005) and Azahar (2006).

67 CETS, the Child Exploitation and Tracking System, has also been

tested at the Brazilian Federal Police headquarters in Brasília.

However, it could not be incorporated by all units of the

agency because of some technical gaps. One of them is that all

commands in the current version of CETS are in English, while

only a few federal agents are ﬂuent in that language.

68 When the data collection was being ﬁnalised in May 2010,

another mega operation was conducted by the Federal Police

(Operation Ossorico).

69 As established in the ECA, the penalty for possession of child

pornography ranges from one to four years of imprisonment

and a ﬁne – softened if the amount is small.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET33 Brazil

The approval of the new law was the last event

in a year during which a series of interconnected

events and forces had raised the visibility of the ﬁght

against web-based sexual abuse and exploitation of

minors in Brazil signiﬁcantly.

Many factors and the role played by a wide

gamut of actors explain this intensiﬁcation. One

of them is the presence and growing inﬂuence of

conservative religious forces on the political system,

legal norms and policies. Another is the strong ap-

peal of criminal justice as a pedagogic instrument,

as previously described. But in this particular con-

text of analysis it is also worth connecting national

policy initiatives in this area with the overall global

feeling of insecurity analysed by Karam in the fol-

lowing terms:

New technical possibilities now break through

time and space boundaries, facilitating the per-

ception of risks in a frightening globalised way.

Risk is not simply perceived as a possible result

of any action, but in negative ways, as a threat

that makes central the search for an ideal of se-

curity.

On the other hand, developments observed in 2008

are also directly related to the adoption of a new

advocacy model to address human rights abuses and

criminal conduct on the internet. In 2003, a new

project was started at the Federal University of Ba-

hia (UFBA), designed to use state-of-the-art legal

and technological tools to improve web safety.

Two years later, the project was transformed into an

NGO, SaferNet Brasil. Its ﬁrst initiative was a hotline

to report sexual abuse of minors on the internet,

which was established in partnership with CEDECA,

a children’s rights organisation.

The website “de-

nuncie.org.br” was then established to collect these

reports. Later in time the scope of violation tracked

by SaferNet would expand to also encompass events

related to racism, neo-Nazism, xenophobia, de-

fence or incitement of violence, hate speech, crimes

against life, and homophobia.

The model is similar to frameworks adopted by

European and Canadian hotlines for child protection.

Its operation involves high-level technical expertise

to track reports and gather the necessary evidence

70 Lúcia Karam “Para conter e superar a expansão do

poder punitivo” Veredas do Direito: Direito Ambiental e

Desenvolvimento Sustentável 3, 5 (2006): 96 www.domhelder.

edu.br/veredas_direito/pdf/23_122.pdf

71 SaferNet Brasil was founded by lawyer and long-time internet

activist Thiago Tavares, who is currently its president. www.

safernet.org.br

72 The Yves de Roussan Defence Center for Children and

Adolescents, CEDECA-BA www.cedeca.org.br/inst_quemsomos_

eng.php

for investigations.

In 2007, SaferNet was contracted

by CGI.br to provide systematic and documented

information on violations of human rights on the

Brazilian internet. Although homophobia has not

been legally deﬁned as hate crime – as is the case

with racism, Nazism and xenophobia – reports of

homophobia are also received, registered and fol-

lowed up by SaferNet, as mentioned above.

According to SaferNet,

in 2009, 52% of all re-

ports ﬁled through the hotline concerned “child

pornography” (69,963); 24% referred to “defence or

incitement of crimes against life” (35,566); and 28%

corresponded to events related to “racism”, “neo-Nazi

content”, “xenophobia” and “religious intolerance”,

evenly distributed (28,534 in all). “Homophobia” ac-

counted for 3% of reports (3,543). The following year,

“child pornography” fell slightly to 47% of reports

(32,255); “incitement of crimes against life” to 19%

(13,085); and “racism”, “neo-Nazi content”, “xeno-

phobia” and “religious intolerance” to 24% (16,411);

while reports of “homophobia” doubled, rising to

10% (6,568). The SaferNet web hotline is today the

main source of data on web-based sexual abuse and

exploitation of children, which provides background

to legal actions and public policy at the country level.

It was initially associated to INHOPE, but now it re-

sponds to the Human Rights Secretary, among other

branches of the Brazilian judiciary.

2008: Intensiﬁcation and overlapping

One immediate political effect of the late 2007

Operation Carrossel II was the creation of a Joint

Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (in Portuguese,

CPI, Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito) in March

2008 to investigate paedophilia on the internet. The

evidence justifying the establishment of the commis-

sion was based mainly on press releases about police

operations against web-based child pornography. It

included pornographic images that had been seized,

aimed at “sensitising” the legislators.

The issue was

73 Reports can be ﬁled by any user by accessing “Denuncie” (“report

abuse”) tools available in popular websites. The initial project

was funded by the Canadian International Development Agency

(CIDA). When the NGO was established the team decided to

continue the work on a self-ﬁnanced basis, in order to remain

exempt from any political inﬂuence. But this proved not to be

sustainable. In 2007, CGI.br hired SaferNet Brasil to prepare

technical reports and indicators on child pornography and hate

crimes on the Brazilian web. In 2010, in addition to CGI.br’s

support, the other sources of funding were the Brazilian branch

of the World Childhood Foundation (WCF) of Sweden and the

Petrobras Citizenship Development Programme.

74 SaferNet Brasil, Indicadores, Central Nacional de Denúncias

www.safernet.org.br/site/indicadores

75 Senate request No. 200 of 2008

www.senado.gov.br/atividade/Materia/detalhes.asp?p_cod_

mate=84094 As reported by interviewees and conﬁrmed

by fellow researcher Lowenkron, whenever Senator Malta,

promoter of this initiative, discussed the CPI, he showed

shocking images attributed to web porn rings to his

interlocutors, including President Lula da Silva.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET34 Brazil

addressed and conveyed by commission members as

a moral scandal, while poorly framed in legal terms.

This approach was coherent with the proﬁle of the

main promoter and leader of the inquiry, Senator

Magno Malta, a well-known evangelical pastor, who

leads the opposition to the legalisation of abor-

tion, same-sex marriage and, in particular, Bill PL

122/2006, also being processed in the Senate, for

the penalisation of homophobic speech, when it re-

sults in injury or incitement to violence, or typiﬁes

homophobic hate crimes.

Conservative evangelicals

in Brazil, like in the US, hold that paedophilia is inti-

mately linked to homosexuality, fanning the ﬂames

of a commonly held misconception. Although this

allegation causes discomfort among moderate and

progressive religious sectors, their voices are silenced

by the powerful religious conservative-controlled

mass media in Brazil.

Lowenkron,

in her analysis of the discourses

deployed by the commission, underlines how its

members portrayed themselves as “good citizens”

engaged in a crusade, in which “the paedophile” –

who corrupts children and threatens society as well

as family values – is the “common enemy”. Commis-

sion leaders called for cohesion across party lines

and managed to engage representatives of all par-

ties and tendencies. The CPI immediately achieved

great media visibility. Although initially set to work

for 120 days, its term was successively extended, un-

til January 2011. The formal mission of the inquiry

was to investigate the use of the internet for the ex-

change, sale and purchase of child pornography. But

the scope of the cases it examined extrapolated this

initial mandate and commission members have also

investigated a number of reports of ofﬂine sexual

child abuse, giving high priority to cases involving

politicians and religious authorities, such as Catholic

priests. Such cases always catch media attention.

As the CPI started its work, its agenda overlapped

with SaferNet Brasil’s stream of advocacy and policy

initiatives. Since 2005, SaferNet hotline records had

identiﬁed a high incidence of reports regarding the

share and sale of child pornography in Orkut com-

munities. In 2006, this database was shared with

the Federal Prosecutors’ Ofﬁce in São Paulo and a

suit was ﬁled against Google, requesting the com-

pany to provide information on internet trafﬁc data

related to, and the identities of, users suspected of

involvement with child pornography. The company

76 Other key participants of the commission were Senator Romeu

Tuma, who is a police ofﬁcer, and Senator Demóstenes Torres,

who is a member of the Attorney General’s Ofﬁce of the State

of Goiás.

77 Pazello “Internet: campo de batalha”

78 Laura Lowenkron Sexualidade e (Menor)idade: estratégias de

controle social em diferentes escalas Masters dissertation (Rio

de Janeiro: PPGAS/Museu Nacional/UFRJ, 2008); Lowenkron

“Abuso sexual infantil”

rebutted, alleging that the Orkut server was based

in the US and, therefore, access to the users’ log ﬁles

would be beyond the jurisdiction of Brazilian law.

Google Brazil was subpoenaed several times, but

as it failed to respond SaferNet developed a new line

of advocacy. As is well known, Google sells adver-

tisements that appear, at random, in search results

and community pages. As these ads also pop up in

web spaces where sexual abuse against children

was reportedly taking place, SaferNet mapped and

documented these events. This empirical evidence

supported a complaint made to the Brazilian Coun-

cil of Advertising Self-Regulation (CONAR), which

requested a more comprehensive investigation.

SaferNet also recommended that advertisers be in-

formed whenever their products were reportedly

shown side by side with child pornography, and that

Google should be called to comply with ethical stand-

ards set by the body.

A request was also ﬁled with

the MPF/São Paulo to investigate whether Google,

advertently or not, was receiving ﬁnancial gains

from ads posted on “criminal pages”. The national

and international media reported on data collected

by SaferNet and the legal and ethical measures be-

ing enacted. This caused Google stocks to go down

in Nasdaq, and the company decided to respond.

On 23 April 2008, at a session of the CPI on

Paedophilia, Google directors delivered access of

users’ logs to the Brazilian authorities. This act of

compliance achieved high media visibility in the in-

ternational press, boosting the prestige of Brazilian

public authorities and other actors, including the CPI

members. The next step was the signing of a Con-

duct Adjustment Agreement (Termo de Ajustamento

de Conduta – TAC) by Google, SaferNet and the São

Paulo State Attorney’s Ofﬁce,

which ended the liti-

gation started in 2006. In signing the TAC, Google

committed itself to receive and acknowledge civil

and criminal notiﬁcations regarding child pornog-

raphy and hate speech in Orkut, and to respond

promptly to all subpoenas received. The TAC also

stipulates that, in order to be able to operate in the

country, the company must comply with Brazilian

legislation (in the case of cyber crimes committed

79 CONAR’s inquiries and requests can be summarised as follows:

ﬁrst, questions were raised about whether advertisers and

advertising agencies were aware that their campaigns were

being published on pages showing sexual abuse and violence

against children and adolescents, and whether they agreed

with that. Second, at each click CONAR should ask Google if the

company agreed with the proﬁt generated by this practice.

80 Guilherme Gatis “Orkut: sociedade cobra punições” Folha de

Pernambuco 16 March 2006 www.safernet.org.br/site/noticias/

orkut-sociedade-cobra-puni%C3%A7%C3%B5es

81 A TAC is an instrument typically adopted by the MPF in criminal

or civil cases where the interests of a diversity of public and

private actors are involved. The signing of a TAC implies

periodical assessments of its implementation by the various

parties involved. Non-compliance leads to civil and criminal

sanctions.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET35 Brazil

by Brazilians or by access originated in Brazil) and

determines deadlines and obligations to be fol-

lowed by Google before Brazilian public authorities.

Among other provisions, the TAC determines that all

users’ log ﬁles must be kept for 180 days and made

available whenever requested by the judiciary.

Differences are quite stark between Safer-

Net’s and CPI members’ vision, language, methods,

strategies and discourses. While SaferNet used the

terminology of sexual abuse and exploitation, em-

phasising the human rights framework inside which

they operate, the CPI’s dominant trope was paedo-

philia. While SaferNet data collection work included

homophobia as a hate crime, more often than not

commission members in general, and Senator Malta

in particular, conﬂated paedophilia and homosexu-

ality.

However, since 2008 the two approaches have

overlapped. A CPI Advisory Working Group was cre-

ated to provide technical advice to the members of

the commission, which included ofﬁcers from the

Federal Police, the Federal and State Prosecutors’

Ofﬁces, and the director of SaferNet Brasil. The work-

ing group discussed technical deﬁnitions, such as the

differentiation between sexual abuse and exploita-

tion of minors, child pornography and paedophilia.

Legal reform was also discussed, and thirteen bills

and amendments were submitted by the CPI be-

tween early 2008 and mid-2010. These signiﬁcant

outcomes have not diluted tensions, however. The

differences in language and agenda between mem-

bers of the working group and Senator Magno Malta

led to numerous conﬂicts and, in order to avoid a

split, an informal agreement had to be reached. The

agreement required Senator Malta to avoid using

discriminatory language with a religious tone in pub-

lic events where all partners participated. However,

this has not prevented him from expressing his opin-

ions freely under other circumstances.

Among the draft bills submitted to Congress, one

aims at making the contents of the TAC signed by

Google federal law, in order to ensure that all in-

ternet providers comply with deadlines, preservation

and transfer of users’ data to public authorities (PLS

494/2008). But the legal initiatives most praised by

law enforcement agencies were the amendments of

82 The TAC also determines that, by court order, data must be

supplied to prosecutors and the police; Google is to submit

bi-monthly reports to the State of São Paulo MP, informing

about user and community proﬁles removed for involvement

with child pornography, as deﬁned by the ECA, or else for

the crime of racism, as deﬁned by speciﬁc legislation (Law

7716/1989). Filters are to be created to prevent the uploading

and downloading of child pornography. Educational campaigns

are to be developed for the safe and non-criminal use of the

internet. A breach of TAC terms is penalised with a USD 25,000

ﬁne to be paid by Google.

83 Pazello “Internet: campo de batalha”

84 Interview with Thiago Tavares on 10 August 2010

Articles 240 and 241 of the ECA (Law 11.829/2008).

They deﬁne child pornography, typifying the prac-

tices of networks engaged in the production and

distribution of juvenile pornographic material, and

establishing that possession of child pornography

is a crime. The bill was approved in record time by

both legislative chambers and signed by President

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on 5 November 2008, during

the Third World Congress against Sexual Exploitation

of Children, organised by ECPAT,

in Rio de Janeiro.

Concomitantly, between the start of the CPI

(March 2008) and the presidential approval of

PLS494/2008 (November 2008), the Azeredo Bill was

passed by the Senate and sent to the Chamber of

Deputies for approval. In contrast to the consider-

able debate generated both in the Congress and

among civil society actors by a number of the pro-

visions of the bill, such as users’ log retention, the

criminalisation of possession of child pornography

was not widely or openly questioned. This does not

mean that critiques were not articulated. Omar Ka-

minsky of the Brazilian Institute of Informatics Policy

and Legislation (IBDI), for instance, observes that

possession cannot be discussed without taking into

account the complexities of internet data storage,

and the risk of error in log attribution. In his view,

even state-of-the-art storage and identiﬁcation

tools used by providers lack total accuracy. A one-

minute gap in captured data may wrongly trigger an

investigation of an entirely different user than the

person who has in fact perpetrated a criminal act.

Another risk mentioned is fraud, as user data may

be wrongly attributed to a person. Sidow,

in a de-

tailed analysis of law 11.829/08, adopted after the

international conference in Rio de Janeiro, raises a

substantial juridical critique about the crime typify-

ing child pornography possession. However, these

views have not reached an audience beyond limited

circles, nor have they been addressed at higher levels

of public deliberation.

85 Articles 240 and 241 of the ECA refer to the production and

dissemination of child and teen pornography. The new law

increased the penalties, included other verbal offences, and

added items that typify the behaviour of possession and storage

of pornography; harassment and grooming of children online;

and photo or video editing that simulate the participation

of underage persons in sex scenes. The law also stipulates an

objective condition of criminality of the providers that make

possible the publication of material on the internet, specifying

the time of consummation of the crime, when the provider

does not disable access to illegal content. (See § 2 of art. 241-A

of ECA/1990)

86 ECPAT International is a global network of organisations and

individuals working together for the elimination of child

prostitution, child pornography and the trafﬁcking of children

for sexual purposes. www.ecpat.net/EI/index.asp

87 Spencer T. Sidow “Pedofília virtual e considerações críticas sobre

a Lei 11.829/08” Revista Liberdades 1, May-September (2009)

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET36 Brazil

Resisting vigilantism

The Senate debates on the Azeredo Bill were not

conﬁned to closed chambers. Academics and civil

society organisations were either called or offered

their views on the text of the bill. In the end, how-

ever, the balance of power was not in their favour,

and their perspectives on the distortions that crimi-

nal regulation might cause – on the right to privacy,

anonymity, open access, among other concerns – did

not make their way into the ﬁnal proposal. Conse-

quently, right after the partial approval of the law

in the Senate, cyber activists and those engaged in

calls for democratisation of communications pub-

licly contested the contents of the bill by starting

a national campaign against it called “Against the

Digital AI-5”. The name of the campaign echoed the

sombre memory of Decree AI-5, which in 1968 sig-

nalled a hardening of political control by the military

dictatorship at that time, through the imposition of

draconian media censorship and surveillance.

A range of organisations were involved in the

campaign, especially the free and open source soft-

ware and digital culture movements, organisations

engaged in struggles for communication rights, hu-

man rights organisations and academics who had an

earlier engagement resisting the bill while it was still

being processed in the Senate. The ones with higher

visibility were the Brazilian Institute of Informatics

Policy and Legislation (IBDI), the Intervozes Brazilian

Social Communication Collective, the Center for Tech-

nology and Society at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation

(CTS/FGV), the Brazilian Free Software Association,

the Information Network for the Third Sector (RITS)

and SaferNet Brasil. The coalition launched an on-

line petition against the bill, which laid out a series

of arguments with regard to its social, economic,

In October 2009, in assessing the progress made af-

ter the signing of the TAC, Ms. Priscila Schreiner, a

public prosecutor and member of the Special Group

to Fight Cyber Crimes, informed the researchers that

the installation of ﬁlters requested by the TAC had

not yet been implemented, despite the company’s

“good will”. According to Schreiner, Google was

keeping images and communicating with the MP

and SaferNet Brasil, but there were still obstacles

to be overcome. On 23 April 2010, a public hearing

was held by the CPI on Paedophilia to evaluate the

implementation of the TAC. On the occasion, Ivo

Correa, director of Public Policy and Government

Relations of Google Brazil, expressed the company’s

satisfaction with the results of TAC implementation

and the partnership established between the com-

pany, the MP/SP, the CPI and SaferNet. At that time

he stated that, since the agreement, the monthly av-

erage of reports had decreased from 9,000 to 2,000.

In the area of law enforcement, the Federal

Police report that about 380 search warrants were

issued between 2005 and May 2010, resulting in

45 arrests (in ﬂagrante), four convictions and sen-

tences, and the rescue of 70 children that had been

exposed to situations in which child pornography

images were being produced. In 2009 and 2010, six

“mega operations” were deployed to ﬁght against

child pornography on the internet and the agency

expected to double the number of these opera-

tions in 2011. This degree of success is attributed to,

among other things, the recent legal reforms. But

even so, law enforcement ofﬁcials are not com-

pletely satisﬁed. In their view, the court process to

authorise access to crime evidence is still slow (it can

take up to six months). They strongly call for the

TAC (which determines a three-year minimum for IP

retention and six months for data retention) to be

transformed into law as, in their view, this would

help speed up investigations. Federal Police ofﬁc-

ers and public prosecutors strongly contest the view

that retention of user data (IP address, time, date,

time zone, etc.) is a violation of privacy. In their per-

ception, if somebody has posted child pornography

on the web his/her privacy is automatically compro-

mised. They also recall that these data are already

being used and made available by the telecommuni-

cations companies with commercial ends.

Mr. Stenio Santos,

a high-ranking Federal Po-

lice ofﬁcer, also stressed the sharp contrast between

Brazil and partner countries in relation to child por-

nography investigations, because in their case access

to data related to a complaint of web-based sexual

abuse or exploitation of children may be granted

in less than 24 hours. Santos also raises concerns

regarding the age of sexual consent. In his view,

the ideal standard is European and US legislation,

which deﬁnes it as eighteen. In Brazil, it is deﬁned

by multiple parameters. The ECA deﬁnes the rights

of children and adolescents as those applying to

persons under eighteen. Norms recently adopted

set the age of the victim (fourteen to eighteen) as

aggravating crimes such as rape, prostitution and

the production of pornographic material. But long-

established jurisprudence sets the age of sexual

consent at fourteen. Santos claims that unless sexual

consent is set at eighteen, Brazil might become a

“haven” for the production of child pornography

over the coming years.

Recent normative changes: Outcomes and looking forward

* Interview with the authors, 12 May 2010

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET37 Brazil

political, legal, technological and scientiﬁc impact.

Within a month, 13,000 people had signed the on-

line petition.

As the text of the bill was sent back to the lower

house for ﬁnal clearance, the coalition put pressure

on friendly legislators and, in November 2008, the

Committee on Science, Technology and Communica-

tion called a public hearing to discuss the contents

of the bill. The hearing was attended by the Ministry

of Justice, the Federal Police, academics and activ-

ists.

On the occasion, Sérgio Amadeu, a sociologist

engaged in the Free Software movement, criticised

the Azeredo Bill for creating tools to “block open

networks, criminalise conducts that are common-

place on the internet, and deﬁne quite unclear

regulations.”

Representative Paulo Teixeira (from

the Workers’ Party), one of the lawmakers who had

requested the public hearing, raised many concerns

that, if approved, the bill would “restrict network

utilisation, increase web control and transform the

internet, which is a place of democracy, into a uni-

verse restricted by legal mechanisms.”

In April 2009, a second online petition titled “Re-

jecting the cyber crime bill – In defence of freedom

and the advancement of knowledge on the Brazilian

internet” was launched. It obtained some 150,000

signatures.

The main argument it raised was that

the Azeredo Bill, as written, would curtail all types

of activities and ﬂows on the internet, as one of its

articles stipulated that it is crime to obtain or trans-

fer data of information available on a computer or

information or communication network without

authorisation. The petition called for a presidential

veto of the bill and triggered a series of public events

that became known as the “Mega No” campaign to

give visibility to the call and broaden its political sup-

port.

The core message of the mobilisation was a

strong repudiation of censorship and a call for free-

dom of expression. This wide, diverse and intense

“e-agitprop” was successful in enhancing the direct

dialogue between civil society and powerful state ac-

tors, which would favour a radical shift in the terms

of the debate.

From a state-related institutional angle, three

moments are to be highlighted in relation to this

88 Thiago Tavares (SaferNet Brasil), who participated in this

ﬁrst mobilisation, commented that opening this space at the

Chamber of Deputies was not an easy task. Finding support

among legislators was a challenge because of common strong

resistance to re-open the approved text of a bill.

89 Câmara dos Deputados “Projeto sobre crimes praticados

pela internet recebe críticas” Agência Câmara de Notícias 13

November 2008 www2.camara.gov.br/internet/homeagencia/

materias.html?pk=128469

90 Ibid.

91 This online petition is available at www.petitiononline.com/

veto2008/petition.html

92 Mega No campaign blog meganao.wordpress.com

period. In March 2009, CGI.br launched a Decalogue

of Principles for Internet Usage and Governance

in Brazil. This document contributed to shift the

terms of the debate on regulation from criminal law

towards a human rights framework. The text rec-

ommends that internet regulation must be guided

by freedom of expression, respect for privacy and

human rights, and governed in a transparent, mul-

tilateral and democratic way. With regard to illicit

activities, the Decalogue stresses that liability should

be attributed exclusively to those who knowingly

and willingly performed the breach of conduct and

not against those indirectly involved.

Then, during the International Free Software Fo-

rum in Porto Alegre, June 2009, the critiques against

the Azeredo Bill were presented to President Lula.

At that time he declared himself fully against any

form of censorship, and therefore committed to ﬁnd

ways to address the problems of the bill. Right af-

ter the event, the Ofﬁce of the President requested

the Secretary of Legislative Affairs at the Ministry of

Justice (SAL-MJ) to explore a legal alternative to the

Azeredo Bill. A narrow window of opportunity was

made possible because the bill had been sent back to

the lower house, which was more favourable to shift

the terms of the debate.

In order to fulﬁl its mandate, SAL-MJ established

a partnership with the Law School at the Getúlio

Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, a prestigious

academic institution with long research experience

on internet regulation, to craft an online public con-

sultation aimed at building the foundations of a Civil

Rights Framework for Internet Regulation (Marco

Civil da Internet).

The third moment was the launching of the pub-

lic consultation on the Civil Rights Framework. The

event, held in October 2009, in Rio de Janeiro, was

attended by the Minister of Justice. The consulta-

tion was opened to the public in the same month as

a blog on the “Cultura Digital” website, supported

by the Ministry of Culture. The SAL-MJ team was re-

sponsible for the moderation and the consultation

93 The summary of the text reads as follows: a) internet use

must be guided by freedom of expression, respect for privacy

and human rights; b) internet governance shall be exercised

in a transparent, multilateral and democratic way, counting

on the collaboration of various sectors of society; c) internet

governance must promote continuous development and

wide dissemination of technologies and models of usage and

access; d) universal access to internet as a means for social

and human development must be ensured. The document

also strongly advocates for network neutrality in ﬁltering and

trafﬁc shaping, which shall be deﬁned by strict ethical and

technical criteria, avoiding political, commercial and religious

criteria of regulation as well as any other kind of discriminatory

grounds. In regard to illicit activities the Decalogue stresses

that prosecution must target exclusively those who are directly

responsible for these acts and not the means they may have

used to access and transport information, and that criminal

justice measures must comply with principles of freedom,

privacy and human rights.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET38 Brazil

was designed to evolve in two stages.

The ﬁrst stage

was aimed at discussing the overarching premises of

the new framework. It coincided in time with the ﬁ-

nal preparations for the First National Conference on

Communication Policies (CONFECOM). At that con-

ference, a working group was set up to speciﬁcally

discuss the principles of the new legal framework.

Participants were mainly government ofﬁcials, aca-

demics and activists, and the general ideas proposed

by the SAL-MJ team were consensually approved. In

a second stage, a draft bill prepared by SAL-MJ was

made available online for comments in April and

May 2010.

The draft which prompted the ﬁrst round of

debates was based fundamentally on core princi-

ples of the Brazilian Constitution. It also included

proposals contained in the CGI.br Decalogue and

other documents developed by the campaigns

against the Azeredo Bill. Roughly 900 comments

were posted by individuals and organisations dur-

ing this ﬁrst phase of the consultation. Then, in the

course of the 50 days during which the draft bill

elaborated by SAL-MJ was available for critiques,

it received more than a 1,200 comments. While the

consultation was still open, other public debates

took place, such as a meeting held by the Cham-

ber of Deputies Committee on Science, Technology

and Communication; another meeting was organ-

ised by the Rio de Janeiro Legislative Assembly

Commission on Culture. Both meetings were held

in April 2010. Most importantly, the processing of

the Azeredo Bill in the lower house was stalled to

wait for the new draft to be tabled as well. The de-

bates around the Civil Rights Framework achieved

reasonable coverage by both online and ofﬂine

media between 2009 and 2010.

However, in April 2011, when this report was

being ﬁnalised, the draft text resulting from the

online consultation had not yet been made public

or tabled in Congress. In part this delay is related to

the 2010 general elections, as the proposal had to

wait for the new federal administration and legisla-

ture to start. But most principally it derives from the

fact that the later stages of all policy or legal formu-

lation are necessarily done through conventional

bureaucratic procedures. Since January, the draft is

being revised by relevant ministries – Justice, Cul-

ture, Communications, Science and Technology,

Planning, Foreign Policy – and the National Tele-

communications Regulatory Agency (ANATEL), and

only after it is cleared by these various bodies will

it be tabled.

94 The public consultation is available at www.culturadigital.br/

marcocivil

The Civil Rights Framework:

Contents and meanings

The elements of the new draft bill that are most rele-

vant for the case study can be summarised as follows:

s In Chapter I, addressing general principles, Article 2

reads: “The regulation of the internet in Brazil shall

be grounded on the recognition of the internation-

al nature of the internet; the rights of citizenship

into the digital environment; the human rights;

the values of plurality, diversity, openness, and col-

laboration; the freedom of entrepreneurship and

the freedom of competition, considering the fol-

lowing principles: I - the guaranteed freedom of

speech, communication and expression of thought;

II - protection of privacy; III - protection of personal

data in accordance to the law; IV - preservation and

guarantee of net neutrality; V - preservation of sta-

bility, security and functionality of the network,

ensuring means of technical measures compatible

with international standards and incentives to best

practices; VI - preservation of the participatory na-

ture of the internet.”

s Chapter II deﬁnes user’s rights and obligations.

Article 6 states: “The access to internet is a civil

right, essential for the exercise of citizenship, of

the freedoms of expression, speech and thought,

and to guarantee the access to information.”

s Chapter III addresses internet connection servic-

es. Article 9 states that providers are required to

store users’ connection logs, but not the internet

service access logs, deﬁned in Article 4 as “the

set of information referring to the date and time

of use of a particular internet service by a deter-

mined IP number.” It also deﬁnes that providers

shall not “monitor, ﬁlter and analyze the content

of data packs, except for technical administra-

tion of trafﬁc, according to Article 12.”

s Article 14 of the same chapter deﬁnes a time-

frame of six months for connection logs to be

stored, to allow for criminal investigations.

Ar-

ticle 20 proposes as a solution for the removal

of content that infringes fundamental rights

of a person, such as in cases of defamation, a

voluntary mechanism that eliminates judicial

interventions.

95 The full English version of the draft is available at docs.google.

com/Doc?docid=0Aea4T5El0jxuZGRzY21kbnFfNTFkdzR2ODhjeg

&hl=pt_BR

96 The article reads: “The provision of Internet connection imposes

to the administrator of an autonomous system the obligation

to keep records on connection logs conﬁdentially, in a secured

controlled environment, for the maximum term of 6 (six)

months, as provided by further administrative regulation. Sole

Paragraph. The obligation to maintain records on connection

logs cannot be transferred.”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET39 Brazil

s Finally, Chapter IV addresses the role of gov-

ernment authorities. Article 31 states: “Public

initiatives to promote digital literacy and the

usage of internet as a social tool must: I - seek

to minimize inequality in access to information,

especially between regions; II - promote digital

inclusion of all population, especially low-income

individuals.”

Bearing in mind the discussions introduced earlier,

the trajectory described above illustrates how deeply

cyber regulation debates are embedded in demo-

cratic politics. The issues involved attract an ample,

heterogeneous and contradictory spectrum of actors

and powerful interests. The Brazilian experience in-

dicates that, under speciﬁc conditions, advocacy and

mobilisation enhanced by cyber activism can have

an impact on critical normative debates. In this case,

the effect was a radical shift from a public security

and criminal law approach, which was put on hold.

A new bill found its way into the legislative arena, a

civil law framework grounded on human rights – a

perspective different actors have struggled for since

the 1990s. This move was crucial from the point of

view of the internet regulation debate speciﬁcally

because, among other things, it challenged the ten-

dency to penalise the means, instead of keeping

the focus of criminal law on conducts and perpetra-

tors.

But, in addition, it interrogates assumptions

ingrained in Brazilian political culture, which favour

the easy recourse to criminal law. In other words, this

process challenged the persistence of authoritarian-

ism, public security concerns, and growing religious

dogmatism.

On the other hand, some features of the proc-

ess as a whole and the consultation speciﬁcally point

towards the persisting relevance of public spheres as

an ofﬂine phenomenon. The new information and

communication technologies issues and cyber activ-

ism were at the centre of this political process. The

strategic use of the internet through calls, blogs, bul-

letins, online petitions and Twitter among other web

tools alongside the online consultation were critical

factors beneath and behind the major policy shift

achieved. However, novel modalities of exchange,

deliberation and mobilisation co-existed and inter-

played with well-established public arenas, such as

congressional debates and public hearings. Moreover,

a series of face-to-face debates and agitprops were

also vital to raise public awareness and engage state

actors directly, as in the case of the dialogue with

President Lula and Porto Alegre. The expanded public

sphere, with its multiplicity of online and ofﬂine spac-

es, was therefore activated, connected and catalysed

simultaneously so as to reconstruct social and public

97 Castells A era da informação

consensus. Another aspect to be highlighted relates

to the traction power of state actors and institutions,

which was evident particularly at the later critical

stages of policy shift. In other words, it seems produc-

tive to ask if the policy outcomes would be the same

if powerful actors from the federal executive branch

– such as the president himself, SAL-MJ, and govern-

mental members of CGI.br – had not been persuaded

that this was the direction to go.

Democratic deliberation and participation:

Gains and deﬁcits

If participation and equal access to deliberative are-

nas are key indicators of democratic vitality, or of its

deﬁcit, one signiﬁcant outcome of the Civil Rights

Framework consultation is that it has set a stage of

a level playing ﬁeld for equal access by interested

actors in the deliberation. In the second stage of the

consultation, a number of internet service providers

and other internet and mass media enterprises, in-

cluding Google, made proposals to amend the text.

TV stations and representatives of the audiovisual

and music industry, including foreign organisations

from Argentina, Mexico, Chile and the United States,

also expressed their views in relation to author copy-

rights and “piracy”.

Three major state institutions also made explicit

their views on how the internet should be regulated:

the Ministry of Finance, the Foreign Ministry and the

Federal Police, which presented a long and dense

document calling for amendments to the draft.

The format and nature of the deliberation sharply

differ from “business as usual”, when usually these

powerful actors meet behind closed doors to ex-

change ideas and take decisions. In the case of the

Civil Rights Framework draft bill, their positions have

been made quite transparent, are accessible on the

web and had, at least in the consultation stage, the

same value as the contribution of any other partici-

pant in the debate. This is certainly a key democratic

quality of the political process to be underlined,

which sets an important precedent in terms of pro-

cedures to guide democratic deliberations to be

applied to other subjects and normative areas.

100

98 These included the International Federation of the

Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the Mexican Association of

Phonogram Producers. The IFPI contribution to the Civil Rights

Framework for Internet Regulation is available at culturadigital.

br/marcocivil/2010/05/26/contribuicao-do-ifpi-para-o-marco-civil-

da-internet

99 The Federal Police memo was signed by the cyber crime and

computer expertise divisions. The Foreign Ministry contribution

was made through reports submitted by Brazilian embassies

from 24 different countries that provided information on how

local legislations addressed internet regulation.

100 Omar Kaminski from IBDI suggested for example that the

internet may become an important tool to expand participation

if and when constitutional amendments or reforms are

debated.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET40 Brazil

Another aspect to be highlighted is that the proc-

ess triggered by the Civil Rights Framework has also

reframed the terms and conditions of the debate

within the cyber activism ﬁeld itself. The ﬁrst mo-

ments of the Digital AI-5 and Mega No mobilisation

were strongly imprinted by anti-vigilantism slogans,

which projected an image of resistance to and repu-

diation of not only the Azeredo Bill but any form of

internet content regulation. As the process evolved,

although this unconditional defence of full freedom

in cyberspace did not disappear, the views defending

a regulatory framework based on civil/human rights

became more visible and vocal. In the observation of

meetings and debates that followed the launching

of the Civil Rights Framework these two positions

coexisted and eventually triggered tensions. If sharp

resistances and reactions against the Azeredo Bill

were raised, critical positions in respect to the Civil

Rights Framework were also articulated.

For instance, when the Civil Rights Framework

was discussed in the Brazilian Digital Culture Forum

(November 2009), important actors highlighted the

risks of any form of internet regulation, defend-

ing the creation of laws to guarantee internet use

without any type of vigilantism. In the online consul-

tation, a number of comments also emphasised that

no new law was needed, since existing norms, such

as the constitution or the civil code, provide enough

rules to guide web-based conduct. As the process

of deliberation matured, however, a stronger, even

if provisional, consensus seemed to have emerged

around the meaning and legitimacy of the normative

perspective proposed by the Civil Rights Framework.

In April 2010, Sérgio Amadeu, who at earlier stages

had raised criticisms in relation to the proposal, pub-

lished an online article where he openly praised the

initiative:

The proposal of the Ministry of Justice is deﬁ-

nitely a breakthrough, even when it still contains

some points that need to be changed. If we in-

clude the inalienable right of navigation without

identiﬁcation and take away the mechanism of

private censorship we will have an extremely ad-

vanced and exemplary Civil Rights Framework, in

times of the HADOPI Law.”

101

Despite the unequivocal merits of the political proc-

ess here described, caveats and limitations can be

identiﬁed. For instance, as previously mentioned,

since June 2010 the draft bill is being processed

through conventional bureaucratic procedures: the

101 An article published in the blog Trezentos, which recognised the

merit of the Civil Rights Framework and particularly highlighted

the public consultation on the new draft bill as proof that

online collaborative practices and participation may improve

understanding of the issues and raise the quality of democratic

decisions.

debate has gone back behind closed doors. This

suggests that even in the best circumstances new

modalities of doing politics coexist with longstand-

ing methods and processes of decision making and

this is one important aspect to be taken into account

in any cyber politics analysis.

When the focus of the analysis is turned towards

horizontal participation in terms of involvement of

citizens at large or of other constituencies beyond

cyber activists, limitations can be identiﬁed. The

ﬁgures concerning people directly involved in the

Digital AI-5 and Mega No campaigns were high in

comparison to other streams of public demand and

engagement with policy debates in Brazil,

102

and the

number of signatories of the second online petition

(150,000) is quite impressive. However, the direct

participation in the consultation itself was limited

to roughly 1,000 individuals, organisations and insti-

tutions, which either belong to the free and open

source software, digital culture and communication

rights movements and academic institutions en-

gaged with these, or were, as described above, the

voices of powerful private or state actors who have

vested interests in the regulatory debate.

Technical and semantic factors may explain the

low ﬁgure of broad citizenship participation. The

timeframe of the consultation was very short, the

blog was not user friendly, and the content of the

discussions were, quite often, excessively technical.

But it does not seem excessive to suggest that these

low numbers may also reﬂect deﬁcits and distortions

of contemporary politics, in terms of dispersion and

differentiation of roles and spaces. As noted by vari-

ous authors, one effect of cyber politics is that today,

while more people can adhere to certain causes

by signing a petition with the click of a mouse or

posting a statement on their blog or social network

proﬁle, this does not mean that they will spend time

and energy engaging with the conﬂicts and com-

plexities of legal reforms or other policy debates.

Consequently, even when a mobilisation is highly

successful – as was the case in the struggle against

the Azeredo Bill – only those who are deeply com-

mitted or are “the experts” remain engaged in the

later stages of full democratic deliberation. Among

other reasons, engagement at that level is also de-

pendent on motivation.

103

102 Sufﬁce to recall that LGBT pride parades bring millions of

people to the streets. Similar numbers are mobilised by

evangelical Protestant and Catholic gatherings. Hundreds

of thousands of participants are engaged with councils and

periodical conferences.

103 The Latinobarómetro data also conﬁrm this hypothesis, as

more than 60% of Brazilians use the internet to search for

information broadly speaking, but just 18% search for political

information on the web. In other words, the internet is used as

a source of information, but political motivation seems to be

low.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET41 Brazil

The engagement of ordinary citizens in policy

debates is always a challenge. Yet, one could have

imagined that – given the proﬁle and density of

participatory politics in Brazil – the Civil Rights

Framework could have captured the imagination of

other organised constituencies whose advocacy work

or even personal lives have been deeply transformed

by the internet. But this has not been the case either.

The study has examined more closely the engage-

ment (or non-engagement) of the feminist and

LGBT communities in the various debates regarding

internet regulation that are analysed in this report.

Initially, in the study a hypothesis was raised that, in

Brazil, no organic connection existed between the

realms of sexual and cyber politics. The ﬁeld observa-

tions conﬁrmed this hypothesis, as neither feminists

nor LGBT activists got involved in the Civil Rights

Framework consultation, even when information re-

garding its important meaning and procedures was

disseminated by the research team amongst these

groups.

In order to explore further the reasons behind

this gap a survey was conducted with LGBT activ-

ists during the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,

Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) Latin America

and Caribbean Conference (January 2010) and with

feminists leaders participating in a discussion about

abortion and media (April 2010). The results of the

survey are compelling in indicating that these com-

munities were not informed of or engaged with

the ongoing debates. One question asked if they

have heard of discussions around internet regula-

tion. More than 40% of respondents did not even

answer it, 25% said they had heard of CGI.br, 14%

knew about the Azeredo Bill, and a mere 8% had

any awareness of the Digital AI-5 and Mega No

campaigns.

104

To summarise, the Civil Rights Framework po-

litical process implied major gains and meanings in

terms of democratic deliberation, as it shifted the

terms of the debate both within the cyber politics

ﬁeld and at a higher policy level. It has also created

a level playing ﬁeld that allowed a heterogeneous

gamut of forces and actors to be virtually seated

around the same table. But even so, it was not ex-

empt from deﬁcits and caveats that, as described

in literature, are typical of contemporary politics in

terms of a broader horizontal participation and sys-

tematic engagements with democratic deliberation

of legal and policy frameworks.

104 Though the sample was not big (62 people) it is quite

representative as respondents are engaged activists, many of

them involved in debates around communication issues and

policies.

The Civil Rights Framework debates:

Trends, controversies and deadlocks

The online discussions triggered by the Civil Rights

Framework were quite often technical and complex.

But they comprise a rich archive to be examined in

relation to distinctive perspectives informing the

Brazilian cyber politics ﬁeld, positions amongst par-

ticipants in the consultation with respect to norms

regarding privacy and freedom of expression, and, at

a later stage, the positions of key state and private

actors regarding the premises of internet regulation.

In addition, ofﬂine debates regarding the same is-

sues shed light on distinct perspectives of particular

state actors. This section offers a panoramic view of

their discourses and the political dynamics in which

they are involved.

Online discussions during both stages of the Civil

Rights Framework public consultation often referred

to fundamental rights, and political and technical

aspects, particularly with regard to data retention.

During the ﬁrst stage many participants emphasised

the relevance of existing laws, particularly in refer-

ence to constitutional rights. Some proposed that in

addition to the bill, public policies should be adopt-

ed to raise awareness about the right to privacy and

the need to respect it. During the second stage, the

language with regard to “the guarantee of freedom

of speech, communication and thought” received

30 comments and triggered a heated debate about

conﬁdentiality and anonymity. Some commentators,

for instance, suggested that the text should make ex-

plicit that freedom of expression, as deﬁned by the

Federal Constitution, does not grant full anonym-

ity in all circumstances. A number of contributors

identiﬁed a contradiction between the expressed

commitments to the principle of privacy and the pos-

sibility opened by the text that anonymity could be

breached and logs stored, suggesting that the Fed-

eral Constitution indeed guaranteed anonymity.

As the above discussion indicates, however, the

most controversial issue throughout the consulta-

tion referred to the retention of users’ log records

by internet providers to allow for police and court

investigation. In the ﬁrst stage, many commenta-

tors argued in favour of full net neutrality, claiming

that neither the state nor private providers should

monitor what users do on the internet, both because

these actions are fully private, and because net neu-

trality is a prerequisite for innovation, pluralism and

democracy. Few participants, in fact, expressed the

view that each user is responsible for selecting and

ﬁltering content they access. In the second stage,

controversies concentrated around Articles 4 and

14 of Chapter III, which spelled out the deﬁnition of

“log” and the rule concerning data retention by au-

thorities to allow police and court investigation. In

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET42 Brazil

relation to these contents, a number of participants

raised the issue of potential violation of privacy and

contested the use of connection logs in investiga-

tions and court processes, because, in their view,

these type of data lack absolute reliability to be used

in criminal law procedures, as the information can be

invalid, frail and subject to fraud.

These controversies continued ofﬂine de-

bates that had evolved long before the Civil Rights

Framework materialised. Some of our interviewees,

although fully agreeing that a new bill should be

adopted, also recommend great caution regarding

the legal debate around the retention of log ﬁles,

as in their view it should not be easily framed in

binary terms: either in favour or against data reten-

tion. Some of them, for instance, pointed out that

log ﬁles are already being stored by internet serv-

ice providers (ISPs) for advertising and marketing

purposes and that, consequently, the debate should

focus on the reasons and conditions of data reten-

tion. Carlos Afonso, a well-known internet expert,

APC member, founder and director of the Center of

Research, Studies and Learning (Nupef – Núcleo de

Pesquisas, Estudos e Formação) and member of the

CGI.br board, argues that court orders and warrants

for user data records should be accompanied by an

audit on how those data would be kept, recorded

and protected. He also highlights that the main con-

cern in this particular domain should not be about

log or user data retention, but about how these data

are already being used for commercial purposes,

in order to safeguard users’ rights to privacy. In his

words, “This discussion needs to be very reﬁned. And

the centre of this debate is the right to privacy. The

use made of these users’ data.”

105

Another important aspect to be highlighted

refers to the content of the new bill in relation to

providers’ responsibilities. Various actors who sup-

ported the Civil Rights Framework and praised the

online consultation model and its outcome, remained

concerned that the deﬁnitions in this particular area

can favour the economic interests of internet provid-

ers to the detriment of users’ rights. Thiago Tavares,

from SaferNet Brasil, in his analysis of Chapter III of

the draft bill, considers that the economic interests

of providers may be easily favoured, because the text

does not include a clear statement calling for the le-

gal and ﬁnancial liability of providers with regard to

criminal and abusive contents posted on their prod-

ucts and platforms by third parties:

When the Civil Rights Framework addresses le-

gal aspects in relation to this topic it loses a bit

of its direction because, in my view, it is a text

strongly inﬂuenced by the economic interests

105 Interview with the authors at CONFECON, December 2009

of the internet providers, especially Google.

There is no possibility to detach the article that

addresses providers’ civil liability from Google’s

economic interests. No wonder Google, this big

company, supports the text as is, this particular

article speciﬁcally.

106

Lastly, the participation of major state agencies, in

the ﬁnal moments of the consultation, is relevant

to this discussion. The Foreign Ministry contributed

with information on legislation on internet regu-

lation in other countries. The Ministry of Finance

indicated that the Civil Rights Framework should fa-

vour a competitive environment, calling for network

neutrality as a fundamental principle.

107

On the other hand, it should be noted that, de-

spite its catalysing effect on the political and public

debate, sexuality broadly speaking, and child por-

nography speciﬁcally, were not issues systematically

addressed at either the ﬁrst or the second stage of

the consultation on the internet Civil Rights Frame-

work, except, indirectly, in proposals submitted by

the Federal Police. The agency posted an eight-page

memo, stating that the Civil Rights Framework draft,

as written, “affects or will signiﬁcantly affect the

power of the state in its duty to ensure the preser-

vation of public order, the security of people and

property.”

108

Based on the text of the Federal Con-

stitution, the memo emphasises that the internet

“must be preserved, be safe, reliable and keep its us-

ers safe from illicit and malicious actions.”

In order to ensure internet security, the memo

proposes thirteen amendments to the Civil Rights

Framework draft, including new language empha-

sising the constitutional principles related to the

preservation of public order and safety of persons,

property and legal security; the clariﬁcation that

the right to privacy and freedom of speech does

not guarantee anonymity in all circumstances; per-

mission for ﬁltering, monitoring and analysing user

data by internet providers, whenever necessary for

the purposes of criminal investigation or criminal

procedure, with prior court authorisation; and a

three-year minimum timeframe for log storage, as

recommended by the Terms of Technical Coopera-

tion signed between major Brazilian ISPs and the CPI

on Paedophilia, the Senate, CGI.br, MPF and other

institutions.

The relative absence of stronger debate on

child pornography was somehow intriguing. Could

106 Interview with the authors, 27 July 2010

107 The Ministry of Finance contribution is available at

culturadigital.br/marcocivil/2010/05/27/contribuicao-do-

ministerio-da-fazenda

108 The Federal Police memo is available at culturadigital.br/

marcocivil/2010/05/31/contribuicao-da-policia-federal-para-o-

marco-civil-da-internet

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET43 Brazil

it mean that child pornography had suddenly be-

come a non-issue? Or did it simply imply that actors

engaged in the ﬁght against paedophilia and child

pornography were totally unaware of the process?

The data collected suggest that in fact some of these

actors had decided not to engage with the process of

debate as it has been deﬁned by SAL-MJ, but rather

to use their own spaces and means to eventually

raise concerns about the content emerging from the

online consultations, as discussed below.

Steps forward, persisting tensions,

challenges ahead

In April 2010, as the second stage of the consulta-

tion on the Civil Rights Framework was starting,

the CPI on Paedophilia requested a public hearing

to discuss the proposal and the process it had trig-

gered. Present at the meeting, held in June 2010,

were CPI chair Senator Magno Malta; Guilherme Al-

meida (SAL-MJ); Carlos Eduardo Miguel Sobral and

Stenio Sousa Santos, high-ranking ofﬁcers in the

Federal Police; State Prosecutor Priscila Costa Sch-

reiner, coordinator of the cyber crime unit at the

State of São Paulo Federal Prosecutors’ Ofﬁce; and

Demi Getschko, president of the Brazilian Network

Information Center (NIC.br) and member of CGI.br.

Senator Azeredo and Thiago Tavares, president of

SaferNet Brasil, were scheduled to appear, but failed

to attend. When calling for the hearing, in April

2010, Senator Magno Malta expressed the view that

CPI members had been excluded from the debate on

the Civil Rights Framework, saying:

This is a very important issue, which has not been

widely discussed. This Civil Rights Framework

for Internet Regulation is being discussed by a

handful of persons. We are therefore calling this

public hearing because those who elaborated

the draft proposal of the Civil Rights Framework

have not invited the contribution of the CPI on

Paedophilia.

109

The very ﬁrst round of discussions at the hear-

ing was devoted to contest the view conveyed by

Malta. Guilherme Almeida spent some time clari-

fying that it was not at all correct to say that the

CPI members had not being invited to contribute

to the debate of the Civil Rights Framework, since

the call for participation was addressed to society

and state institutions as a whole. Subsequently, Al-

meida provided an overview of how the Civil Rights

Framework had been constructed, highlighting the

problems experienced in the process but also ex-

pressing forward-looking strategies and proposing

109 From the minutes of CPI on Paedophilia session number 70, 28

April 2010

the next steps. He emphasised that the Civil Rights

Framework was conceived as an exercise to construct

a “constitutional bill for the internet” comprising

principles of fundamental rights for users, providers

and the government itself, as well as rules of func-

tioning and procedure. In his own words, “its main

feature is that it has been designed as a civil rights-

based normative framework, and not as a criminal

justice statute.”

110

As expected, the law enforcement actors present

– the Federal Police and Federal Prosecutors’ Of-

ﬁce representatives – reacted to Almeida’s speech.

They raised a long list of security concerns and in-

sisted that it was urgent to adopt robust, up-to-date

and quickly enforceable legislation to facilitate the

criminal investigation and prosecution of criminal

conduct on the internet. In his response, Almeida re-

iterated that the main objective of the Civil Rights

Framework was precisely to move the internet regu-

lation debate away from the logic of criminal justice

that informed previous bills discussed in the Con-

gress. He acknowledged the relevance of problems

and obstacles to investigations raised by the law

enforcement agencies, but also expressed the view

that, in the analysis of SAL-MJ, the barriers funda-

mentally derive from the slowness of the judiciary, a

structural problem that affects many other areas of

justice implementation, which cannot be resolved by

a cyber crime law.

The MPF and the Federal Police representatives

present at the hearing were not easily persuaded.

Prosecutor Priscila Schreiner raised the controversial

question of log storage, suggesting that the ideal

timeframe for retention should be three years, as

already prescribed by the TAC signed with Google,

and not the six months stipulated by the new draft

bill. Reacting to this proposal, Demi Getschko made

it clear that that CGI.br does not consider the reten-

tion of connection logs a problem in itself. In fact,

logs are already retained by ISPs for commercial

purposes. CGI.br recommends that the Civil Rights

Framework should further clarify the very concept of

log, in order to avoid unnecessary confusion.

Getschko also spelled out a perspective on in-

ternet regulation that goes beyond the core idea,

manifested by other speakers, that the main objec-

tive of the draft is to set a distance from a criminal

law approach to regulation. In his view, even when

the Civil Rights Framework is a normative instrument

aimed at ensuring the rights of internet users and

rules to be followed by providers, it should not be

portrayed as a regulatory instrument because “the

internet is immaterial, users are its main actors, and

the internet should be protected, not controlled.”

110 From the minutes of CPI on Paedophilia session number 73, 9

June 2010

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET44 Brazil

This line of thinking converges with the conceptual

frame informing the CGI.br’s Decalogue of Principles

and, in a subtle way, interrogates the very possibility

of strict regulation of the internet.

This tense debate illustrates how – in spite of

the open, participatory and meaningful democratic

deliberation that delivered the new draft provi-

sion – structural divergences among state actors, as

well as between them and civil society perspectives,

have not been entirely diluted. Moreover, the pos-

sible tabling of the new draft bill in the lower house

suspended the quarantine to which the Azeredo

Bill was submitted. In October 2010, right after the

end of the ﬁrst round, the text was quickly proc-

essed and approved by two house commissions (on

the Constitution and Justice and Public Security and

Combat against Organised Crime). This spurred cy-

ber activists to organise another “Mega No” event in

Brasília in November. In January 2011, as soon as the

new cabinet was appointed, the Creative Commons

label was deleted from the Ministry of Culture’s

website. Since then, cyber activist blogs and the na-

tional media have explored the reasons behind this

move, interpreting it as the effect of greater power

achieved by copyright advocates in the new federal

administration.

111

Cyber politics intersect with sexual rights

The eruption of child pornography and paedophilia

as a national public issue, along with ongoing de-

bates about the Azeredo Bill, has also intersected

with sexual rights controversies. In June 2008, as

those debates were intensifying, the federal gov-

ernment-sponsored First National Conference on

LGBT Policies took place in Brasília. Concurrently,

lobbying and visibility for the bill aimed at typifying

homophobia as an aggravating circumstance for vio-

lent crimes and penalising homophobic hate speech

(PL122/2006) was also stepped up. Religious and

other conservative sectors, including those involved

in the CPI on Pedophilia, were at the forefront of

resistance to that bill.

One discursive strategy mobilised against LGBT

rights was evoking the conﬂation of homosexuality

and paedophilia commonly promoted by religious

conservatives. But the opposition to PL 122/2006

elaborated an effective line of argumentation

crafted in legal terms, based on ethical grounds. Law-

makers afﬁliated to the religious caucus argued that,

if approved, the bill would infringe the principles of

freedom of expression and freedom of religion, since

it would prevent priests and pastors from preaching

based on their belief and the doctrine that holds

111 Minister Ana Buarque de Hollanda, when inquired about the

subject, did not provide a clear or direct explanation.

that homosexuality is a sin.

112

The 2005-2008 period

was also a time of regress for women’s sexual rights,

particularly with regard to abortion, both in the

Congress and in terms of public policy,

113

due to the

efforts of the same religious political forces.

Unlike cyber activists, who were closely follow-

ing the various initiatives described above, neither

the LGBT nor feminist movements have paid atten-

tion to or engaged with the processes related to

internet regulation. Although in the early days of

the internet, child sexual exploitation and abuse

had been discussed to some extent by gay organi-

sations and leaders, particularly by those involved

with alternative LBGT media, by 2008 the issue had

essentially disappeared from the movement’s public

agenda. A review of both preparatory and outcome

documents of the First National Conference on LGBT

Policies identiﬁes numerous demands against dis-

criminatory treatment in the media at large, as well

as recommendations for media and educational ac-

tions against homophobia targeted at youth and

children. But no mention is made regarding sexual

abuse and exploitation, either ofﬂine or online.

Feminists, for their part, have always taken a

strong anti-criminalisation stand when advocating

for abortion rights. This stand against criminalisa-

tion would be a potential point of entry for feminist

organisations to engage internet regulation de-

bates, at least in relation to the detrimental effects

of criminal justice approaches. But this connection

has not been made. Moreover, it is to be expected

that many feminist groups would not have major

problems with strong appeals for anti-web-based

child pornography criminal laws, as they also call

for strong media control in relation to abusive im-

ages of women.

This conﬁguration is not a Brazilian peculiar-

ity, but reﬂects the structural tension between

protection and freedom as the two main dimen-

sions articulating sexuality issues within a human

rights framework. This tension is particularly visible

in the deﬁnitions of sexual rights adopted by the ﬁ-

nal document of the Beijing Conference on Women

– which has become lingua franca in the feminist

movement – and later on in LGBT communities.

114

112 This line if argumentation has been reiterated since then,

gaining renewed visibility at the end of the 2010 presidential

campaign. It was subtly acknowledged by the “Letter to the

People of God”, issued by then candidate Dilma Rousseff.

113 Washington Castilhos The Pope’s Visit to Brazil: Context and

effects (Rio de Janeiro: Sexuality Policy Watch, 2008) www.

sxpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/wp_2008_ing-ﬁnal.

pdf; Sônia Corrêa ed. Interlinking Policies, Politics and Women’s

Reproductive Rights (DAWN, 2006) www.repem.org.uy/ﬁles/

globalinterlinking.pdf

114 Corrêa, Parker, Petchesky Sexuality, Health and Human Rights;

Alice M. Miller Sexuality and Human Rights: Discussion Paper

(Versoix: International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2009)

www.ichrp.org

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET45 Brazil

At the core of this tension lurks the difﬁculty to rec-

ognise – symbolically and politically – the autonomy

and freedom of subjects who have been tradition-

ally subordinated within a male-dominant system or

else are yet to be considered full persons. On the one

hand, women have been acknowledged as subjects

of rights, but, on the other hand, they remain caught

in the webs of gender domination. By the same to-

ken, children and adolescents, also accounted for as

subjects of rights, are treated as not yet fully devel-

oped persons, subjected to tutelage. In other words,

the structural tensions between agency and subor-

dination, or between consent and coercion – where

feminist activism has tended to favour narratives

that highlight the latter term of the pair – provide a

better description of how mainstream sexual politics

tend to operate.

Another issue worth bringing to this analysis is

the globalised nature of both child protection rights

and sexual rights discourses, norms and advocacy.

The assimilation of deﬁnitions and norms by Brazil-

ian legal frameworks and policy guidelines emerging

from these two streams has not been coherent or

balanced, as needed. Child protection measures are

enshrined in binding norms, such as the Additional

Protocol to the CRC, which are immediately trans-

lated into national laws, usually as criminal justice

statutes. But deﬁnitions in the realm of sexual

rights are mostly soft international law (conference

deﬁnitions and recommendations of surveillance

committees). Moreover, they remain subject to much

controversy at both the global and national levels.

Last but not least, under the current climate of “in-

security”, national states ﬁnd it easier to pass and

ratify norms to curtail and punish than those that

emphasise freedom and autonomy. When exam-

ined from the point of view of civil society actors,

the international child protection agenda has been

translated into legal and emotional idioms more

rapidly and consistently than revised sexual frames,

as exempliﬁed by the Optional Protocol to the CRC,

which is more widely recognised as legal than other

human rights legal instruments.

In terms of democratic deliberation, the absence of

dialogue between child protection advocates working

within a consistent human rights framework, feminists,

The internet mediates intense informal exchanges

addressing sexuality matters among persons and

groups. On the other hand, the degree of anonym-

ity on the web, while fostering sexual freedom and

self-expression, has propitiated activities which at

times may constitute violations of others’ personal

privacy, or facilitate the perpetration of crimes,

including the victimisation of women, youth and

sexual minorities. This creates waves of anxiety and

tends to crystallise a perception in society at large

that the web is fraught with dangers and risks, es-

pecially to children.

In this landscape, different discourses on sexual-

ity connect and conﬂict in many ways, both online

and ofﬂine. Fears of sexual crimes over the internet

circulate in both realms, and across their bounda-

ries, while communities based on sexual identities,

experiences and exchanges meet moral anxieties.

Such fears and anxieties are diffuse and scattered

in a multiplicity of public spheres, including those

where formalised claims for sexual rights are formu-

lated. The relationship between sexual rights claims

and the issue of internet surveillance and vigilant-

ism is yet to be addressed by sexual rights activism.

A short survey on internet use was applied to 62

respondents on the occasion of two activist meetings

in early 2010: the ILGA Latin American Conference,

held in Curitiba in January 2010; and a small meeting

of abortion rights activists convened by the Patri-

cia Galvão Institute in São Paulo, in April 2010. The

survey conﬁrms that feminist and LGBT groups view

the internet mainly as a communication tool and pre-

dominantly engage with it on the level of content,

without delving into the technical and political com-

plexities that are at play in deeper layers.

All respondents had access to internet, and the

majority accessed the internet “all the time” (53%),

mostly from home (47%) or the workplace (39%).

Most (77.4%) were members of some internet social

network, while 44% were Orkut members. While

most respondents (62%) did think that the internet

is already regulated in Brazil, 25% did not know

how it was regulated or by whom. Among those

who identiﬁed a major regulatory agency or actor,

the majority said it was regulated by the provid-

ers (the market), which is not very far from reality,

given the absence of a legal regulation framework.

Almost one third said that the internet was regulat-

ed by the Public Prosecutors’ Ofﬁce (12.3%) or the

police (8.6%), showing awareness of various opera-

tions performed by these agencies over the past few

years. Roughly 30% consider the internet a space

of absolute freedom, and 50% showed concerns

regarding the effects of regulation on privacy and

freedom of expression. A large majority (more than

60%) think that the internet should be regulated.

Half of the respondents regarded total internet

freedom and principles of privacy and non-discrimi-

nation more important, while the other half wanted

regulation to control crime and abuse.

Sexualities and the web: Transformation and anxieties

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET46 Brazil

LGBT rights advocates and cyber activists has allowed

the discourse on protection, abuse and sexuality to be

captured and controlled by religious and other con-

servative voices. Progressive constituencies have let

various opportunities pass to share their visions on key

dimensions of internet policy controversies. Feminists

and LGBT activists have not engaged with the lively

and enriching discussion on the distinction between

paedophilia, a psychiatric term, child pornography, a

typiﬁed criminal conduct, and sexual abuse and exploi-

tation of children and adolescents, ingrained in human

rights discourse. By not engaging in these debates, each

constituency tends to use these terms in an undifferen-

tiated manner. Child protection advocates and cyber

activists would beneﬁt from exposure to up-to-date ar-

guments on sexuality and human rights discourse.

Above all, Brazilian democracy would beneﬁt enor-

mously from a more systematic and balanced dialogue

between these constituencies and society at large on

the various perspectives and tensions cross-cutting in-

ternet regulation debates, such as internal tensions

within human rights discourse; the legal and social

shortcomings of criminalisation; issues of freedom of

expression and the right to privacy in the domain of

sexuality; and the sensitive question of consent and,

particularly, the age of consent. The potential for these

aspects to enter public discourse in relation to child

pornography and internet debates has so far been

obliterated, under the effects of a semantic overﬂow

and political barrier constructed around paedophilia,

which makes it difﬁcult for the terms of the debate

to be shifted back to a human rights framework, and

has enhanced a negative articulation between sexual

abuse, exploitation of minors, and sexual rights.

In September 2010, a researcher from the SPW

EROTICS team coordinated a workshop on sexual

rights with HIV-positive women in Rio de Janeiro. No-

tably, in the discussions, one participant expressed that

great caution was required in relation to sexual rights,

because they might open the doors for paedophiles to

take over. This is one anecdotal illustration of how the

spiralling politics of the paedophilia and child pornog-

raphy scare is intersecting with sexual politics at many

levels. It is permeating the social fabric, thereby creat-

ing an effect of capillary resistance to discourses and

practices that seek freedom and promote self-reﬂect-

ing agency and the exercise of sexual rights.

The live world of sexuality on Orkut

As mentioned in the introduction to this report, on-

line practices by internet users were observed using

an ethnographic approach, which meant accessing vir-

tual spaces for direct observation of virtual sociability.

As a contribution to the consolidation of a new re-

search ﬁeld, developing at the crossroads of internet,

sexual rights and gender studies, this section explores

the results of observation on how and in what ca-

pacities sexual discourses are elaborated, sexuality is

performed, and sexual communities are built on the

internet as sites for expression and contestation.

Two online social domains were examined.

The ﬁrst involved online spaces where anti-lesbian

prejudice was expressed, including forms of verbal

harassment and abuse. Special attention was placed

on how anti-lesbian expressions were contested and

struggled against. The second domain was a virtual

community of individuals engaged in an effort to

legitimise romantic relationships between adults

and adolescents, while contesting the term “paedo-

philia” to characterise their interest.

While, as noted in previous sections, sexual rights

activism was absent from the policy debates that sur-

rounded the Azeredo Bill and Civil Rights Framework,

the everyday investments

115

of individuals in the two

online spaces observed make them interesting sites

to examine and foreground a different kind of mo-

bilisation – political nonetheless – and engagement

with the exercise of internet rights and freedoms.

Both cases serve as counterpoint to the observa-

tion that Brazilian feminist and LGBT activists and

organisations have invested neither in the internet

regulation debate, nor in the controversies around

child pornography that contaminated that debate.

In contrast with the apparently low level of engage-

ment by sexual rights activists with these debates, the

description of online spaces where sexuality is at the

same time performed and addressed as a controver-

sial issue is aimed at exploring investments in sexual

expression, online safety, and modalities of struggle

against sexual discrimination and violence based on

sexual prejudice, while couched in terms different

from conventional forms of ofﬂine activism.

Mapping sexuality online

In a preliminary mapping of online practices as a stage

for sexual self-expression, performance and commu-

nication, virtual networks and online activity were

classiﬁed into three broad types. The ﬁrst consists of

online spaces and networking activities where sexual

identities are performed (ritually executed, therefore

iteratively afﬁrmed), empowered or contested.

116

includes web portals, blogs, social networking sites

and dating websites. In Brazil, some platforms, in

particular Orkut, have become a privileged means

115 By investment we mean a strategic deployment of social

resources of material or symbolic value.

116 For a discussion on the notion of performance and ritual, see

the works of Victor Turner, especially From Ritual to Theatre:

The Human Seriousness of Play (1982) and The Anthropology

of Performance (1986), as well as the seminal work of Erving

Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). On

the “performative” efﬁcacy of speech, see John L. Austin, How

to Do Things with Words (1962). On the “performativity” of

gender, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990).

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET47 Brazil

of communication for the LGBT public, particularly

among youths, who make novel, meaningful appropri-

ations of those spaces. The internet has allowed people

whose sexual orientation, experiences or identities are

marginalised to meet online and interact, creating new

forms of sociability and organisation, or re-creating old

ones.

The second set of networks consists of online sex-

ual “markets”, meaning sites of exchange which may

be characterised as sexual. Among these, a distinction

is made between commercial online marketplaces,

where interactions are primarily understood as sexual

“services” and involve the exchange of money; and

non-commercial circuits where exchanges are based

on sexual interest and are not monetised. The bound-

aries between these two types of circuits are ﬂuid.

Money, goods and services, on the one hand, and con-

sensual sex or romantic involvement, on the other, are

not mutually exclusive. However, moral conventions

do impact and organise these online interactions.

Non-commercial markets include online dat-

ing services and social networking platforms. Both

have expanded as a means for seeking and initiating

sexual and romantic liaisons. Conversely, commer-

cial markets include male, female and transgender

escort services in a myriad of formats available on-

line. In this milieu, the client is a subject category as

relevant as the performer of sex services. Moreover,

commercial sex trade is not restricted to spaces pri-

marily designed for that purpose, but also occurs on

social networking and dating platforms.

The third category of online activity where sexu-

ality is at play is the ﬂow and exchange of sexual

knowledge, involving issues of sexual expression,

and information on sexual rights and sexual health.

Online information exchanges are not limited to

those produced by political actors, or to the pedago-

gies traditionally associated with sex education, but

take place under various formats, responding to a

diversity of interests and logics. In this classiﬁcation,

pornography, while often involving commercial in-

terest, is also a source of sexual knowledge.

Contesting gender and sexual hierarchies

in Orkut

As a major online phenomenon in Brazil, Orkut was

the primary ethnographic focus of this case study.

The platform was launched in 2004 and has since

become the most widely known online social net-

work in Brazil, with the greatest number of users,

although more recently Facebook and Twitter have

also become popular.

117

In September 2010 the basic

117 According to its Wikipedia page, as of April 2010, 48.0% of

Orkut’s users were from Brazil, followed by India with 39.2%

and the United States with 2.2%, out of more than 100 million

active users worldwide. Data collected in October 2010.

screen layout changed to incorporate many features

similar to Facebook settings and appearance.

To have access to Orkut, one needs to become

a member of the social network. This is formally

restricted to persons eighteen and older. All that is

required to enter Orkut is a login identity, which can

be created free of charge and gives access to most

contents inside the platform. This means that all

Orkut contents that are not deliberately “blocked”

by users are understood to be public.

118

This assump-

tion, however, requires some qualiﬁcation. Firstly,

Orkut deﬁnitions of content privacy, as stated in

the User Agreement, require members to comply

with constantly changing regulations. Secondly, as

relevant as normative deﬁnitions of “private” or

“public” are users’ understandings of how personal

data circulate. Users are not always aware of poten-

tial uses of the information they post.

119

Orkut communities

The Orkut platform offers its users the possibility of

creating and joining any number of “communities”.

Orkut communities are the primary locus of online

interaction within the platform, where users can de-

velop a sense of belonging, which ultimately leads

to the formation of an online community.

120

Commu-

nities have their own area of virtual interaction: a

“community proﬁle”, with a description of the aim,

interest, preference, identity or theme shared in

common by members; an illustrative image; a list of

members; and a “forum” section, where discussion

threads called “topics” can be created. Each topic

encompasses one individual discussion thread within

an Orkut community forum. Each individual topic is

made of “posts”. “Posting” means either introducing

a new topic, or “replying” to an existing one. In or-

der to post or reply to a topic in a community forum,

an Orkut user must become a community member.

The process of becoming a community member can

be as simple as clicking on a link called “join” on the

community proﬁle. That is the case for non-moderat-

ed communities.

118 In Orkut jargon, “blocked” contents are set as private, only

available to other authorised users, or Orkut “friends”.

119 Since most internet users can hardly make an informed

evaluation of the ways in which the data they publish online

will be used, from an ethical perspective, research committed

to respect users’ privacy must not take advantage of users

misrepresentations of their online security and privacy. In

collecting data for the case study, Orkut users’ privacy has

always been respected as a basic rule. The data presented

below were collected in Orkut, but never from spaces set as

private by users. Names and contents shown were in all cases

“unblocked”, openly accessible to all Orkut users.

120 In this report, “community/ies” refers, in most cases, to “Orkut

community/ies”, a social category, as used by subjects in the

ﬁeld. On the other hand, “online community” is an analytical

category, denoting speciﬁc forms of social interaction that take

place on virtual spaces fostering a sense of belonging among

the people involved.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET48 Brazil

Otherwise, in the case of moderated communi-

ties, approval is needed. A community’s “moderator”

is a person or group of people that deﬁne and reg-

ulate who may participate, and what contents are

allowed to be posted in the community forum. Usu-

ally the moderator function is performed by the

person who created the community – its “owner” –

or a member who volunteered for and was given the

position by the creator. Moderators have the power

to deny entry to prospective members seeking ap-

proval, thus barring them from contributing to topics

on the community forum. Moderators may also expel

community members. Moderation powers also allow

the person in charge to delete individual posts on

a particular topic, or a whole topic, from the com-

munity forum. Thus, an active community moderator

can have a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the kind of inter-

actions that take place in the forum, as well as with

regard to contents displayed. For instance, offensive

or otherwise explicit language can be forbidden, the

same applying to arguments or discussions that de-

part from the community themes.

Some communities are simply a slogan to be

“worn” on one’s individual proﬁle (e.g. “I like

dogs”), while many operate as actual debate forums,

where members discuss topics, usually related to the

community theme. Slogan-type communities prevail

in Orkut and active forums of discussion, which sur-

vive over a long period of time, are not a common

occurrence. Both types of Orkut communities were

observed for this study.

Communities can have as many as over a thou-

sand members, but in most cases no more than a

dozen are active forum participants. Hence, the best

way to assert if a community has become an active

online forum is to verify the intensity of its interac-

tions. The number of topics inside a forum and/or

the number of posts triggered by a speciﬁc topic

provide key signs of the intensity of engagement of

community members. Forum topics were also consid-

ered as interactive units in their own right. In other

words, “topics” are another level of Orkut interac-

tion within an Orkut community and therefore part

of the larger Orkut network.

121

Two particular foci of Orkut community activ-

ity were selected for observation. One comprised

121 Attending to the reach and time limitations of this

research exercise, a strategic decision was made to restrict

the transcription of postings to a minimum. Taking into

account that the target audience of this report is mainly

non-Portuguese-speaking, the report demanded an effort

in translation from Portuguese, especially considering the

colloquial style and frequent presence of double meaning and

innuendo found in many verbal exchanges. The unfortunate

downside is that the description does not show many

instances of direct speech by individuals, although people’s

voices are ever present in the analysis. We still feel that social

representations regarding the topics addressed have been

successfully laid out.

interactions across several communities prompted

by lesbophobic remarks, including the threads of

responses to them. The other focus was a commu-

nity that openly addresses the controversial issue of

inter-age sexual relationships, including critiques of

the CPI on Paedophilia. By addressing Orkut dynam-

ics and current regulation as related to the semantic

ﬁelds around the terms “paedophilia” and “lesbian”,

the description below offers a window into issues of

censorship, privacy, sexual expression, violence, and

online political mobilisation, from the perspective of

lay users’ expressivity.

Is the internet for lesbians?

After examining a broad range of sexuality-related

online spaces, networks, debates and contents, a

Ning-based member-only community for lesbian

and bisexual women, called Leskut (a contraction

of lesbian and Orkut), was initially selected as a unit

of online sociability where issues under examina-

tion by this research component could be observed,

namely sexual expression, community building,

online safety, and forms of debate and struggle

against sexual discrimination and violence based

on sexual prejudice.

122

Although not Orkut-based,

Leskut makes explicit reference to Orkut, owing to

the popularity of the latter as a social networking

platform. Leskut’s online activity is not restricted

to the Ning platform, as Leskut members regularly

access and contact other members through other

internet channels.

123

Leskut emerged as an interest-

ing place of observation because it presents itself

as a safe online space for homosexual and bisexual

women, where men are not allowed to participate

and explicit sexual content is strictly forbidden.

These rules are enforced by a particularly active

moderation team. The moderators analyse mem-

bership requests in order to certify that they are

indeed submitted by women. Moderators also pa-

trol forums and chat rooms, looking for abusive

(i.e. explicit) sexual content, and banning members

who break community rules. Its stress on online

safety, as guaranteed by a community-driven and

administered patrolling device, made Leskut a

suitable case to examine how self-regulation rules

are established by online communities, and the ef-

fects they produce. However, Leskut’s moderation

style became a major obstacle to observation. Con-

tacts were made with moderators presenting the

research objectives and requesting access to the

community. After various attempts in that direction

122 Ning is an online platform speciﬁcally designed for users to

create their own social networks. www.ning.com

123 Contents available on those other networks, however, are

either restricted to members of the Ning community, or are

not very extensive, leading to insufﬁcient data regarding social

interaction online and self-regulation community initiatives.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET49 Brazil

no response was obtained. Without this approval,

a thorough analysis of Leskut activity could not be

performed.

124

Nevertheless, Leskut’s owners’ stress

on online safety and moderation may as well be

read as a reﬂection of their struggle to build a

“safe” online space, protecting themselves and

platform members from what they consider harm-

ful content and behaviour.

At this juncture, other online spaces were ex-

plored to observe the ways in which Brazilian

women engage with sexuality issues online. The re-

search team identiﬁed several Orkut communities

where anti-lesbian contents are deployed.

125

Either

“seriously”, as a purportedly objective statement,

or “teasingly”, as mocking remarks, these groups

uphold the argument that that lesbians’ sexual ori-

entation is the result of “not having met a real man.”

Further observation of these communities showed

that a substantive number of female Orkut members

respond to these offensive postings, arguing directly

with members of these communities to contest their

lesbophobic remarks.

126

This ﬁnding highlights a capillary lesbian or

pro-lesbian mobilisation taking place on Orkut.

While not necessarily conceived or experienced as

“activism”, as deﬁned by established conventions

of ofﬂine sexual rights politics, this is a meaning-

ful engagement in sexual afﬁrmation and with the

struggle against hate speech and violence based on

sexual prejudice. The description below, by focusing

on lesbophobia across different Orkut communities,

captures ways in which the internet is used as a me-

dium to air homophobic discourse, as well as how

LGBT or pro-LGBT women (and men) react to those

expressions. Such uses introduce evidence lead-

ing to an analysis of how representations around

female sexuality (and sexuality in general) are ne-

gotiated online.

Orkut lesbophobia

Forum activity was observed at ten Orkut com-

munities where members deployed lesbophobic

speech. They were located when one of these com-

munities was reported to an LGBT activist mailing

124 EROTICS researchers tried different ways to get permission to

study Leskut. Although one researcher had been a long-time

Leskut member (her primary use is for activist purposes, mainly

posting announcements), it would have been unethical to enter

Leskut and observe the community without the moderators’

approval. We used her contact to try to reach the moderators,

but could not elicit their response this or any other way.

125 See the following section for a description of how the

communities were accessed.

126 Given the fact that Orkut, as described above, provides a tool

to report harmful content, some of these women might also be

using that channel to ﬁle complaints about the abusive nature

of content posted on these communities. The research team did

not have access to reports of those complaints.

list one EROTICS Brazil team member belonged to.

The community name was “She’s a lesbian because

she never saw my cock”. Since the community was

located based on references obtained though an

activist network, an alternative methodological

procedure was followed in order to characterise

its background in Orkut terms, i.e. as related to

uses and perceptions of the word “lesbian” and

representations of female sexuality within Orkut.

An Orkut search using “lesbian” as keyword pro-

vided a panorama of representations of women’s

homosexuality across the platform. Consecutively a

sample of four Orkut communities from the search

results was selected and analysed. They addressed

expressions of women’s (homo)sexuality and lesbi-

an empowerment.

It should be noted that the remaining six les-

bophobic communities show no activity on their

forums, suggesting they are mainly slogan communi-

ties. Three of these communities are also closed to

non-members, probably to prevent their contents

from being tagged as harmful. The analysis of closed

communities only takes into account their proﬁles’

public features, e.g. description, images, number of

members.

However, the community originally referred to

by activists – “She’s a lesbian because she never saw

my cock” – had an active forum.

127

All forum activity

observed consisted of 22 discussion topics, averaging

ﬁfteen to 30 single posts per topic.

128

One single topic

elicited 200 comments, while another one triggered

60 posts. Close examination of the topics generating

the most debate – the ones generating the greatest

number of replies – allowed for an analysis of the dy-

namics at play when mocking remarks are construed

as lesbophobic by Orkut users who react to them as

offensive speech or expressions of intolerance. Par-

ticular attention was paid to the more systematic

engagement of users who responded to this sort of

virtual harassment regularly.

127 “Cock” in English might sound more offensive than the

Portuguese original, “pinto”. A young boy would refer to his

penis as “pinto” – the same word for cockerel. “Cock” was

chosen because it plays out the irony also present in the image

of an armed and “ready for battle” cockerel provided as an

illustration in the community proﬁle.

128 Data collection took place mostly between July 2010 and August

2010, and continued during write-up, until November 2010.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET50 Brazil

Community image:

Link: www.orkut.com.br/

Main#Community?cmm=4726593

Description:

This community exists to show all the women who

opted out to be lesbians that they did so because

they never had a cock like mine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So that no misunderstanding happens, we clarify:

The community does not endorse prejudice.

Some members and even some lesbians didn’t get

the joke!!! Your bad xD

Language: Portuguese (Brazil)

Category: Gay, Lesbian & Bi

Owner: Paulo

Type: public

Content privacy: open to non-members

Location: 35521, Brazil

Created: September 3, 2005

Members: 1,248

The chart below lists all “She’s a lesbian because

she never saw my cock” community forum topics

in reverse chronological order considering the last

reply to the topic, i.e. from the most recent to the

one with the oldest reply. Chart headings include

the ﬁrst poster/creator of the topic (“author”),

and the number of replies it received (“posts”).

The “topic” column gives a panoramic view of the

themes debated on the community (last access in

November 2010).

Community name: She’s a lesbian because she never saw my cock

* See footnote 127

Topic Author Posts last post

Bigoted idiot community! Antoniio 219 Sep 26

Corrective penetration for lesbians Ministro Claudio 8 Sep 22

PREJUDICE Lucky 2 Aug 20

Have you ever fucked a lesbian??? Paulo 65 Apr 27

This is not a homophobic community!! Ricardo 2 Mar 28

My cock is a CUM SPURTING machine!!! PULSEN 4 Mar 27

homophobes around!

ǑȄčġėɉ

0 Mar 11

homophobes Ricardo 1 Feb 28

beautiful message Israel_Almeida- 4 7/31/09

THE LOVE THAT STICKS IS LOVE OF DICKS!!! Felipe 15 5/24/09

Men anonymous 22 5/16/09

Fucking cool new community here...LOL CLEITON 1 5/11/09

It’s here??? Gi 35 4/29/09

I’m tired of being sexy Juliana 10 4/16/09

She’s a lesbian because she’s grossed out by

your dick

Nayla 4 3/12/09

Expression Rights and Sexuality Rights CLEITON 1 2/17/09

I fucked a lesbian julio 1 10/28/08

I’m gonna talk... Laura 30 10/14/08

BEING A LESBIAN neelu 1 10/12/08

Freedom of Expression Community Liberdade 1 8/6/08

MY PENIS

˥Ȉ Ȉ͆ȈȈˠȈʮ

7 7/12/08

Hello People Paulo 2 5/22/08

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET51 Brazil

Of the 22 topics analysed, six were created by

members who agreed with the community theme,

and can therefore be classiﬁed as homophobic

and/or misogynistic. Since they a,re mainly teasing

remarks, members’ replies express support by expres-

sions or symbols indicating laughter. In such topics

female homosexuality is made fun of and ridiculed,

especially through the argument that, in order to be-

come “normal” again, all a lesbian needs is to have

sex with a man, and that the poster is ready to give

it to her.

Homophobic/misogynistic topics: 1) Correc-

tive penetration for lesbians 2) PREJUDICE

3) Have you ever fucked a lesbian??? 4) My

cock is a CUM SPURTING machine!!! 5) THE

LOVE THAT STICKS IS LOVE OF DICKS!!!

6) I fucked a lesbian

On the other hand, seven topics were created by

people who ﬁnd the community offensive. They

were created by women or men who disapprove of

the community and its afﬁrmations. In order to be

able to post on the community forum these Orkut

members needed to join the community themselves.

The pattern of replies generated is as follows: if a

female is writing, community members just tease

back, implying that all these women need to shut

them up is receiving “their cocks inside them”. The

women in turn deploy a series of dismissals, claims

and accusations against the aggressors, such as

pointing at their stupidity, homophobia, hateful-

ness, criminal tendency, or the fact that they are

obsessed with their own penises, implying that they

are probably (closeted) homosexuals, since penises

seem to be “the only thing they can talk about.”

This is conﬁgured as an offensive remark. It could

be argued that using the accusation of homosexu-

ality as an insult is in itself a form of homophobia,

but this issue is not discussed on these topics. Some

replies are also made by men disapproving of this

attack on female homosexuality. The members de-

fending the community only reply to these men by

calling them gay, faggots and other derisive terms

for male homosexuality.

The seven posts criticising the community were

created by male or female lesbian sympathisers.

They are usually focused on the afﬁrmation that

sexual orientation is not an option. This is a direct

response to arguments deployed on the forum that

refer to homosexuality as a “sexual option”, a no-

tion quite widespread in Brazil in the early 1980s,

which was subsequently replaced with “sexual ori-

entation” by the gay movement. “Sexual option”

is today often used to imply that homosexuality is

an arbitrary lifestyle choice. LGBT movements in

Brazil actively contest that implication, promoting

an understanding of homosexuality as a natural,

unavoidable “orientation”, in order to dissociate

non-heterosexual identities and behaviour from

ideas of perversion and immorality, as well as from

biological determinism. However, both categories

are still used indistinctively in everyday speech. The

most usual occurrence on the community forum of

such arguments is that of a member correcting the

wrong usage of the term, arguing there is no choice

in sexuality.

Topics created by people who ﬁnd the

community offensive: 1) Bigoted idiot

community! 2) Beautiful message 3) Men

4) It’s here??? 5) She’s lesbian because she’s

grossed out by your dick 6) I’m gonna talk...

7) BEING LESBIAN

Four topics elaborate on the claim that the commu-

nity is not to be taken seriously. They were posted by

members of the community trying to avoid engag-

ing in arguments, exchanging insults, and the name

calling that usually takes place under the ﬁrst two

topic classiﬁcations. They nonetheless stand for the

community, by stating that there is nothing offensive

about it, that they are just teasing and should not

be taken seriously. Three other topics advertise other

communities with similar homophobic themes.

Topics saying that the community is not to be

taken seriously: 1) This is not a homophobic

community!! 2) I’m tired of being sexy 3) Ex-

pression Rights and Sexuality Rights 4) Hello

People

Topics advertising other communities with

similar homophobic themes: 1) Corrective

penetration for lesbians, homophobes (the

community this topic refers to has been

deleted by Orkut) 2) Fucking cool new

community here...LOL (“My feminine side

is lesbian” community) 3) Freedom of Ex-

pression Community (not a homophobic

community, but one discussing freedom of

expression)

There are almost as many topics which contest the

community’s convictions as there are homopho-

bic topics (seven and six topics, respectively). But if

one looks at the number of replies each topic has

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET52 Brazil

produced, the topics which receive the greatest

number of replies are those contesting the commu-

nity’s legitimacy, which gives an idea of the amount

of disapproving posts the community receives and

also demonstrates that this is the most common form

of interaction taking place within.

However, some of these topics have been sub-

jected to moderation, either by the community’s

moderators or by Orkut managers acting after some

report of improper content. Members can also de-

lete their own posts, so not all absent posts were

necessarily deleted by Orkut or a moderator. On the

forum pages where some posts have been deleted

and are no longer available this message from Orkut

appears on the bottom of that topic page: “Some

replies on this page have been deleted or are under

review.” Some of the deleted topics are from those

contesting the community, and they were probably

deleted by community moderators. In this instance,

the community moderation is against those who

contest the community. However, Orkut does count

deleted posts when showing how many replies a top-

ic received. For instance the topic “My cock is a CUM

SPURTING machine!!!” has four posts listed, but ac-

tually only two are still available.

Mockery?

Members of the communities observed tend to

portray themselves as harmless, claiming that their

attitude and speech “should not be taken serious-

ly.” They say that what they post are jokes, simple

teasing. They act surprised by the accusations of

homophobia levelled against their posts, saying that

they do not understand why their posts are consid-

ered offensive. This apparent misunderstanding or

gap in communication suggests that the very mean-

ing of mockery must be critically interrogated. What

do these jokes mean? Does a mocking tone make a

homophobic remark less homophobic? Paradoxically,

perhaps the most harmful aspect of mockery is pre-

cisely the pretence that the expression of prejudice

be justiﬁed as harmless.

At the time this report was written, the forum topic

with the most recent reply post contesting the com-

munity was called “Bigoted idiot community!” This

was also the topic with the greatest number of re-

plies (219), although many had been deleted. The

topic was started on 29 January 2008, the oldest

post being by “‘Antoniio”, the topic creator, calling

the community bigoted and idiotic, claiming that

they should not comment on a girl’s sex life, and

that the premise that showing a lesbian their cocks

would lead her to become straight is dumb. He also

says homophobia is a crime and that it is because

of brainless people like these that Brazil is so un-

derdeveloped as a country [sic]. The next reply on

the topic thread is from 3 March 2008. The post was

made by “Kyo”. However, this is not the original or-

der of conversation, as a message from Orkut at the

bottom of the page reports that a number of posts

have been deleted by Orkut. “Kyo’s” post mentions

other replies that agreed with “Antoniio”, showing

that some replies are not available anymore. From

“Kyo’s” remark it can be implied that some of the

deleted posts were from people criticising the com-

munity, so it is possible they were deleted by the

community creator or moderator. It is still never-

theless possible to follow up on the conversation

thread.

Defending the community, “Kyo” claims that

some people do not understand a teasing joke,

and that most community members have only

joined because of the funny picture of a cockerel

illustrating the community proﬁle. He then adds,

“THE FAGGOTS THAT ARE ARGUING ABOUT THESE

THINGS ARE RETARDED.” He is followed by “Frank

Lampard” on 19 March. His comment simply reads

“blah blah blah blah”, meaning that this whole con-

versation is worthless to him.

The next post, from 20 March, is the ﬁrst one

still available made by a woman, “Bárbara”. She

says that a man showing his penis to a lesbian would

be meaningless, and that the most handsome man

means nothing to a lesbian girl compared to her

girlfriend. She says that the afﬁrmation that a man’s

penis would make a lesbian straight may even be said

jokingly, but a girl can be rightfully angry about that.

She is followed by “Paula”, on 21 March, whose post

just says “Stupid Jerks”, with the emoticon “¬¬’”,

which means she is giving them a serious look.

The next post is from “ ˋ ˕ ˢˢ͑͑”. He says:

“Everybody can grab my dickie, a dickie on your

butts. DON’T LIKE THE FUCKING COMMUNITY?

THINK IT’S BIGOTED? GRAB MY BALLS AND LEAVE

THE COMMUNITY!!! No one wants to know if it’s

bigoted, if you like it, or if you disagree with the

community, I want you all to fuck yourselves and

leave the fucking community… Why did you be-

come a member? Besides being gay, you’re a moron,

a jerk and a retard!” He is followed by other mem-

bers’ posts that either agree with the idea that such

teasing should not be taken seriously and is not

subject to critique, or show disapproval. Complaints

about the crass tone the debate has derailed to is

also a characteristic of many posts.

This short sample of posts gives an idea of the

kind of discussions, name calling and verbal quar-

relling that take place on the community and the

prevailing mocking, virulent tone of the homopho-

bic attacks.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET53 Brazil

The sarcastic tone in the samples of speech col-

lected from the communities observed makes them

more pungent, but also makes them rather diffuse

and therefore more difﬁcult to be contested. Such

expressions can be examined through the lens of

“joking relationships” studied by the anthropologist

Radcliffe-Brown,

129

who, in his analysis of African

traditional political systems, argued that the use of

ritualised jokes and mocking patterns of speech and

demeanour has the main function of softening po-

tentially antagonistic relationships. In these joking

games Radcliffe-Brown identiﬁed two kinds of re-

lationships: asymmetrical, where only one party can

offend the other through banter, without expecting

retaliation; and symmetrical, where both parties can

mock or tease each other without causing offence.

The speech patterns observed in Orkut lesbophobic

communities ﬁt the category of asymmetrical joking re-

lationships, as those who deploy the jokes do so from a

position of hierarchical superiority towards their female

audience, thus restricting the possibilities of their ban-

ter being socially recognised as offensive. The hierarchy

at play in these web-based communicative interactions

is a direct effect of gender roles, i.e. men have the au-

thority of determining “what those women’s problem

is.” The authority of their statements about lesbians and

lesbianism is informed by and reinforces the dominant

heteronormative bias that “women are made women

by the sexual ability of men.” In the same manner, both

in the community description and forum topics, mem-

bers claim that their mockery should not be regarded as

offensive. This protective language is aimed at render-

ing utterers of demeaning speech unaccountable for

it, while at the same time allowing them to describe

women as unreasonable or irrational when the latter

react to the former’s offensive speech and contest the

views that support it. The gender bias, needless to say,

is further intensiﬁed by this characterisation of women

as crazy or hysterical.

Virtual interactions involving discriminatory mock-

ing remarks closely resemble ofﬂine experiences. In

Brazil, as elsewhere, it is a socially accepted practice

for a man to take offence and react to verbal abuse,

as a legitimate defence of his honour. The same type

of reaction in the case of a woman is considered a

mere acting out or else an expression of lack of rea-

son and excessive emotionality. In plain language, it

is regarded as a woman playing “bitch”. Gender hi-

erarchies, as well as the free use of public space by

men, including the right to legitimately speak in the

name of others, make men less accountable for such

behaviour. While they can speak their minds, women’s

complaints are generally deemed inappropriate or ex-

cessive. This is clearly illustrated by the argument used

129 Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown “On Joking Relationships” Africa:

Journal of the International African Institute 13, 3 (1940): 195-210

by online lesbophobic bullies that “we’re only kidding

and have the right to do it.” As an example, the de-

scription on the community proﬁle reads:

THIS COMMUNITY EXISTS TO SHOW ALL THE

WOMEN WHO OPTED OUT TO BE LESBIANS

THAT THEY DID SO BECAUSE THEY NEVER

HAD A COCK LIKE MINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So that no misunderstanding happens, we

clarify:

The community does not endorse prejudice.

Some members and even some lesbians

didn’t get the joke!!! Your bad xD

In their responses to online anti-lesbian bullying, some

women post comments claiming that the authors

of such homophobic speech acts are in fact “closet

cases”. By joining the jocular tone of the lesbophobic

remarks, they highlight how the bullies’ discourse re-

ﬂects their own “obsession with penises”. The women

question the masculinity of their opponents resorting

to the same type of rhetoric used by the latter: ambi-

guity and mockery. In doing so, these women make

the potentially serious – threatening to homophobes,

in any case – claim, based on popularised psychologi-

cal theories, that excessive display of masculinity and

obsession with the penis are clear signs of a repressed

homosexual inclination. At the same time, by claim-

ing the right to contest men’s authority to determine

the truth about women’s sexuality, they contest the

hierarchy that presumably authorised men to air

their views in the ﬁrst place, thus establishing a sym-

metrical position from which women’s claims can be

made and debate can be engaged. While this type

of engagement may be read as operating within the

heteronormative matrix, the reversal of mockery, as a

form of parody, may as well shake the foundations of

a supposedly stable straight identity.

Don’t feed the trolls

The lesbophobic claims and name calling displayed

in Orkut communities can eventually be regarded as

genuinely naïve, caused by ignorance, or the effect

of dogmatic religious doctrines or other conservative

world views. However, the mocking tone that pre-

vails in these communities should also be examined

as an illustration of “trolling”.

130

Herring et al.

131

130 Trolling is a ﬁshing technique, where a baited line is dragged

behind a boat. Trolls are also brute creatures from Norse

mythology, nightmarish monsters that attack people. On the

internet, a troll is an attention seeker who deliberately disrupts a

community by causing controversy using provocative messages.

131 Susan Herring et al. “Searching for Safety Online: Managing

‘Trolling’ in a Feminist Forum” The Information Society 18, 5

(2002): 371-384 www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/WP/herring.pdf

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET54 Brazil

analysed some aspects of online trolling through the

observation of how members of an online communi-

ty they researched, a feminist web-based discussion

forum, responded to an individual’s systematic at-

tempt to disrupt their space and rules of discussion.

Trolls is the term used to describe those that make

use of trolling, which means luring others into point-

less and time-consuming discussions.

Can the behaviour observed in Orkut communi-

ties described above be described as trolling? Orkut

trolls are not always active provocateurs and do not

focus on a single, speciﬁc online space (a speciﬁc com-

munity). While they may have homosexual women as

clear targets, they are a diffuse, almost random pres-

ence in Orkut, inciting women who feel offended to

engage in pointless debates. The case examined is

different in that the lesbophobic dynamics identiﬁed

is mostly passive behaviour, in the sense that the bul-

lies simply post their comments; they do not chase

their victims, but rather eventually engage them. On

the other hand, although veiled behind jokes, their

provocations represent actual aggressions.

For Herring et al., the boundaries between ﬂam-

ing, ostensive insults directed towards all members

of a virtual community, and trolling – veiled attacks

through the use of an argumentative but futile rhet-

oric, which render naïve readers more vulnerable

– are blurred. The authors observe, however, that the

most vulnerable internet users are later-comers, who

are more likely to be young, females, or members of

minorities.

132

According to them, the study of online

trolling can help improve the access and quality of

use by social groups that are just becoming internet

users.

Trolls tend to be attention seekers and career

provocateurs. The best way to deal with them is to

leave them alone, along the lines of the internet ad-

age “Don’t feed the trolls”. However, Herring et al.

also note that to ignore trolling requires a great deal

of self-control, because trolls use rhetoric and argu-

ments that directly attack and hurt people’s sense of

self. And as mentioned before, online spaces whose

members are more concerned about building a feel-

ing of safety are usually those whose members are

part of some marginalised group. These spaces are

especially vulnerable to troll attacks, because they

must balance the ideal of openness and freedom of

speech (which would, in the end, allow anyone to

express themselves, even trolls) and ways to prevent

132 The concern about minorities also implies, particularly in the

North American context addressed by Herring et al., attention

to class. This connection is relevant in the Brazilian context as

well, since economic inequalities are more likely to determine

access to the internet than being a member of a social minority

would. Also in Brazil, because of market trends and social

inclusion policies, youths and some LGBT people, regardless of

class, might be more familiar with internet technology than the

average within their social strata.

ghettoisation of the community. If rules are adopted

to block out trolls, the community risks becoming

isolated from communication and debates that can

be potentially empowering.

The most effective proactive measure against

trolls, according to Herring et al., is to educate mi-

nority online community members about trolling,

informing them about trolling patterns, and help-

ing them to recognise such attacks. The authors

also suggest developing stricter and clearer rules of

participation and debate, in order to rightfully ex-

pel trolls from their communities; as well as more

centralised content control through (more) active

moderation. However, the latter two measures are

at odds with three praised internet ideals: no con-

tent control, complete freedom of expression, and

resistance to authority. Trolling is an instigating phe-

nomenon, as analyser of the boundaries of freedom

of speech on the web.

Herring et al.’s study also shows at least one

positive “side effect” of troll attacks on certain com-

munities: the strengthening of the group’s identity.

The controversial and confrontational nature of troll

activity may prompt community members to engage

in debates, even if only because they are arguing

with the troll. Group camaraderie can also be en-

hanced as a response to trolling, especially after the

troll is expelled from the community. However, this is

not the only possible outcome of trolling attacks. In

certain cases, community members can either choose

to leave the online community or stop engaging in

community debates. The community as a whole may

vanish because of trolls, especially if it was originally

a “safe” space for its members and trolls made them

feel that the space was not safe anymore.

Assessing constructions of online safety is a com-

plex task. Ideas concerning what a safe environment

is are based on perceptions and understanding of vir-

tual mechanisms as subjective processes. One might

feel safe in an online space if one can express oneself

freely, without being attacked for who one is. Feel-

ings of online safety are akin to a person’s feeling

of being welcome in a place just the way they are.

The assessment of Orkut members’ feeling of safety

regarding the platform as a place where marginal-

ised ideas, opinions and identities can be expressed

is a complex task, even when such expressions are

indeed available in Orkut. In some communities, for

instance, non-heterosexual women can come to-

gether and share their opinions and beliefs without

being harassed, while in others they are immediate-

ly threatened. Taken as a whole, Orkut is as safe a

space as each single member feels it is. By and large,

it is perceptions of safety that will, at the end of the

day, determine a person’s decision of making infor-

mation available or engaging in certain interactions

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET55 Brazil

in Orkut. This is especially true if the information or

interaction is of a sexual nature.

Another key question to be asked is if this sub-

jective perception of safety has or not any inﬂuence

on the decision of women to respond to lesbophobic

remarks in or by an Orkut community. The interac-

tions observed suggest that quite probably women

engage and interact with lesbophobic communities

because they regard their existence as making Orkut

less safe for them. Fighting back against the bullies

is a way of chasing homophobia away. The engage-

ment of lesbians and their sympathisers against

Orkut bullies and potential trolls is a sign of LGBT

identity afﬁrmation and strengthening of the self-

esteem of individuals involved in these battles. It is

a meaningful political engagement, as a “semantic

struggle” (a dispute over linguistic and discursive

means of control over political meanings) which

could as well feed into debates and conﬂicts playing

out in the public sphere regarding claims for rights

by sexual minorities.

While Brazilian LGBT organisations bet on the

pedagogic effect of a punitive approach to homopho-

bic violence, educational campaigns, and assistance

to victims, insidious forms of everyday patronising

and often non-judiciable forms of harassment and

bullying proliferate, particularly online, especially

on social networking platforms. If not resisted, they

can instil fear, self-loathing and censorship. Informal,

witty, spontaneous forms of resistance to the banal-

ising of homophobic speech are means of generating

solidarity and community. It is also a positive way of

responding to injurious acts, by refuting their logic,

instead of imposing a rule of silence on them (which

paradoxically mirrors the homosexuality taboo).

Pedophilia in Orkut?

Orkut was also explored in search of discourses,

debates, and other contents related to the term

“paedophilia”, deﬁned in the study as one key se-

mantic ﬁeld to be explored. Rather than focusing

on criminal or security aspects of activities linked

to child abuse or child pornography, the case study

delved into effects and developments deriving from

the notion of “harmful content” and initiatives to

control it. The guiding parameter in this exploration

was the general premise of freedom of expression.

The Orkut community in this case is the “Against

Inter-Age Prejudice” community, celebrating love

between adults and “adolescents”.

133

The analysis of its dynamics provides insights

into both the effects of sexuality regulation, and in-

citement to sexual discourse, as it further illustrates

connections made earlier in this report about the

Foucaultian notion of sexuality as the paramount

disciplinary device of modern individualism, and

the internet as a milieu where the incitement of

discourses on sex and the self reaches fruition. The

modern individual is compelled to elaborate and ex-

press the “inner truth” of their sexuality, as deﬁned

by the discourses of religion, criminology, medicine,

psychology and psychiatry, which have the author-

ity to determine what each individual’s sexuality is

worth. An effect of such “incitement to discourses”

about sex and the self is the emergence of sexual

identities and collectives (such as Orkut users of the

“Against Inter-Age Prejudice” community), who

have developed counter-discourses stating rightful

claims for recognition and protection from discrimi-

nation, criminalisation and psychiatrisation. The

internet and contemporary forms of online sociabil-

ity are but the most recent manifestations of what

Foucault described as the process of individualisation

by the application of technologies of biopower.

133 The Portuguese word “adolescente” has been translated as

“adolescent”, rather than “teenager” or “teen”, to highlight

the original resonances of the category as used by the subjects

whose discourses are analysed.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET56 Brazil

The community was created on 16 July 2009, one year

after the TAC between Google and the São Paulo

State Attorney’s Ofﬁce regarding the handling of

harmful content had been signed. A year later, the

community had 150 members, a large number, consid-

ering its theme and purpose. Its forum activity is quite

intense; therefore it cannot be portrayed as a label

community. It is a moderated community, but open

to non-members, which means its forum topics can

be viewed by anyone with Orkut access. The “Against

Inter-Age Prejudice” community presents itself – both

on the community proﬁle and on the forum topic’s

discussions – as advocating for adult-adolescent rela-

tionships, while a sharp distinction is explicitly made

between adult-adolescent relationships and child sex-

ual exploitation and/or child sexual abuse.

The community proﬁle is illustrated by a photo of

a famous Brazilian couple, musicians Marcelo Camelo,

born 1978, and Mallu Magalhães, born 1992. When

they became a couple in mid-2008, she was sixteen

and he was 30, which was met with public scorn and

received some media coverage. The location chosen

for designating the geographical area where the

community is based is “Babylon, Brazil”. The country

is selected as default by Orkut, but the name of the

city is provided by the community creator. In this case,

as the community creator is from São Paulo state,

where no city by that name is found, he might have

chosen “Babylon” as a reference to the ancient city in

Mesopotamia, a place associated with sin and deprav-

ity in the Christian Bible – a curious choice for such

a community, probably a provocation to religious

conservatives who are referred to as some of the com-

munity’s main interlocutors and antagonists.

Semantic struggles

In the psychiatric literature, the terms ephebophilia

and hebephilia have been suggested as possible labels

and/or diagnoses for subjects who manifest this inclina-

tion.

134

Neither the ICD-10,

135

nor the DSM-IV-TR,

136

the

134 Ray Blanchard et al. “Pedophilia, Hebephilia, and the DSM-V”

Health San Francisco 38 (2009): 335-350

135 International Statistical Classiﬁcation of Diseases and Related

Health Problems - 10th Revision (ICD-10), published by the

World Health Organization (WHO).

136 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth

Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), the current edition of the

inﬂuential textbook published by the American Psychiatric

Association (APA).

Community Image:

Link: http://www.orkut.com.br/

Main#Community?cmm=92120418

Description:

There is a kind of bias that is growing in Brazil,

yet few people realise it: the prejudice against

inter-agers (those that are in a relationship with

someone much older or much younger).

In Brazil adolescents and adults have always had

sexual and affectionate relationships by their

own free will, however because of the igno-

rance of certain politicians and the opportunism

of non-specialised media, today consenting

relationships between adolescents and adults

are regarded as suspicious, being confused with

paedophilia and becoming the object of reports

in a rude and criminal manner.

This community is open to everyone who wishes

to put an end to this bias.

Adolescents and adults have the right to be in a

relationship.

Only the parents (legal guardians) may approve

or not of an adult-adolescent relationship and

regard it as adequate or not to the minor’s well-

being (except in cases of prostitution or family

abuse).

Age prejudice is forbidden according to the

Brazilian Constitution of 1988 (Article 3, IV).

Language: Portuguese (Brazil)

Category: Romance & Relationships

Owner: Andrei Blues Boy

Moderators: Verinha Ro-Rath, Music,

Caliman, Carlos

Type: moderated

Content privacy: open to non-members

Location: Babilônia, Brazil

Created: July 16, 2009

Members: 150

Community Name: Against Inter-Age Prejudice

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET57 Brazil

most inﬂuential and widely used manuals in psychiatry

to deﬁne sexual deviation, lists speciﬁc ephebophilia

diagnostic criteria.

137

In contrast, in legal terms, sex with

adolescents is generally classiﬁed as a crime, although

the age of consent varies from country to country. As

mentioned in earlier sections of this report, current

public debates around paedophilia, child abuse, child

pornography and related issues seem to lead towards

raising the sexual age of consent from fourteen to

eighteen, as is the case in the US and most European

countries.

The “Against Inter-Age Prejudice” community

openly discloses members’ convictions about inter-

age love and sexual attraction and can be said to

advocate for the practice of such liaisons. This is

somehow surprising, given the level of social and

political consensus against paedophilia or, more

precisely, child pornography. In doing so the group’s

pledge may be linked to the “boylovers movement”,

although the community explicitly rejects any asso-

ciation with either “boylovers” or “paedophiles”.

While the proposals of both the boylovers move-

ment and the “Against Inter-Age Prejudice” Orkut

community fall within a strict-sense understanding

of paedophilia, some distinctions are to be made.

Self-declared “boylovers” make a distinction be-

tween what they call “ethical” access to children, on

the one hand, and the idea of abuse, on the other,

which is associated with the image of the sexual

predator. They make an effort to distance themselves

from “paedophiles” by condemning access to chil-

dren “without their consent”. They preach an ethics

of appropriateness of inter-age relations, imagining

friendly, non-violent contact with minors. Boylovers

can be considered a paedophile activist movement.

138

Their discourse is found on forums, websites and

web pages where people from a variety of countries

advocate for the right to romantic and erotic liaisons

between adults and children, and struggle against

the social stigma associated to them.

Participants in boylovers’ virtual spaces also act

as a support group, assisting peers to avoid engaging

in rape and sexual seduction of children, in recogni-

tion of the status of those acts as criminal offences.

They identify as lovers of children and their tru-

est admirers. Sexual intercourse is understood as a

137 Brazilian psychiatry utilises ICD-10 mental disorders

classiﬁcation, which has a chapter on sex deviance, based

on the DSM. The DSM is also an important teaching tool in

medical schools and Psychiatry graduate training. Translated

into Portuguese, it is quite an inﬂuential reference for Brazilian

psychiatrists.

138 For instance, an incipient, small political party from the

Netherlands, PVND, defunct since mid-2010, advocated for the

rights of adult-minor relationships. Their political platform

included lowering the minimum age of consent. Wikipedia

“Party for Neighbourly Love, Freedom, and Diversity” accessed

18 July 2011 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Neighbourly_

Love,_Freedom,_and_Diversity

possibility, but only mediated by what they construe

as the consent of the child.

139

Boylovers’ arguments

are obviously contrary to conventional conceptions

of proper adult-child interactions and children’s au-

tonomy to consent to them.

On the other hand, the argument developed by

the “Against Inter-Age Prejudice” community pre-

dominantly aims at differentiating sexual attraction

to “adolescents” from sexual attraction to “children”.

The association between both is understood and ac-

knowledged, but a clear effort is made to separate the

attempt to legitimise an “inter-age” interest (i.e. sexual

and emotional interest in adolescents) from both what

is commonly known as paedophilia (sexual attraction

to children) and the notion of a “tamed” paedophile,

deployed in boylovers’ arguments. Such themes are

openly debated and explored on the “Against Inter-

Age Prejudice” community, with frequent appeals to

the premise of freedom of expression and attempts to

dissociate inter-age love from criminal and/or patho-

logical abuse. Not surprisingly, the “Against Inter-Age

Prejudice” community is apparently the only virtual

community that has publicly addressed recent political-

legislative developments aimed at controlling internet

activity in Brazil and its intersection with paedophilia.

140

The importance of disclosure

The openness and disclosure exercised by the com-

munity is deliberately projected as a certiﬁcate of its

members’ goodwill. This commitment is systemati-

cally deployed by the community creator and leader,

whenever he responds to attacks and reports against

the community that label it as a paedophile group.

The underlying logic is that if it were a paedophile

community, it would not be as straightforward and

open to public scrutiny. Secrecy always raises suspi-

cions in the eyes of anti-child pornography crusaders,

because networks sharing child pornography are ex-

tremely closed and isolated. The relative longevity

of “Against Inter-Age Prejudice” might be related

to this straightforward attitude. In contrast, other

communities that could have been related even lat-

erally to paedophilia have disappeared after Orkut

agreed to disclose its trafﬁc records to Brazilian law

enforcement teams investigating child abusers and

child pornography complaints.

141

139 Alessandro J. Oliveira “De ‘pedóﬁlo’ a ‘boylover’: ilusão ou uma

nova categoria sexual que se anuncia?”, in Prazeres Dissidentes

eds. María E. Díaz-Benítez and Carlos E. Fígari, 455-480 (Rio de

Janeiro: Garamond, 2009)

140 Except for internet civil rights activists, our mapping exercise

has shown no other examples of groups with such an interest in

regulatory initiatives regarding sexuality and the internet.

141 For instance, the Orkut community owned and operated by

self-identiﬁed boylovers described in Oliveira’s research is

not available anymore, although the author cannot conﬁrm

whether this was caused by Orkut’s negotiation with the São

Paulo Attorney General’s Ofﬁce.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET58 Brazil

“Against Inter-Age Prejudice”

forum activity

The forum activity of the “Against Inter-Age Preju-

dice” community, open to all Orkut users, was

observed and analysed.

142

As mentioned above, mat-

ters related to (sexual) relations between adults and

adolescents were openly addressed as debate top-

ics, and links to speciﬁc websites and blogs that also

discuss the matter remain posted. In addition, mem-

bers’ excursions to other (often hostile) communities

and virtual spaces also occur regularly. Questions and

opinions concerning ongoing congressional debates

on paedophilia and related law-enforcement opera-

tions are also posted, triggering much debate and

intense ﬂows of opinions on issues such as moral

panics and age of sexual consent.

During the period that the community was ob-

served (between July 2010 and November 2010) the

forum comprised 74 topics. The most active ones

had around 30 to 40 individual posts, and all top-

ics were somehow linked to the debate on inter-age

sexual relationships. The notion of social commen-

tary probably best describes the ﬂow and content

of community conversations. The tone is sometimes

resentful, with members criticising society for deﬁn-

ing limits to the age of sexual consent in a rather

“narrow-minded” way. But some interventions are

142 The community has existed since July 2009. Most content posted

since that date is still available. Data collection took place

mostly between July 2010 and August 2010, and continued

during write-up, until November 2010.

also politically straightforward, for instance, when

participants contest laws that, in their view, deﬁne

minors as “half citizens” and deny them the possi-

bility to mature differently from social expectations.

Some discourse deployed in the forum underlines

that development into maturity is gradual and con-

tinuous and cannot be deﬁned at an arbitrary age.

These debates, regarding children’s development

and maturity, also relocate the question of age of

consent in relation to broader existing rules of social

regulation. Participants mention, for instance, ado-

lescents’ ability to engage in acts of violence,

places

where young people may be charged with crimes,

or the fact that in Brazil a ﬁfteen-year-old can be

legally emancipated. These examples are used to

demonstrate that multiple standards exist in relation

to age and autonomy. These arguments evidently

clash with dominant assumptions about adolescents’

innocence and need of tutelage. Various members

argue that minors are not necessarily innocent, and

present examples of extreme violence experienced

by minors in major Brazilian urban centres, point-

ing at their exposure to abuse and control by drug

dealers and other criminals. In many posts, members

equate the maturity to engage in violence with the

maturity to engage in consensual sex, thus contest-

ing the views of some sectors of society – which they

consider hypocritical – that portray minors as mature

enough to be held to some degree accountable for

crimes, but not mature enough to have sex without

harm done to their development. Another argument

The proﬁle of the “Against Inter-Age Prejudice”

community creator, Andrei, provides some informa-

tion to further understand his arguments and those

of the community regarding “inter-age love”. On

his proﬁle he says about himself:

“I’m an artist, musician and composer, living on

this beautiful and suffering Blue Planet, struggling

for better days for all of us.”

Following that paragraph, links to a number of

web projects are provided, including Projeto Amor

Menino (Boyish Love Project),

a musical project with

ten songs based, according to the author, on his own

personal experiences and on Greek homoeroticism.

A brief paragraph explains the author’s conception

of homoeroticism, related to the idea of a sexual-

ity free of all labels. A reference to psychoanalysis

is present in the afﬁrmation that human essence is

bisexual. This conception is presented as not against

Christianity: it is remarked that there is nothing in-

trinsically anti-homoerotic in Christianity, claimed to

be a religion that preaches love above all else. An

1 teenfree.sites.uol.com.br/apresenta

explicit reference is made to adolescents engaged

in relationships with older men, always grounded in

the Classical Greek ideal of pederasty. The content

of the songs is also about this kind of relationship.

An additional website,

also linked to Andrei’s

proﬁle, offers the songs’ tablature, and Andrei

keeps a blog

under the same title as the Orkut

community. Almost all posts on this blog also are

posted as community forum topics. Andrei is avail-

able for contact in a number of ways listed on his

proﬁle: email, MSN instant messaging, and a Twit-

ter account. He also offers a link to a virtual photo

album, with many pictures from trips and family

events. Although on his Orkut account Andrei does

not provide his surname, it is easily found at least on

his musical project web page, where he states that

his songs are copyrighted under his full name. It is

also possible to gather other pieces of information

about him, such as that he is around 50 years old,

single, and owns a food company.

2 www.mysongbook.com/tab-tab_list-id_artist=8429.htm

3 antipreconceitointeretario.blogspot.com

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET59 Brazil

used is that minors have the right to a sexual educa-

tion, which is denied as a result of conservative ideas

on sex that are detrimental to them.

Most of these discussions are usually triggered by

comments on news stories about strict-sense paedo-

philia and child pornography cases, or else by public

statements by authorities regarding adolescent sex-

uality. Attention is drawn to the need of a precise

deﬁnition and differentiation between different

sexual expressions and behaviour that are generally

lumped under the paedophilia label. Orkut commu-

nity inter-age love advocates suggest a case-by-case

approach to correctly evaluate the nature and risks

of “inter-age” sexual relations. The assumption of

sexual violation (statutory rape) of minors is also

contested. Many interventions interrogate the so-

cial imaginary and norms that cloud the distinction

between criminal and non-criminal forms of rela-

tionships involving adults and adolescents.

Some discussions also focus on religious moral

takes on “inter-age” relationships. Both Catholic and

evangelical Protestant denominations are criticised

for fostering prejudice against adult-adolescent

relationships, while they should actually be held ac-

countable for the abuse of children by priests and

pastors. The attack on religious discourse is not re-

stricted to moral doctrine on inter-generational

sexual relations, but also focuses on dogma, under-

stood in most arguments as a key factor explaining

people’s ignorance and inability to reason and de-

bate key social and policy issues. Some participants

claim that the pervasive presence of a religious

world view is also the main cause of obstacles to the

advancement of civil rights in Brazilian society.

Not surprisingly, a recurring topic of discussion

addressed in the community is homophobia. A case

is made against the commonly claimed association

between paedophilia and homosexuality. Members

The arguments, posting dynamics and debates

in the “Against Inter-Age Prejudice” community

can be further understood by looking at commu-

nity forum topics and the interaction taking place

around them.

Out of 74 topics on the community

forum, 43 – more than half – have been posted by

“Andrei”, the community creator. He is followed by

members “Diogo”, author of nine topics, “Music”,

author of seven, and “Soubi”, author of four topics.

Two posts were made by member “100%gui”, and

an assortment of nine other community members

are the creators of one topic each. Observation of

individual posts made within each topic show that

Andrei, Diogo, Soubi and Music are also the most

assiduous members that reply to topics – although

that does not mean that there are no contributions

from other members or that these contributions are

not considered worthy of attention by these mem-

bers with more frequent participation.

The phenomenon of an “inner circle” of more

active participants is common in many online

discussion forums. The actual difference in the

“Against Inter-Age Prejudice” community is that

members outside this inner circle can voice their

opinions and are usually welcomed and encour-

aged to do so by the inner circle. This policy was

set by Andrei, the community creator, since the be-

ginning. As his stated purpose was to encourage

debate about adult-adolescent relationships, he

shows satisfaction and gratitude when someone

engages in respectful debate.

The oldest topic on the forum was created

within three days of the community creation on 16

July 2009, by Andrei, community owner and most

1 The complete list of all forum topics was not included here

due to its length.

frequent poster. Most of the older topics are repro-

ductions of articles published in Andrei’s blog. In

those cases the number of posts does not refer to

replies, but actually the number of posts necessary

to post the full text, considering the character limit

for each individual post.

On the topic “CPI (Parliamentary Inquiry Com-

mission) on Paedophilia & Inter-Age Prejudice”,

“Soubi” posted a reply on 18 July. Soubi is the name

of a character in a homoerotic manga depicting in-

ter-age relationships between young adult men and

teenage boys. Also, in Portuguese “Sou bi” means

“I’m bi(sexual)”. This member became a vocal pres-

ence in the community, replying to several topics

and starting four new ones. On his proﬁle, Soubi

declares that his is a “fake” proﬁle. In Orkut slang,

“fake” designates a proﬁle created either as a joke,

e.g. fake proﬁles of famous people, or as a face-sav-

ing or discreet presentation of the self for activities

such as cruising for sex. This is Soubi’s case, as he

says that he just came out of the closet and wants

to meet young gay men. Soubi’s proﬁle says he is

24 and lives in Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan region.

Other members soon joined the interaction.

Among those who post as often there is “Diogo”,

the only one whose proﬁle shows a face picture. Like

Andrei, he is also an amateur musician in his mid

20s to early 30s, who likes rock and heavy metal. He

offers a link to his blog about political revolution,

inspired by communist readings, and conspiracy the-

ories, particularly attacking evangelical Christians in

Brazil (known for their preaching against sexual mi-

norities). Another member who joined in constant

debate is “Music”, who has a proﬁle almost empty

or with closed content information, quoting the

Michael Jackson song “Heal the Word”, and illus-

trated by a cat sitting on a piano.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET60 Brazil

of the group recall that relations between men and

male teenagers always provoke much more scan-

dal than relations between male adults and female

teens. The community does not deny the abhorrent

nature of child abuse, but at the same time under-

lines the inherent homophobic traits that are usually

displayed when these cases are made public. As men-

tioned before, the topics also include concerns about

political and legislative developments taking place in

Brazil, over the last decade, in regard to paedophilia

and child abuse. Many postings speciﬁcally refer to

the CPI on Paedophilia, and analyse the moral panic

it has provoked and the political opportunism and

self-aggrandisement of political actors involved in

the paedophilia debates. Senator Magno Malta, CPI

chair, has been repeatedly accused of political oppor-

tunism and religious zealotry. Some comments also

interpret the Azeredo cyber crime bill and other con-

gressional and law-enforcement initiatives currently

being debated as attempts that go beyond the pro-

tection of children from abuse to curtail civil rights,

especially those of sexual minorities. These critiques

involve reﬁned forms of rhetoric and quotes from re-

ligious texts and legal documents.

Final considerations

Peculiar features of the regulation debate

While reports and proposals for child protection

have had an impact on Brazilian debates about in-

ternet regulation, such episodes should not be read

in isolation, but rather as one piece of a broader

puzzle, where the matters at stake are the meanings

and direction of the Brazilian democratic experi-

ence. Agendas are fragmented, as constituencies

engaged in sexual rights, child protection, and cyber

politics conversations have not met the challenge of

openly addressing controversial issues such as (i) the

deﬁnition of (child) sexual exploitation, (ii) the use

of criminal law as a means of social regulation and

social pedagogy, and (iii) the implications of raising

the age of sexual consent. Engaging those issues col-

lectively would mean expanding the boundaries and

contents of democratic deliberation.

When compared to the experience of other coun-

tries, the recent Brazilian policy process concerning

internet regulation may be perceived as remarkable

for its broad democratic participatory features. How-

ever, it is not totally unusual in view of the Brazilian

record in mechanisms of public deliberation. Participa-

tory processes leading to policy formation have been

an element of the national policy scenario for a long

time. In any case, from the perspective of international

trends, the prevailing national climate, and the orien-

tation of previous internet regulation initiatives, the

political process leading to the Civil Rights Framework

for Internet Regulation had unequivocal merits.

Firstly, no bill tabled for discussion at the Nation-

al Congress has ever been formally subject to a public

consultation as open and wide. This experiment was

possible because of the particular matching between

the subject matter under discussion and the means

by which this discussion was conducted, namely,

e-democracy and online debating. Secondly, the Civil

Rights Framework proposal meant a radical shift

in the legal terms by which the matter of internet

regulation is addressed, away from a criminal justice

approach, towards a civil rights framework. This not

only challenged assumptions deeply ingrained in

the national political culture, intensely mobilised by

powerful actors, but also a global ideology of risk,

and the need to create state-enforced security meas-

ures. Although there are no solid indications that

this perspective will be sustained, its very formula-

tion is positive for the political landscape.

Thirdly, the online consultation created a ﬁeld

for democratic deliberation which allowed for equal

access of all actors interested. However, key actors

did not engage with this new deliberative process,

opting to transfer the debate back to a more con-

ventional, hierarchical public sphere arena, namely,

a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission. Most princi-

pally the last stage of processing the new draft bill

followed conventional bureaucratic procedures of

consultation of decision making exclusively among

state agencies. Likewise, in civil society the mobilisa-

tion against the Azeredo Bill combined both online

and ofﬂine modalities of agitprop and discussion.

The trajectory of this policy debate shows, there-

fore, that a multiplicity of spaces, ﬁelds and arenas

compose the public sphere, even when it has been

reconﬁgured by cyber politics. Old spaces of political

deliberation and decision making have not disap-

peared and are as relevant for achieving normative

change as the new ones.

The chain of events starting with mobilisation

against the partial approval of the Azeredo Bill

and ending with the public online consultation on

the Civil Rights Framework for Internet Regulation

seems also to have impacted Brazilian cyber politics

in terms of enabling a broader consensus, albeit pro-

visional, with regard to the need and the possibility

to construct a normative guideline for internet regu-

lation collectively; although many actors in the ﬁeld

are convinced that the internet cannot and should

not be controlled or set under surveillance. On the

other hand, from the standpoint of broader hori-

zontal participation, deﬁcits are identiﬁed. Neither

did the online consultation motivate large numbers

of citizens to participate, nor has it captured the

imagination of other constituencies whose beneﬁts

from communication over the internet are at stake

in this process. Such deﬁcits are not peculiar to the

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET61 Brazil

Brazilian context, but reﬂect the limitations and loss

of vitality of liberal democracies deriving from the

privatisation and marketisation of public space, and

fragmentation of political deliberation.

At the heart of the public policy debate on in-

ternet regulation in Brazil is the struggle between

a criminalising approach, promoting vigilantism

and control, on the one hand; and a civil rights

perspective, emphasising constitutional principles

of freedom of expression, protection of privacy

and non-discrimination, on the other. The shift in

orientation that occurred between 2009 and 2010

was crucial both to cyber politics and to democracy

broadly speaking. This debate is caught by the ten-

sion – observed by Foucault

143

– between a world

vision in which society must be protected or defend-

ed (by the state) against enemies whose shape may

vary over time or may appear diffuse, and the vision

of those who believe in the autonomous capacity of

individuals to protect themselves and their relations.

Nothing indicates that this structural tension might

or could eventually be easily resolved.

Balancing rights in the domain of sexuality:

Many challenges

Spiralling discourses and legal measures concern-

ing sexual abuse, exploitation of children and the

internet have inﬂuenced the direction of the policy

debate around regulation. But as important as this

effect may have been, the ﬁndings also indicate

that the discourse and norms on child protection,

often crafted in distorted terms, have spread in so-

ciety at large, creating a focus of resistance to ideas

and practices related to sexual rights broadly speak-

ing. This has also restricted the spaces where public

parlance can develop around the problems and un-

anticipated effects of measures against conducts as

hard to typify as the “possession of child pornogra-

phy”, currently deﬁned as a crime, or calls for raising

the age of sexual consent from fourteen to eighteen.

Such a state of affairs suggests that Brazilian

debates may beneﬁt from a balancing of rights per-

spective, which would strike parameters to guide

measures with regard to protecting children from

sexual abuse, while avoiding potential restrictions

on discourses and proposals concerning sexual rights.

But this balancing is not a theoretical construction.

To be solid and sound enough to infuse transforma-

tions in public discourse and legal norms, it must be

constructed through systematic deliberation across

different perspectives that would engage child

protection groups, LGBT rights activists, feminists,

information society thinkers and cyber activists. In-

stead, the fragmentation of sexuality and human

143 Michel Foucault Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the

College De France 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003)

rights politics has so far hampered that possibility.

It is no accident that the debate has to a large ex-

tent been captured by powerful and hard-to-contain

moral conservative forces.

Nothing indicates that this picture will change in

the near future. On the other hand, while a cross-dia-

logue between child protection advocates, feminists,

LGBT rights activists, information society thinkers

and cyber activists represents an attractive scenario,

it is no easy task to disentangle the structural tension

within human rights conceptual frames between

agency and domination, consent and coercion.

A note of caution is also due regarding the po-

litical and policy scenario of internet regulation.

This landscape is wide in scope and heterogeneous

in terms of the institutional machineries involved,

normative debates and technological aspects at play,

and state and civil society actors engaged. More over,

it has undergone rapid, intense and open-ended

rearrangements over the past few years, therefore

making it difﬁcult for any analysis to be conclusive.

The processing of the Civil Rights Framework for

Internet Regulation is far from complete. Any inter-

pretation regarding its future remains provisional.

But our study conﬁrms that context matters. While

episodes in the child protection agendas in relation

to sexuality have impacted Brazilian internet regula-

tion debates in intricate ways, this is but one piece

of a broader puzzle, where the direction, meaning

and distortions of the Brazilian democratic experi-

ence are at stake.

Sexuality and privacy

The right to privacy is a core premise of sexual rights.

One striking element emerging from the sexual

– personal and political, legal and illegal – uses of

Orkut is the blurring of boundaries between public

and private. This insight also applies to other forms

of individual and collective web engagements. But

the complexity of the issues raised by this research is

skipped over when, in the view of law enforcers, all

the practices and situations characterised as “child

pornography” allow for the automatic suspension

of the right to privacy of persons identiﬁed as po-

tential felons. Under the provisions of the ECA, any

form of circulation of child pornography (as well

as its possession) results in an automatic loss of the

right to privacy, enabling all involved agencies (e.g.

in Brazil, ISPs, State Attorney’s Ofﬁces, the Federal

Police, court ofﬁcials) to scrutinise that person’s en-

tire online activity without consent. In other words,

the political time might be ripe to recognise that ex-

isting parameters of legal protection of privacy and

intimacy online may have lost their full grip.

In light of this understanding, claims for the right

to privacy and conﬁdentiality that emerged during

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET62 Brazil

the consultation on the Civil Rights Framework were

crucial yet limited. They mainly refer to the non-au-

thorised disclosure of personal data (log retention),

other forms of disclosure of personal information.

When a sexual rights approach is faced with the mul-

tilayered challenges of internet regulation, other

critical dimensions emerge, such as intimacy, conﬁ-

dentiality and self-expression. According to Graciela

Selaimen of Nupef, this area of legal and political

thinking is still poorly developed and understood in

the Brazilian context:

We even have a recent culture of defence of

freedom of expression and access to information,

as a response to the discourse of censorship. But

the defence of the right to privacy does not come

out in this debate, which is really curious. My

own theory is that people still do not have the

culture of claiming their right to privacy. People

are violated, raped, deﬁled, exposed, humiliated.

But they do not see and realise that they have an

argument to defend themselves by ﬁling a law-

suit. […] I support the idea that it is necessary to

create a regulatory framework for the right to

privacy.

144

On sexual expression

An interesting parallel can be drawn between

the two online dynamics analysed in Orkut: men

and women who contest offensive speech against

lesbians, and the “Against Inter-Age Prejudice”

community members who invest in conceptually

separating “adult-adolescent relationships” from

“paedophilia”. Both are cases of identity afﬁrma-

tion and community building by means of contesting

prejudiced views on certain sexual categories. Both

are instigating examples of alternative mobilisation

styles shaped by web-based sociability. They contrast

in various ways with established forms of organised

and state-centred ofﬂine activism.

The social, political and policy-making environ-

ment in which these dynamics have developed is one

where, on the one hand, the spectre of “child por-

nography” has been intensively mobilised to justify

criminal law approaches to internet regulation; and,

on the other hand, the national LGBT movement

has made the criminalisation of homophobic speech

their legal reform ﬂagship.

In a context of censorship and moral anxiety,

sexual expression becomes taboo; debates on the le-

gitimacy of dissident sexualities are silenced. Moral

anxieties and panics not only produce censorship,

but also generate speciﬁc forms of knowledge about

144 Interview with the authors, 29 June 2009

their objects. They not only curtail adults’ and chil-

dren’s freedom to explore, express and learn how to

protect themselves, but also shape their expectations

and their roles in a universe imagined as laden with

risks and threats.

Given this outlook, online struggles around

the status and legitimacy of sexual subjects – inter-

ager lovers and lesbians – as political mobilising

alternatives should not be trivialised. They serve as

counterpoint to the observation that Brazilian femi-

nist and LGBT activists and organisations have not

engaged with the internet regulation policy debates

but, rather, seem to have avoided the controversies

around “child pornography” that “contaminated”

those debates.

In contrast, the everyday investments that en-

gaged individuals make online seem quite relevant.

The mobilisation of women and men on behalf of

lesbians in response to attacks on their right to freely

exercise their sexuality challenges conventional un-

derstandings of activism, participation, sexual rights,

and the role of the internet in the ﬁght against

sexual prejudice and violence. In the same manner,

the creation of an online community to address the

controversial issue of inter-age sexual relationships

– one which openly criticised the CPI on Paedophilia

– reveals an awareness and creative response to con-

nections between sexuality and internet regulation

debates, which are nowhere else to be found.

Orkut communities reveal a wide-ranging pro-

liferation of discourses and expressions. The subtly

aggressive mocking tone of lesbophobes and the re-

sponses it generates among other Orkut users has the

virtue of agitating debates and generating parlance

about female homosexuality, which complements

other ofﬂine and online forms of struggle and activ-

ism. The gathering together of inter-agers to form an

Orkut community resisting censorship and segrega-

tion of all practices and identities vaguely associated

to the semantic ﬁeld around paedophilia is also an

exercise in freedom of expression and an invitation

to look at the objects of moral anxieties and pan-

ics under a different light. The value and potential

of such expressions highlights the potentially detri-

mental effects of across-the-board internet control

initiatives. From a legal point of view, no argument

supports an intervention against inter-agers. While

possibly disturbing to some, the case of the “Against

Inter-Age Prejudice” (arguably a euphemistic name

for paedophilia, broadly deﬁned) Orkut commu-

nity works as a provocation to reﬂect upon (i) the

complexities of and disruptions introduced by the

principle of free speech, and (ii) expected alignments

in the struggle for sexual rights, on the one hand,

and freedom of expression and rights to information

on the other.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET63 Brazil

Tensions also emerge in relation to online com-

munity moderation modalities, as exercises of

self-regulation. Web semantics and vocabularies

differ substantially from those known as proper to

traditional (ofﬂine) public spheres. The ﬂuidity of

the public/private boundary, the relative capacity

of individuals and collectives to control the degree

of intimacy or publicity of their exchanges, and the

complexity, multi-layered structure, and constant

change in access-control (and hacking) technolo-

gies are an exciting challenge to rethink agency and

political mobilisation – as an internet era rewrit-

ing of the personal as political. While the Leskut

moderation policy of hands-on protection against

non-lesbian-identiﬁed intruders presumably isolates

members and their cherished (sexual) self-expression

from potentially sympathetic audiences, it also casts

out opportunities of direct engagement with rival

discourses on lesbianism.

However, the isolation of that particular space

does not prevent members from expressing them-

selves or collectively engaging in oppositional tactics

elsewhere (online or ofﬂine). The internet allows for

a variety of spaces – with different rules and deﬁni-

tions – to coexist, and for users to navigate across

them. The key question seems to be how that navi-

gation is facilitated, restricted or oriented – where

red, green or yellow lights blink, and who sets those

blinking mechanisms.

Non-moderated or lightly moderated Orkut com-

munities, on the other hand, seem to favour debates,

greater visibility, the empowerment of dissident sex-

ual selves, and the wider reception of diversity. The

one-on-one clash of lesbians and lesbian sympathis-

ers against male bigots produces tangible changes

in perceptions and practices. Initiatives to regulate

the internet more restrictively might eventually limit

the voices of those who respond to bullying, since

they might enable aggressors to mobilise censorship

tools against the speech of those who respond to at-

tacks. Some friendly criticisms of the criminalisation

of hate speech, for instance, have pointed out that

such measures may contribute to dissipate debates

on the form and substance of prejudiced discourse,

thus contributing to a (silent) stabilisation of the dis-

course underlying such expressions.

In the case of Orkut, users have the power (if

not always the knowledge) to report hate speech to

be investigated by law enforcement. But some also

have the initiative to debate them, as seen in our

case study. Due to the interactivity and anonymity fa-

cilitated by internet technology, the targets of hate

speech and online harassment may engage in direct

verbal interaction with their aggressors. Rather than

acting as passive victims, the former have the oppor-

tunity to exercise effective responses. The recursive

nature of language means that, within a climate fa-

vourable to sexual expression and a rights discourse,

disenfranchised youth, women and sexual minori-

ties, given their stigmatised status, might use such

potentially harmful interactions as an opportunity

for their self-expression.

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EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET66 India

Foreword

The EROTICS cross-coun-

try exploratory research

project responds to the

question:

How may the emerging debates and the growing

practice of regulation of online content either

impede or facilitate different ways women use

the internet and the impact on their sexual ex-

pression, sexualities and sexual health practices,

and assertion of their sexual rights?

Or expressed differently:

How does the internet facilitate the exercise of

sexual rights and the expression of sexualities,

particularly of women living in different socio-

political, economic and cultural contexts?

How does emerging regulation online affect this

ability?

The primary aim of this exploratory research is to

bridge the gap between legal/policy directives and

actual evidence of everyday internet use and percep-

tions of problematic content and “harm” by users of

the internet. Policy making must be evidence-based

and guided by data on existing practices and needs,

yet in an increasing environment of internet regula-

tion, there is a paucity of on-the-ground research on

how people are using the internet and what their

experiences and concerns are. The EROTICS India re-

search study seeks to examine lived experiences of

women internet users in Mumbai and contribute a

preliminary evidence base to help direct internet-

related policy in the future.

Current directions and recent actions in infor-

mation and communications technology (ICT) law

and policy reﬂect anxieties around cyber terrorism

resulting in greater regulation of cybercafés, a pre-

occupation with censoring “obscene” content, and

protection of children from online harm and sexual

content. There are two problems with this: one, that

these concerns are not derived from an evidence

base and two, that women users’ and young peoples’

realities are notably absent. The EROTICS study in

India aims to ﬁll these gaps by documenting middle-

class women’s experiences of internet use in urban

India, and bringing to the table their voices and con-

cerns. In doing so, it contributes to the building of an

evidence base reﬂecting users’ realities and concerns

that can guide internet law and policy in India.

This study records how women and young peo-

ple in particular (given their increasing use of the

internet) access and use the internet in the following

areas: in their everyday lives, particularly in terms of

social networking sites, blogging and online activism;

their access of sexual content, experiences and rela-

tionships; how they negotiate its dangers and protect

themselves; what they think about content regula-

tion; their strategies to keep children safe online; and

how the gendered politics of internet access impact

on their lives. A feminist approach guided the design

and execution of the research. The study comprised:

a detailed mapping of internet use and regulation in

India; a quantitative survey of 150 young people (120

women and a small control sample of 30 men, aged

eighteen to 25, mostly students) to assess broad trends

and their access to and use of the internet; and a qual-

itative study of women users’ internet experiences

through in-depth interviews with 31 respondents (27

women and a small control of four men, age range

eighteen to 54 years, all regular internet users includ-

ing young people, students, housewives, professional/

working women, bloggers, queer women and older

women; an effort was made to include women with

disabilities but it was not possible to access disabled

women internet users). In-depth interviews typi-

cally took 90 minutes and were conducted in public

locations like coffee shops and cafés; in a few cases

interviews were conducted in respondents’ homes if

that was more convenient and secure. Given the limi-

tations of time, scope and resources, the study was

conducted only in Mumbai, the city with the highest

internet usage in the country. The research was con-

ducted over November and December 2009.

The survey results indicate that young people

typically perceive the internet as essential to being suc-

cessful in modern India for its global reach and access

to diverse forms of information. Respondents alluded

to the two-sided nature of the internet, referring to

both its pleasures and dangers. Internet addictions

rated very highly as a cause for concern in this group,

as did not being able to trust strangers online, and

a concern for the safety of personal information on-

line. Those surveyed do not face many restrictions in

INDIA

Negotiating intimacy and harm: Female internet

users in Mumbai

MANJIMA BHATTACHARJYA and MAYA INDIRA GANESH

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET67 India

accessing the internet, although young women do re-

port infrastructural issues like poor connections and

power failure, as well as feeling uncomfortable in

cybercafés, and parental or spousal objections as be-

ing a signiﬁcant barrier in free and complete access

to the internet. Women reported that accessing sex-

ual content online was “immoral” and “unhealthy”.

Strikingly, survey respondents were cautious about

responding to questions around sex and sexuality and

very few reported accessing the internet for anything

related to sexuality. This is in contradiction with the

results of the qualitative survey, indicating that an in-

quiry into sexuality on the internet is likely to yield

richer data when qualitative methods are used.

The qualitative research, through in-depth inter-

views with regular internet users, resulted in rich and

interesting data on women’s internet use. The sample

of interviewees was primarily middle class, with most

respondents (with the exception of students under 25

years) working outside the home as well; the sample

had almost unrestricted access to the internet and faced

few limitations. Social networking sites and online

chatting are the most popular and regularly accessed

online spaces, particularly by younger respondents.

Cybercafés are not routinely accessed by this sample

since they have personal internet access either at home

or on their mobile phones. Women in this sample felt

cybercafés are unpleasant spaces to be in, citing them

as being overcrowded, noisy, not private, populated by

men surﬁng porn and working-class people. Women

bloggers have a sustained relationship with the inter-

net and it presents for them numerous opportunities

for self-expression, as well as to challenge received

ideas about what is appropriate for women to speak

of. Queer-identiﬁed respondents felt that the internet

provides immeasurable freedoms, particularly under

conditions of criminalisation and being closeted, to

ﬁnd partners, social networks and for activism.

Young women were vocal about the excitement

in making friends with strangers online through

chatting, and social networking sites allow them a

certain freedom in being able to mingle with the

opposite sex and display themselves wearing “sexy”

clothes – all of which are strictly regulated in their

ofﬂine worlds. This gives them a sense of agency and

thrill. However, this group of women is highly aware

of having their online behaviour surveilled by family

members and other known people and report being

cautious about how their online personas may have

repercussions on their ofﬂine freedoms, particu-

larly freedom to access the internet. Family honour

is at stake for women if knowledge of their online

behaviour comes to light. However, women inter-

viewed were fairly conservative on what they did

online: ﬂirting, romance, viewing “hot pictures” or

“sexy videos”. Older women also access the internet

through social networking sites, though more to

re-establish contact with old friends rather than to

make new friends. Access to dates and potential

life partners was signiﬁcant in the lives of some

women who are using the internet. Access to por-

nography was not considered taboo in this sample.

Respondents spoke about it casually, and it is seen

as something that is for pleasure and to enhance

an intimate relationship. Children’s access to sexual

content on the internet, however, was a cause for

concern across the sample. Regulation of online con-

tent was not perceived as being a viable or effective

option because of the convergence of various media,

and because adults recognised their right to access

sexual content for their own pleasure. According to

respondents, the sexual content accessed online is

not restricted to a category called “pornography”;

moreover, respondents themselves produce sexu-

alised imagery and speech to share online. Online

dating and matrimonial sites were also very popu-

lar with young men and women, although chatting

through dedicated chat sites and on social network-

ing sites was the most preferred option to ﬁnd casual

partners for online or ofﬂine romance.

Women say that the kinds of harassment they

face online occur mainly in chat forums when stran-

gers pester them to talk or say inappropriate (sexual)

things to them; sometimes, strangers they meet on-

line and have either casual, ﬂirtatious or intimate

friendships with threaten to blackmail them if they do

not take these relationships further. The other forms

of online harm women experience are when their

email or social networking proﬁles are hacked into,

phished and manipulated. Women are also extremely

concerned about how their personal images on social

networking sites can be used and manipulated. Often,

male friends and acquaintances are responsible for

this; when women post pictures that are “too sexy”

online, their friends want to rein them in “for their

own good”. In terms of strategies to be safe, women

say they do not share personal or location data with

strangers, and change their passwords regularly. In the

posting of sexy pictures of themselves, young women

also internalise socially imposed limits to what is “ap-

propriate” and devise methods for self-regulation

to ensure that they do not get unwanted attention.

In online chats women also use aliases and ﬁctitious

names to protect their identities. Women who are

conﬁdent of staying safe on the internet report that it

is more important to be conﬁdent and know how to

take care of oneself online. The most frequently cited

forms of harmful content online were child pornogra-

phy, anti-national and hate speech, and viruses.

Children’s and teens’ access to the internet is a

cause for concern because sexual content is so freely

available; a less frequently mentioned but signiﬁcant

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET68 India

concern is that children could befriend adult stran-

gers on social networking sites. Mothers in the

sample tend to monitor their children’s internet use

in a variety of ways, such as using ﬁltering software,

password-protecting and monitoring internet access,

and going through browsing histories. Some are un-

comfortable with their children visiting cybercafés.

Some respondents also monitor younger brothers,

sisters, cousins and so on. Most respondents believed

that it was more important to talk to and educate

children about the risks present online. However,

with few resources and little guidance on how ex-

actly to talk about sexual content and danger online,

parents interviewed felt somewhat uncomfortable

and limited in their approaches to keeping children

safe online.

The people interviewed in the quantitative and

qualitative studies were generally unaware of the

laws and policies relating to the internet. There was

little awareness of the IT Act and the government’s

role in regulation. Few favoured governmental

control of the internet and the qualitative sample

was generally against the idea of content ﬁltering

online. The internet undoubtedly allows women to

ﬁnd voice, agency and self-expression through the

internet, securing their sexuality rights and commu-

nication rights, but not without having to negotiate

the ofﬂine controls and limitations that exist.

Introduction

Context

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the govern-

ment-owned internet service provider (ISP), ofﬁcially

launched the internet on 15 August 1997, India’s 50th

anniversary of independence from colonial rule. It

was the only ISP at the time. In 1997 a mobile phone

cost roughly INR 60,000 (around USD 1,700 at that

time) and talk-time was priced at INR 16 (USD 0.45) a

minute. As a result, communication technologies like

the internet and mobile telephony were accessible

only to a very small segment of society. Things have

changed rapidly in the last fourteen years.

From 1.4 million internet users in 1998, the ﬁrst

leap in usage came in 2002 when the number of users

more than doubled to 16.5 million. By 2007, ten years

after the internet came to India, there were 42 mil-

lion internet users (see Table 1). Although this pointed

to a low penetration of only 3.7% of the population,

the internet had by now become part of life in many

parts of the country. Today, there are countless local

ISPs, mobile phones can now be bought for INR 3,000

and mobile tariffs in India are amongst the cheapest

worldwide.

According to the iCube 2009-2010 survey there

are 57 million active internet users

and 71 mil-

lion people who have ever used the internet in

India, making it the country with the fourth highest

number of internet users in the world. In a country

of over a billion people, this is still a niche segment,

but we can see that proﬁles of users are changing.

The internet, once the privilege of the elite, is now

being accessed by a more general population. Urban

Indians made up 77% of all internet users in 2000 but

in 2009 that number had fallen to 34%, while 36%

of users were now from towns with a population of

less than 500,000. Another relevant trend is the rising

number of youth active online; young people under

25 are the largest and fastest-growing demographic

of internet users, close to 77%.

The state of Ma-

harashtra, of which Mumbai (called Bombay till the

name was changed in 1997) is the capital city, has the

highest percentage of female users, at 27%.

India implemented the Information Technology

Act (IT Act) in 2000 to set up a system for dealing

with incidents of cyber crime, in addition to guide-

lines for governing the use of the internet more

1 According to the survey, an active internet user is someone who

has used the internet at least once in the month prior to the

survey.

2 Internet and Mobile Association of India i-Cube Survey Internet in

India (Mumbai: IAMAI, April 2010) iamai.in

TABLE 1. Growth of internet use in India (1998-2007)

Internet users (m) Total population (m) Penetration (%) Data source

1998 1.4 1,095 0.10 ITU

1999 2.8 1,095 0.30 ITU

2000 5.5 1,095 0.50 ITU

2001 7.0 1,095 0.70 ITU

2002 16.5 1,095 1.60 ITU

2003 22.5 1,095 2.10 ITU

2004 39.2 1,095 3.60 C.I. Almanac

2005 50.6 1,112 4.50 C.I. Almanac

2006 40.0 1,112 3.60 IAMAI

2007 42.0 1,130 3.70 IWS

Source: www.DigitalStrategyConsulting.com

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET69 India

generally. As cases came up – of hacking, morphed

pictures, fraud – the anxieties increased. This idea

of the internet as a dangerous space that needed to

be controlled was given another dimension when in

2004 the “DPS-MMS Scandal” broke.

Two school-

going youth, a girl and a boy, in Delhi used a mobile

phone to ﬁlm themselves being intimate, and the

footage eventually found its way on to the internet.

That case and others similar to it

trained the spot-

light on what increased access to digital technologies

implies: users generating, replicating and sharing

content, heightened forms of interactivity, greater

risks to the integrity of data and networks, and the

public display of private intimacies.

These anxieties can be read against a background

of a particular cultural politics emerging since the liber-

alisation of markets in the early 1990s, and the waves

of globalisation that ensued from it. “Indian-ness” and

“Indian culture”, and an anxiety about the inﬂuence

of all things “Western” have been at the centre of con-

temporary debates and struggles as new and diverse

forms of media and culture have emerged: protests

in the 1990s against the opening of the ﬁrst Kentucky

Fried Chicken outlet and the Miss Universe pageant,

both in Bangalore; the censorship of ﬁlm-song lyrics,

movie posters, commercial and documentary ﬁlms and

music videos for their supposedly provocative/indecent/

obscene content; the ban on bar dancers in Mum-

bai; dress-code regulations imposed on college-going

women prohibiting jeans or tight clothes (ostensibly

to “protect them from harassment”); the curtailing

of holistic sex education in schools; moral policing by

right-wing groups through violent protests, destruction

of property, rounding up of young men and women in

public places, especially on occasions such as Valentines

Day; violence against women engaging in “immoral ac-

tivities” (like buying cigarettes or going to pubs). This

moral thread and concerns with “obscenity” and sexu-

ality have been the centre of censorship debates in the

country since the 1940s.

The emphasis on greater internet regulation is at

this moment very high. According to a report by a US-

based agency published last year, India ranks ﬁfth in

the world for cyber crime with a rate of increase at

50% per year.

Repeated incidents of hacking (like an

attack by Chinese hackers on the Indian Prime Minis-

ter’s Ofﬁce last year) also compounded the hysteria,

3 MMS, or multimedia messaging service, has now become

shorthand for sexual content shot on personal mobile phones and

then circulated via the internet and mobile platforms.

4 Other incidents that have achieved popular notoriety, such as

the Mysore Mallige scandal, the Miss Jammu scandal, clips of

celebrities and starlets in intimate moments and the Guys4Men

case come to mind when thinking about how digital content is

produced and reproduced for public consumption.

5 Prakash Nanda “India’s Cyber Crime Challenge” upiasia.com 9

March 2010 www.upiasia.com/Security/2010/03/09/indias_cyber_

crime_challenge/6678

leading to some views that the internet was the “ﬁfth

element after land, sea, air, space”

that also needed

to be monitored and controlled for national security.

Under the newly amended IT Act 2008 the govern-

ment is expected to exercise greater control of Indian

cyberspace, giving teeth to the IT Act to monitor and

police content that is considered “anti-Indian” or “ob-

jectionable”. Much of this is driven by the concerns

around technology-enabled terrorism and economic

offences. Even as access to the internet can increase

and more Indians ﬁnd a space to be heard online,

the government’s monitoring of cyberspace, collect-

ing private data, eavesdropping on online chatter

and blocking news and information sites are also on

the rise.

According to recently released reports from

Google,

between June and December 2009, the Gov-

ernment of India issued it 1,061 requests for data

and 142 requests for removal of data from its search

facilities. The Indian government was also ranked

third globally in requests and removals. A Computer

Emergency Response Team (CERT) was established in

2003 to monitor internet trafﬁc, warn the govern-

ment of large-scale security and malware disruptions

and support implementation of the IT Act. In terms of

women’s rights, newly established cyber crime cells in

urban police stations have been asserting their com-

mitment to addressing cyber stalking and the online

harassment of women and children.

When it comes to implementing the IT Act and

regulating virtual spaces, dominant social and moral

values and an arbitrary notion of “Indian culture” re-

main the yardstick for regulating what is perceived as

“harmful content”. Invariably it is content related to

sex and sexuality that is immediately targeted. In June

2009 the cartoon-porn site Savita Bhabhi

featuring

the sexual adventures of a prototypical Indian house-

wife was blocked (even as other pornographic sites

continued to ﬂourish) under provisions of the newly

amended IT Act (2008) that makes the publishing and

dissemination of “obscene” material punishable.

More recently, the blocking of information on

“sex” on Microsoft’s search engine Bing in India,

the Chief Justice of India calling for a complete

ban on pornography

and the increased policing

of cybercafés towards monitoring and apprehend-

ing terrorists also lead us to the uneasy conclusion

6 Ibid.

7 Joyeeta Chakravorty “Charge of the Internet Brigade” Times of

India 3 December 2009 epaper.timesoﬁndia.com

8 Google Transparency Report, July 2009-December 2010

www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests

9 Major cities in India have their own cyber crime cells. The Mumbai

Cyber Crime Lab can be accessed at: www.cybercellmumbai.com

10 See www.kirtu.com to access the Savita Bhabhi site.

11 Times of India “Urgent Need to Ban Porn Websites: Chief Justice

of India” Times of India 31 January 2010 timesoﬁndia.indiatimes.

com/india

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET70 India

that the internet is becoming a space where ofﬂine

taboos and anxieties are being replicated, and cen-

sored with the same brush. Such arbitrary moves

adversely affect freedom of speech and expression,

curb constitutional rights of citizens, and in particu-

lar limit the freedoms of women. How will these

trends in regulation affect women users of the in-

ternet? Can measures that are being put into place

to “protect” us work against us? It is important to

look at the implications on sexuality rights of wom-

en in particular, because this is where the locus of

control and regulation has tended to veer towards

in the past.

Rationale for the study

During the course of these social and cultural battles,

the voices of women themselves have been largely ab-

sent. There are few current data that provide a detailed

picture of what internet users, especially women, are

doing online, and how they are going to be affected by

the IT Act and its hazy implementation. There is also no

evidence base of women’s, especially young women’s,

experiences of harm on the internet. What are the as-

sumptions around “harm” that pre-empt arbitrary

moves of regulation online? Are women aware of the

risks online and their rights to be free from harm? Do

they actually perceive and experience the internet as

an unsafe space? What strategies and tactics do wom-

en create to protect themselves online?

These are subsets of some broader questions that

need to be asked to understand how the internet

has impacted women’s lives, in particular: How has

the internet expanded or curbed women’s sexuality

rights

in India? In the context of prevalence of HIV/

AIDS, absence of sex education in schools and col-

leges and societal taboos around discussions of sex

and sexuality, especially for young women, we can

12 According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website,

“Sexuality is an integral part of every human being. It is a complex

and rich terrain that includes identity formation, ideas and ownership

of the self, behaviour, relationship-building and performativity,

grounded in embodiment. Sexuality is embedded and inter-

woven with other axes of identities such as gender and ethnicity,

and constitutes a central idea where social, cultural, economic

and political delineations are constructed.” Following from this

deﬁnition accessed through the same WHO resources, sexual rights

embrace human rights that are already recognised in national

laws, international human rights documents and other consensus

statements. They include the right of all persons, free of coercion,

discrimination and violence, to: the highest attainable standard of

sexual health, including access to sexual and reproductive health care

services; seek, receive and impart information related to sexuality;

sexuality education; respect for bodily integrity; choose their partner;

decide to be sexually active or not; consensual sexual relations;

consensual marriage; decide whether or not, and when, to have

children; and pursue a satisfying, safe and pleasurable sexual life.

(www.who.int/reproductive-health/gender/sexualhealth.html) We use

these particular outlines as they provide a broad framework within

which to position sexuality rights, particularly the right to be free

of violence and disease, and to experience and pursue pleasure and

relationships consensually. These deﬁnitions are also easily applicable

to the context of ICTs and the internet.

assume that a “free”, “unregulated” space like the

internet plays an important role. However, there

are no data to illustrate if and how women in India

have used the internet to enhance their sexual and

reproductive health, build identities, develop rela-

tionships, express themselves using the internet in

ways that expand their agency and allow them to ac-

tualise their rights. What are the particular tensions,

if any, between the online and ofﬂine worlds?

Similarly, there are diverse communities who have

access to the internet and mobile phones yet little is

known about how they are using and adapting these

technologies: the old, queer women, women with

disabilities. For many in India cybercafés provide a

ready point of access to the internet; however, there

is little research that looks at how regulations are be-

ing enforced and circumvented, and what this means

for users. There is also a lack of awareness about the

IT Act and lack of clarity in how to recognise and

address online harms. This is a prescient moment to

intervene in these debates. Moreover, there are gaps

in the existing research on ICTs, particularly from a

feminist perspective and on middle-class women in

urban India, which this study hopes to ﬁll.

Gaps in existing research

India has had a strong women’s movement since the

early 1980s that is responsible for steering change

in many ways, including the creation of new laws

on dowry, domestic violence and sexual assault.

Largely based within a socialist-feminist framework

and coming from a long history of social welfare, the

women’s movement has understandably tended to

focus on the issues of poor women, usually from rural

areas, as this is where the largest segment of Indian

women live, and they are beset by a host of disad-

vantages. As a result, there has been a tendency to

neglect the experiences of middle-class women (ex-

cept with regard to certain issues like dowry deaths

or domestic violence). The middle-class Hindu wom-

has been viewed as a relatively more advantaged

member of society and little research has gone into

looking at her experiences and concerns. Recent

studies have however started to explore middle-class

women’s realities, particularly on issues of embodi-

ment, changing gender roles and ideals of “new

13 Nandita Gandhi and Nandita Shah The Issues At Stake: Theory and

practice in the contemporary women’s movement in India (New

Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992); Radha Kumar The History of Doing:

An illustrated account of movements for women’s rights and

feminism in India 1800-1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993)

14 A generic term that usually refers to women in higher

socioeconomic segments who are educated, enjoy a relatively

higher standard of life and a sense of security from being part of

the majority community in the country.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET71 India

womanhood”,

their mobility, and construction of

their sexuality.

Within the category of middle-class

women, there are still fewer data on young middle-

class women. There has been a considerable history

of feminist interventions on issues of media, gender

and censorship, especially around contested deﬁni-

tions of what constitutes “obscenity”,

even though

feminists have had differences on the issue of cen-

sorship.

The internet and new media, though, are

relatively under-researched territories within con-

temporary Indian feminism (even though women’s

groups in India, as well as feminist researchers, have

been using the internet for activism and research

through the last decade) with only a few studies at-

tempting to make sense of how it has impacted our

lives. This study locates itself in this history of femi-

nist engagement with women’s lives, and seeks to

address certain gaps in research.

Mainstream media increasingly comment and re-

port on the internet as a subject of discussion, but

academic research emerging from India on internet

use among Indians, and speciﬁcally among urban

Indian women, tends to be more sparse. Much of

the existing research on the internet is located in

the ICTs for development (ICT4D) discourse, with a

selection of research on cybercafés in India, online

matrimonial websites and only a smattering looking

at women’s experiences of the internet.

Studies dealing with women and ICT4D focus ei-

ther on women in development or how technology

impacts gender equality and the empowerment

women in society. The key issue is that ICTs may not

be able to empower women unless they challenge the

existing asymmetrical socioeconomic power relation-

ships, and social norms, gendered roles and practices in

15 Meenakshi Thapan “Embodiment and Identity in Contemporary

Society: Feminism and the ‘New’ Indian Woman” Contributions to

Indian Sociology 38, 3 (2004); Meenakshi Thapan “Adolescence,

Embodiment and Gender Identity: Elite Women in a Changing

Society”, in Urban Women in Contemporary India ed. Rehana

Ghadially (New Delhi: Sage, 2007)

16 Shilpa Phadke “Some Notes Towards Understanding the

Construction of Middle Class Urban Women’s Sexuality in India”

in Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice

from South and South East Asia eds. Geetanjali Misra and Radhika

Chandiramani (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 67-81

17 Brinda Bose, ed. Gender and Censorship (New Delhi: Women

Unlimited, 2006)

18 Shohini Ghosh “The Troubled Existence of Sex and Sexuality:

Feminist Engagements with Censorship”, in Image Journeys

eds. Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher (New Delhi: Sage

Publications and London: Thousand Oaks, 1999)

19 Based on the deﬁnition of power as “power to” and “power

within”, Naila Kabeer has developed a speciﬁc concept of

empowerment which emphasises options, choice and control

as the basic components of empowerment. Kabeer argues that

empowerment is “the expansion in people’s ability to make

strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously

denied to them.” Naila Kabeer “Resources, Agency, Achievements:

Reﬂections on the Measurement of Women’s Empowerment”

Development and Change 30, 3 (1999): 435-464

both labour markets and households.

In spite of the

growing emphasis on ICTs as tools for economic and

social empowerment of the underprivileged, there

is a notable gap in methodologically sound informa-

tion on which to base policy making in these areas; as

a result, the role of ICTs for women’s economic em-

powerment, poverty reduction and entrance into the

digital economy relies mostly on anecdotal evidence.

Similarly, Best and Maier state that while the literature

on gender, ICTs and development is extensive, there

are surprisingly few empirical data that systematically

document women’s needs and concerns regarding

ICTs, as articulated by women themselves, especially in

the context of rural development projects.

Studies of women as workers in the IT industries

and women using work with ICTs as a form of “de-

velopment” to lift themselves out of poverty and

create opportunities for themselves re-establish the

existence of a gender divide across classes and age

groups in terms of access and skills related to ICTs.

They also point out how the internet experience has

been “gendered”, usually through extensions of ex-

isting gender differences, discriminations and ideas

around gender and technology. While women and

ICTs is a popular area of research, the focus is on gen-

erating statistics and deterministic conclusions rather

than a political-economic perspective on the actual

experiences of women online and how the internet

has affected their lives as workers.

There is a fair amount of research being con-

ducted on cybercafés in India,

their impact on local

communities and economies, and the IT “revolution”

in everyday lives. It is often argued that cybercafés

can bridge the digital divide for those who cannot af-

ford the internet at home or need help to use ICTs.

Studies on cybercafés also discuss their importance

for youth as a space to hang out, to meet,

and as

20 Shoba Arun and Thankom Arun “ICTs, Gender and Development:

Women in Software Production in Kerala” Journal of International

Development 14, 1 (2002): 39-50

21 Ibid.

22 Michael L. Best and Sylvia G. Maier “Gender, Culture and ICT use

in Rural South India” Gender Technology and Development 11

(2007): 137

23 It is estimated that in 2010 the number of cybercafés in India will

reach 260,000 (Inforum “India Cybercafe Audience” 2008 inforum.

in). About 37% of Indian internet users are found in internet cafés,

a drop from 52% in 2003 (IAMAI i-Cube Survey). The numbers

have been decreasing every year as internet access is increasingly

possible from home, work and mobile phones.

24 Anikar Haseloff “Cybercafes and their Potential as Community

Development Tools in India” The Journal of Community

Informatics (2005)

25 Dipankar Gupta Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds (New

Delhi: Harper Collins, 2000); Rachna Proﬁle of Internet Users at

Cybercafes M Sc Home Science dissertation, unpublished, Faculty

of Home Science, Dept of Extension Education & Communication

Management, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, 2002; Harsha

Parekh and Jyotsna Sawant “Cybercafes in Mumbai” Information

Today and Tomorrow 19, 4 (2000): 11-12; Hansa Joshi “Social Class

and Internet Users” Media Asia 28, 4 (2001): 218-224

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET72 India

a place where particular gendered identities and a

sense of globality may be constructed and experi-

enced.

Despite these functions, the cybercafé has

come under stringent regulations in the last few

years following anti-terror/security concerns of the

state. In 2007, a licensing system for cybercafé own-

ers caused many to fall by the wayside and in 2009

Mumbai police had plans to ask cybercafés to have

ﬁngerprint scanners for user identiﬁcation

which

were widely condemned by cybercafé owners and

the Association for Public ICT Tool Access Providers.

Reports that terrorists use cybercafés to plan and

coordinate attacks have resulted in close monitor-

ing of users through collection of personal data

and veriﬁcation through photo IDs. Cybercafés are

also expected to restrict access to pornography and

manage users’ physical privacy: open-plan seating,

cubicles to face outwards into the main space of the

cybercafé; minors are not allowed to use terminals

that are “behind partitions” or “in cubicles”; cyber-

cafés should not operate within 500 metres of an

educational institution. These regulations also invest

police ofﬁcers with the authority to make random

security checks to ensure the enforcement of regula-

tions. The implications of these measures are yet to

be examined.

The mainstream media tend to report on “cyber

crime” with regularity.

Reported incidents include

phishing, embedding viruses, email scams, hacking

bank and email accounts, and attempts to blackmail

or ruin the reputation of ex-lovers, professors, busi-

ness partners, bosses and neighbours by releasing

secretly ﬁlmed or manipulated video clips and imag-

es. Youth-speciﬁc cyber crimes relate to fake proﬁles

on social networking and matrimonial sites (“bride-

cons”), releasing videos of bullying or pornographic

images of unsuspecting classmates on the internet,

taking revenge on teachers or fellow students by

circulating usually false information about them on

the internet, or attempts to con authorities like the

police. The gendered aspect of this is alluded to but

not looked at in depth.

Also extremely visible in the media are the online

Indian matrimony sites, which have modernised the

traditional Indian arranged marriage process. They

are a booming business – the industry is expected

26 Nicholas Nisbett “The Internet, Cybercafes and New Social Spaces

of Bangalorean Youth”, in Locating the Field: Space, Place and

Context in Social Anthropology eds. Simon Coleman and Peter J.

Collins (London: Berg Publishers, 2006), 129-131

27 B. Viju “Cybercafés Fight Shy of Fingerprints” Times of India, 4

June 2009

28 Between June and December 2009, the Times of India, Mumbai

edition, ran 44 stories on cyber crime. The Cyber Crime Cell

recorded 775 cases in 2008, and had already registered 718 cases in

2009 as of August. Editorial “Cyber Crime Cases Register Huge Rise

in Last Three Years” Times of India 5 October 2009

to reach 20.8 million registrations with revenues of

USD 63 million by 2010-11

– and cater to India’s

diverse (both progressive and caste-conscious) demo-

graphic.

Obviously, such an enterprise would have

gendered implications which need to be looked at.

Research methodology

Against this backdrop, therefore, the aims and ob-

jectives of this study are to understand women’s

and young people’s experiences of and access to the

internet, and internet use in terms of sexuality, iden-

tity, relationships and information seeking, as well as

to intervene in public debates on internet regulation

and online harm by foregrounding women’s voices.

This study is rooted in feminist methodology and

practice in which we position women users of the

internet centre-stage and document their reﬂexive

responses to our questions. Data for the study were

gathered (chronologically) in the following ways:

1. A one-day session co-hosted by JAGORI, a wom-

en’s rights NGO in Delhi, that brought together

feminist activists for a conversation on the theme,

to get a sense of the concerns and challenges of

this issue, which fed into the process of designing

the research tools.

2. A mapping of the Indian context in terms of

internet access, use and regulation; emerging

discourses; legal frameworks of internet regula-

tion; current trends in the implementation of the

IT Act; and a review of news media and academic

writing on these issues.

3. A quantitative survey of young women and a

smaller control sample of young men, to iden-

tify how people aged eighteen to 25 access and

use the internet, and their attitudes towards on-

line regulation and harm. A total of 150 people

(30 men and 120 women, predeﬁned numbers)

responded to the survey, which was conduct-

ed through the Department of Post Graduate

Studies and Research in Home Science, Univer-

sity Department of Extension Education, SNDT

29 EmPower Research LLC “A Web Partner for life: Indian Matrimony

Websites are Modernising Matchmaking for the Ofﬂine World

and Positioning to be Lifelong Portals for the Online One” 2008

mindbranch.com

30 There are sites which are for speciﬁc castes and communities

(Sindhimatrimony.com for the Sindhi community, or

Jainmatrimony.com for those of the Jain faith) as well as sites that

cater to speciﬁc demographics or social categories. Secondshaadi.

com, a site for divorcees, has spawned 160,000 members since

October 2007. Diabeticmatrimonial.com has 670 members and the

more recent Thirunangai.net, the ﬁrst transsexual matrimonial

website in the world, is from the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Two sisters in Gurgaon have recently launched a matrimonial

website for plus-sized people called OverweightShaadi.com. The

website hitchHIV.com was launched in January 2010 at the behest

of the Indian Network for People Living with HIV/AIDS.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET73 India

Women’s University, Santacruz, Mumbai. Ques-

tionnaires were administered by 21 postgraduate

students of the department, with a lecturer in

charge of the process who herself was an aca-

demic with experience of researching the impact

of the mobile phone and internet on the lives of

young women. There was a very low proportion

of “no responses” in the ﬁlled questionnaires,

mainly due to the in-person approach

by the

investigators.

Criteria for the sample were: young people

between eighteen and 25 years of age, hav-

ing access to the internet at least four times a

week, residing in and around Mumbai, of any

linguistic background but ﬂuent enough with

English, and with a willingness to respond to

the questionnaire. An attempt was made to

cover people from diverse backgrounds in terms

of education, occupation, culture and location

of residence. The study covered 38 geographi-

cal localities of Greater Mumbai Municipal

Corporation. Though the study predominantly

covered western suburban areas, the respond-

ents were also from central and downtown

Mumbai and extended suburban areas. Re-

spondents were assured of the conﬁdentiality

of their responses.

4. In-depth interviews with women internet users

across age groups, physical locations in Mumbai

and a range of professions, as well as a few men,

to gain a rich understanding of how they use

the internet for work and in their personal lives,

including use of social networking, matrimonial

and dating sites, and to access sexual, erotic con-

tent and experiences online. Our site for data

collection was the city of Mumbai, considering

that it has the highest internet access rates in

India.

Qualitative methods are known to bring out detailed

narratives that have the potential to be insightful,

rooted in reality and add to debates on internet reg-

ulation in a hands-on manner. We hoped to enable

women’s experiences to emerge in greater detail and

with vibrancy, without having to be monochrome –

like quantitative data is sometimes constrained to be

– and reﬂecting the shades of grey.

31 We had the option of putting the survey online. We experimented

with various online survey formats, but eventually the risk of people

losing interest a few questions down the line and submitting

incomplete surveys decided against this, as this would result in a

data set that would not be comparable to or collapsible with the

surveys done ofﬂine. Moreover, there were critical variables that

were difﬁcult to control with an online “invisible sample”, such as

age and geographical location, which we wanted to maintain.

A total of 32 in-depth interviews were conduct-

ed, out of which one was later considered invalid by

the lead researchers, because the basic name/iden-

tity of the male interviewee was suspected to be

false, hence his responses to the questions could not

be trusted thereafter. Of the 31 valid interviews, 27

were with women and four were with men. In addi-

tion, we did an “expert interview” for background

and context on queer activism and gay men’s use of

the internet. While the focus of the study was wom-

en users, a small number of men were interviewed as

a control, to get a sense of the gendered nature of

responses and whether men’s responses were mark-

edly different.

In recruiting the sample, we identiﬁed a broad

socioeconomic demographic that is often targeted

by market research for consumer products; we de-

cided to use the services of a recruitment agency

referred by a contact in a multinational advertis-

ing agency to get a random, anonymous sample

that would typify the urban internet user. Fifteen

women respondents and four men respondents

were sought in this way. The criteria for this sample

were: women and men from any community/educa-

tion/relationship status living in different parts of

Mumbai (“town” and the suburbs); spread out be-

tween three age groups (18-24, 25-34, 35-45 years);

a mix of working women, students and housewives;

and most importantly, regular internet users who

are familiar with the internet and fulﬁl as many as

possible of these criteria: have active email ID/IDs,

are on a social networking site like Orkut or Face-

book, are registered on or have used matrimonial

or dating sites like Shaadi Dot Com, maintain a blog

or their own website, work in IT-related industries,

regularly surf the internet at home, at work or in

cybercafés.

The agency set up a range of interviews across

Mumbai, in three broad locations – Town (Church-

gate, Mumbai Central, Breach Candy), Central

Mumbai (Chembur) and the Western suburbs (Vile

Parle, Andheri, Santa Cruz). The sample sourced

through the recruitment agency also reﬂects their

own networks, hence the preponderance of wom-

en from particular religious, ethnic and language

communities. Although we had made a speciﬁc

requirement to include women with disabilities

(visual impairment, hearing impaired or physically

challenged) in the sample, the agency was not able

to locate such users within their existing networks.

The other twelve women and one male respond-

ent were selected using purposive sampling methods.

As the focus was on sexuality rights and communi-

cation rights, we targeted internet users who were

likely to have an interest in or connection with these

themes. We selected Indian women bloggers as a

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET74 India

category to sample respondents from (ﬁve), people

on queer electronic mailing lists and groups (ﬁve),

women with disabilities, and some purposively sam-

pled from general interactions with people in public

places and through personal/professional networks

(three). We also set up a WordPress blog and a Gmail

ID so that all respondents could know more about

the project.

The interviews lasted roughly an hour and a half

each, and were held at a place of the respondent’s

convenience. In some cases this was their homes, in

others public places like chain coffee shops. The idea

was to meet respondents in an informal setting so

that the conversation could be casual, albeit struc-

tured, and enable them to communicate freely in a

neutral space where nobody who knew the respond-

ents was listening. The interviewees were informed

that interviews would be conﬁdential and that their

identities would be protected, given the nature of

the questions being asked. Interviews were con-

ducted singly and separately by each lead researcher,

with ﬁve of the interviews being conducted jointly

by the two lead researchers who make up the EROT-

ICS India research team.

The two sets of data gathered by the two

methods, quantitative and qualitative, are mutu-

ally exclusive and although the pool from which the

samples were drawn were sometimes similar (urban,

young, regular internet users across Mumbai), there

was no overlap in sample. Due to time and resource

constraints, both were pursued simultaneously. Al-

though the questionnaire did ask respondents to

volunteer to be interviewed by sending us an email,

we did not receive any. As a result, no one who ﬁlled

the questionnaire was interviewed and vice versa.

Given the emphasis on anonymity in getting sur-

vey questionnaires ﬁlled in, respondents’ personal

contact information was not sought, so it was not

possible, either, for the researchers to follow up with

in-depth interviews. There could perhaps have been

much interesting, substantive data that could have

been accessed by interviewing survey respondents;

however, this is something that we could suggest as

an approach for any further research in this area. The

two sets are therefore not comparable, but they do

complement one another. The strength of quantita-

tive data is the bigger picture it is able to draw and

the broad sweeps or trends it can indicate, whereas

the qualitative data reveals the smaller stories, rich

detail and between-the-lines insights on sexuality

and the self in online/ofﬂine worlds. We have there-

fore used both methods strategically for their own

strengths, to put together a picture of women us-

ing the internet in Mumbai which comprises broad

strokes, but also the colour, texture and vibrancy of

rich detail.

“The world at our ﬁngertips”: Life online

Survey ﬁndings

Our survey of 150 young internet users in Mumbai

sought to trace broad trends on how young people

are accessing the internet, what their perceptions of

the net are and what they are doing online. Young

people constitute the largest, and most rapidly ris-

ing, category of internet users in the country, close

to 77% of all internet users.

By “young” (a contro-

versial category in itself due to contradictory ages

of consent/suffrage/work in different countries) we

mean those who are below 25 years of age. Most

young people active on the internet also fall in the

category of “digital natives”. Though contested,

“the term ‘Digital Natives’ is generally used to dif-

ferentiate the generation that was born after 1980,

who has an unprecedented (and often inexplicable)

relationship with information technology.”

Mumbai is a cosmopolitan, bustling city with a

population of over twelve million people. It is the

capital of the state of Maharashtra but is also known

as the commercial capital of the country. Mumbai

was known as Bombay until 1997, when internal

politics pushed the state to change the name back

from its colonial name to that used by locals. Thou-

sands of people ﬂock to Mumbai from other parts

of India daily to ﬁnd work or live out their dreams.

Our 150 respondents were all young people living in

this crowded and busy metropolis. They were in the

age group eighteen to 25, mostly students pursuing

undergraduate and postgraduate studies from dif-

ferent parts of the city, the total sample covering 38

localities across the suburbs, centre and downtown

areas, although there was more representation from

the western suburbs.

For this group, the internet presents a world of

new and exciting opportunities. This group of re-

spondents really are the “digital natives”: they are

not intimidated by technology, having grown up

32 IAMAI i-Cube Survey

33 Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham Digital Natives with a Cause? A

Knowledge Survey and Framework (Hivos Knowledge Programme

and Centre for Internet and Society, 2009) www.cis-india.org

34 Shah and Abraham describe the existing literature around the

phrase “digital natives”: “Existing literature offers no deﬁnite

answers, only working deﬁnitions: children born after 1980; youths

signiﬁcantly affected by the rise of Internet technologies; an

emerging global population growing up with digital technologies

central to everyday functioning. No literature attempts to provide

either a theoretical understanding or serious expostulation of

what a Digital Native identity can mean. Yet there is an increasing

amount of anecdotal and scholarly evidence of a generation who

relate to digital technologies differently and live in a markedly

different way than preceding generations. Scholarship that

addresses this sense of difference is rare; most rely on novelty as

the source of the difference, without interrogating the identity’s

mechanics and politics. Discussions of Digital Natives and their

presence/growth devolve into questions of infrastructure-building,

safety and education, without adequate theorisation of the

identity.”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET75 India

with its easy access; they have come of age with

the birth of Web 2.0 and it dominates their use of

the internet. The majority of the respondents (120)

were, by design, women, with a small sample of men

(30) included as respondents to indicate any possible

trends of gendered differences in responses. While

the ﬁndings cannot be generalised, they do indicate

some broad trends that may be explored further in

subsequent research. Overall, 95% of the sample

agreed that to be successful in modern India today it

was essential to be connected through the internet.

Emailing, chatting and the lure of social networking

sites, primarily Facebook and Orkut, colonise young

people’s internet usage. The internet is considered

a free space, where a vast amount of information

can be accessed and people can be met. In fact, it

would appear the internet is today the primary tool

for information seeking for this generation of youth.

It is perceived that the internet is a critical tool in

determining career success and is what connects the

Indian youth to the global(ised) world.

At the same time, respondents also speak in

terms of the “dangers and delights” paradigm

that has permeated global public discourse on the

internet since its invention. Within this cautionary

vocabulary, the “dangers” which most occupy the

Indian imagination (fed by a steady diet of public dis-

course and media anxieties) are those of “addiction”

and general “danger”, both of which are not clearly

articulated. This is a limitation of the questionnaire-

based method itself that gives little opportunity for

clariﬁcations and details, but also reﬂects uncritical

usage of popular terms which are bandied about

in the media. Addiction, for example, has a medi-

cal connotation, but this is not necessarily what is

meant by its use here. It is also subjective: for one

parent, a child spending three hours on the internet

may be “addiction” but for another the number may

be six hours; for the child, it may be a way of life.

Even what constitutes “harmful content” is unclear

and subjective: sexual content per se appears to be

harmless, unless there are children and/or violence

involved.

That the internet is a space that can be monitored,

and where privacy cannot always be maintained, are

less of a concern for Indian young users. At present,

Indian youngsters appear to be basking in the social

networking phenomena, and privacy is not a big

issue for them – or at least their concerns are not

framed yet in these terms. This is somewhat disturb-

ing given the gendered implications of this – that

35 Manjima Bhattacharjya and Maya I. Ganesh EROTICS: An

Exploratory Research on Sexuality and the Internet. Literature

Review (Association for Progressive Communications Women’s

Networking Support Programme, 2008) www.genderit.org/content/

erotics-exploratory-research-sexuality-internet-literature-review

there are cases which have emerged in the media

(like the MMS scandal) that demonstrate the murky

side of violations of privacy, in which young women

have had their images taken or trafﬁcked without

their consent. This lack of concern with the impli-

cations of these things may also be the “follies of

youth”, where future implications of current actions

in the digital age have yet to be thought through.

Users are cautious when online and value that it

is a free space, but there is confusion over wheth-

er it should be regulated by the government. Even

though the IT Act was amended recently, more than

90% of the respondents have not even heard of the

IT Act. This ambivalence about regulation demon-

strates the absence of public debate on the issue

of internet regulation in the country, although the

government has been active on this front for a few

years now.

There are no strong gender differences in re-

sponses within this sample, only subtle ones that

mostly reﬂect gender dimensions in Indian society.

For example, women learn to use the internet from a

wider net of relationships whereas men learn prima-

rily from friends, indicating the role that male group

bonding has to play in young men’s social lives.

Women strikingly face more parental or spousal re-

strictions in accessing the internet, whereas men feel

there are no such restrictions, indicating the general

surveillance that women (especially young women)

are subject to. Women are silent when asked about

sexual content on the internet, whereas men are

more vocal and accepting of it. The discourse of mo-

rality is strong in women’s responses, in line with the

general social rules of “decent” womanly behaviour

and middle-class values strongly inﬂuenced by Victo-

rian codes of sexual morality – all of which bear more

on middle-class women than men.

A revealing aspect of this survey is methodologi-

cal. Despite measures taken to ensure their privacy

and conﬁdentiality, respondents seemed uncomfort-

able responding to questions around their access to

sexual content online, preferring instead to present

their attitudes towards such content online. One can

assume respondents did not want to be deﬁnitive in

acknowledging certain behaviours relating to sex.

Furthermore, acknowledging them on paper could

have felt more “ofﬁcial” or one that could have a

tangible footprint rather than the anecdotal evi-

dence one presents in a chat or in-depth interview.

The reticence on the part of women to engage

with issues of sexual content on the internet was

initially surprising, given that the interview sample

drawn from a similar (although not same) popula-

tion talked about their online chatting, ﬂirting, visits

to dating sites, access of pornography and erotica

and posting titillating pictures of themselves, and

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET76 India

thus revealing a rich engagement with the internet

in terms of sexuality. However, none of these are

considered “sex” or even “sexual content” on the

internet. This leads us to reﬂect that, in hindsight,

the words themselves were enough for respondents

to distance themselves from these activities. For rea-

sons of space and concerns around brevity, the survey

questionnaire did not include probing questions

about speciﬁc internet activities relating to intimacy

and sexuality. Perhaps, if we had deﬁned the con-

tent more clearly, a more nuanced picture could

have emerged instead of ofﬂine taboos and silences

being replicated in the responses. With interviews,

however, respondents were able to make the distinc-

tion between various kinds of content and online

experiences, thus allowing for a rich picture of actual

internet use. Based on this analysis we would recom-

mend that future research apply qualitative methods

rather than quantitative methods to explore the nu-

ances of online behaviour, especially on issues like

sexuality where strong social taboos, particularly for

women, continue to exist.

Interviews: Introducing the sample

This report is primarily based on in-depth interviews

with 31 respondents, and explores the details of their

everyday internet use and access. The internet has

rapidly become a regular everyday feature of these

women’s lives, from structuring and facilitating their

work, to allowing them to pursue a range of activ-

ist, hobby, leisure and recreational uses. We begin by

introducing the sample more extensively and catego-

rising respondents based on similarities in age, work

status, and how they use the internet.

Our group of respondents would ﬁt well into the

deﬁnition of the “middle class”

as given by econ-

omist Nancy Birdsall: “In socio-political terms, the

middle class is traditionally that segment of society

with a degree of economic security that allows it to

uphold the rule of law, invest and desire stability.”

Broadly speaking, respondents were typically from

middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds,

educated and ﬁnancially secure, from professional

36 The term “middle class” means different things in different

countries but in India, certain socioeconomic classiﬁcations (SECs)

have been developed by the (Indian) National Readership Survey.

The SEC groups urban Indian households using two factors:

education and the occupational status of the chief wage earner of

the family. There are ﬁve main SECs from A (highest) to E. SEC A is

upper class, SEC B is upper-middle class, SEC C is middle class, SEC D

and E are lower class. Another parameter is ownership of property.

There is some debate over whether the old understanding of

“middle class” is still relevant, given the changing demographics

in Indian society and the sudden burst of wealth and prosperity

enjoyed by a certain section of professionals who have beneﬁted

from globalisation.

37 Rukmini Shrinivasan “India has no middle class?” The Economic

Times 6 May 2010

and service backgrounds, having access to a range of

privileges. Most of them had personal bank accounts

and credit cards, owned property, had postgraduate

degrees, and had easy internet access with personal

computers (some, more than one) and a degree of

familiarity with the web.

Even though the internet is notionally a “free

space”, how people access and use the internet re-

veal the dynamics of power and control that exist

in reality. Age and employment status in this group

were important to their internet access conditions;

women in their late twenties and older, of inde-

pendent means and with jobs tend to have fewer

restrictions or barriers in accessing the internet. And

while younger women living in their parents’ homes

may have access to the technology and infrastructure

of the internet, they are more likely to face parental

or familial restrictions around how frequently they

use the internet, and what they use it for. This is not

to imply, however, that these young women are ac-

tually physically restricted in any way; they do spend

a considerable amount of time living their lives in a

careful balance between online pleasures and ofﬂine

restrictions. More delicate negotiations of internet

access are evidenced in the lives of women who are

in child- and family-care roles, who do not have per-

sonal computers or internet-enabled mobile phones.

We ﬁnd that how women access the internet and

who they are are necessarily linked, being related

to their ages, class, socioeconomic and cultural back-

grounds and histories.

This aspect, therefore, primarily guides our cat-

egorisation of respondents into distinct groups with

common characteristics and patterns. These are

broad descriptions of interviewees with the aim of

giving readers a general idea of the type of proﬁle

they have, and also allowing the reader to refer

back to their general characteristics when individ-

ual respondents are mentioned. The groupings are

not water-tight, with respondents also constituting

bridges between and across categories. Nor do we

intend for these categories to be understood as es-

sentialisms. They are descriptive categories that

allows us to refer to their characteristics and histo-

ries through the following handles: Digital Natives,

Guardians, Moderns, Men. All names used are pseu-

donyms to protect the identity of respondents.

The “Digital Natives”

Corresponding to our survey sample who were

between eighteen and 25 years of age, a third of

our sample for the interviews were also “Digital

Natives”. By using this label to identify the largest

sub-section of the sample, our primary objective

is to indicate how their everyday lives and prac-

tices are closely tied to technologies. This group

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET77 India

of Digital Natives – Arushi, Punita, Rupali, Himani,

Meena, Shuchi and Unnati

– are under the age of

25 years. The Digital Natives category also includes

three young men – Amol, Vikas and Vijay – forming

the largest age group and category in this sample.

They are all from “business community” house-

holds

(Gujarati, Marwari and Sindhi) generally

known to be prosperous, hard working and indus-

trious but also conservative, strict about gender

roles and resistant to change in their culture, values

and cuisine. Mumbai has a strong concentration of

these communities, having been a centre of trade

and commerce for over 200 years. These Digital Na-

tives live with their parents, and intend on doing

so until they get married, which is when they will

move into their own homes; the men will possibly

move into a ﬂoor above/below their parents with

their new families in a continuation of the joint

family system. They all have almost-personal access

to the internet; some share with younger siblings.

Meena, 24, says she “forced” her parents to buy a

computer and keep it in her room; she cites this as

having contributed to her “internet addiction”. In

23-year-old Arushi’s home everyone has their own

computer.

Rupali, nineteen, is a dance choreographer

teaching children in the neighbourhood popu-

lar Bollywood-style routines and choreographing

pieces for weddings and family functions. Amol

was trading in stocks at 22, mostly online. Rupali’s

parents have told her the choreography and dance

lessons are all right as a hobby but only until she

gets married. Amol meanwhile already sits in his fa-

ther’s ofﬁce to learn the ropes of the trade, and gets

inputs from the family stock broker on where he

should hedge his bets. All the other male respond-

ents said they were “part time DJs” (downloading

music online). This is all in addition to the under-

graduate or postgraduate degrees they are enrolled

in, although the relevance of a postgraduate

degree other than an MBA (Masters in Business Ad-

ministration) is suspect in their minds. Commerce is

the popular ﬁeld of study, with three women study-

ing psychology and physiotherapy. These women

will ultimately marry, and the men see themselves

taking over the family business. Eighteen-year-old

Punita’s description of her everyday life is a window

into the hard-work ethic, ambition and responsibil-

ity that the Digital Natives have:

38 The names of all respondents in this study have been changed.

Those who are publicly known by their real names through their

blogs have been given aliases when referred to as individuals. One

interviewee is not considered a “respondent” but as an “expert”

in the ﬁeld.

39 Please refer to the section on methodology to know more about

how this sample was recruited. All “Digital Natives” were accessed

through a recruitment agency.

I am the eldest girl at home right now […] so I

have to manage housework, my mom’s work, my

studies, washing clothes, cooking food and my

own work. I am an events coordinator, and I do

promotion, hostess and ushering work for two

years now. In fact today there is an event at the

Hyatt in the evening for which we have to usher

guests to their place. So nowadays I am getting a

little less time on the internet, but it is there on

my phone. I make about 1,200 or 1,500 Rupees

per day, but there is an event in Delhi coming up

and they are paying 4,500 per day! You just have

to stand and look after things in a stall or some-

thing, it’s damn simple. We get hired through

our own networks – telling our friends, cousins,

etc. – I think our generation wants to earn our-

selves, we are dying to earn money. So we do all

these things, and when we get time, we spend it

on the internet.

These young people’s lives are fairly colonised by

technologies. The internet ﬁrst came into their lives

when they were in school, enabling them to do

their assignments and projects. Now it is, as Arushi

says, “my life, my voice, my expression.” For Himani,

eighteen, terms like “apps”, “hacking”, “DP” (dis-

play picture), “chat” are part of everyday vocabulary.

The internet is more than just about being con-

nected. It is where fortunes will be made, marriage

partners will be sought, and it is what keeps family

and community together across continents. The big

change in their internet lives is social networking;

being able to access the internet from their phones

means that they can be constantly connected, check-

ing for “scraps” on Orkut and “likes” on Facebook.

When they seek online partners for dates and casual

ﬂirting, they are careful to avoid people from other

countries, communities and castes. They are look-

ing for local (i.e. Mumbai) boyfriends and girlfriends

with whom there is a possibility of something more

tangible. Many, though, have friends and ﬂirt part-

ners from other cities as well. The young women

hear that foreign men want to do “weird things”.

They talk of having friends who are “tech crazy”

“tech freaks” who advise them on how to gain some

mastery of the internet beyond everyday social net-

working and surﬁng, like the use of bit-torrents

to download music and movies. Knowing “ethical

hackers”

personally is also part of the currency of

40 A Delhi boy, Ankit Fadia, became widely known when, as a

teenager, he hacked into the website of an Indian magazine and

defaced its front page. At ﬁfteen he published a book called

Ethical Hacking. Since then he has gone on to be a cyber security

expert and ethical hacker, has trademarked an ethical hacking

study programme bearing his name, and is a consultant to a range

of businesses and organisations. Most claims of Ankit Fadia’s

achievements have also been widely disputed and he has been at

the centre of a number of controversies around them. However, he

remains inspirational to many young people.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET78 India

cool. It is these ethical hackers who help them out

when their accounts and proﬁles have been broken

into or manipulated; sometimes they are also the

ones who do the breaking in and manipulating.

A distinctive feature of this group is that while

they may have access to the internet, women have to

negotiate their use around its implications for their

ofﬂine worlds. Still living under her parents’ roof, un-

married and with a reputation to protect, a young

woman discovered to have posted a picture that is

too sexy, found surﬁng pornography or to have an

online boyfriend, puts herself at some risk for cen-

sure. There is surveillance within the peer group too.

Punita says that an older cousin keeps an eye on her

so she does not put up pictures of herself with her

boyfriend or in short clothes. Unnati, 21, does not

want her boyfriend to see the sexy pictures she posts

of herself on Facebook so she has not “friended”

him. Most of them know what the limits are. The

implication of not knowing your limits is that your

reputation can be sullied, ofﬂine; worse still, on-

line, the manipulation of your personal identity and

photographs on social networking sites can have

damaging consequences. The repercussions of that

are all too well-known in this “era of scandals”.

Digital Natives are old enough not to have ﬁltering

software installed on their home computers for three

reasons: they do not have to share their computers,

or they are the only ones in the home who actually

know how to install such software, or because the

siblings they share computers with are not very much

younger. Nonetheless, the women in this group say

that they carefully manage their browsing histories

and try to ensure that no one else at home looks over

their shoulders at what they are doing online.

The “Bridge”

There is a subset of the Digital Native category that

we refer to as the “Bridge”. This includes Meena,

Komal, Shikha and Shuchi who range from 24 to

27 years of age. They have got degrees and some

work experience in diverse areas – banking, sales,

physiotherapy – and all of them are waiting to get

married. Meena met her current boyfriend online in

a chat room; he lives a few streets away and is from

the same community of Sindhis.

Her family does

41 This “era of scandals” refers to a spate of reports about how

camera-enabled mobile phones were being used to record

intimate or revealing clips of everyday people and celebrities

which were then leaked publicly. Scandals ensued with the release

of these images.

42 Sindhis are a socio-ethnic group of people originating from

the province of Sindh in what is now Pakistan. Sindhi was also

the language they spoke. In 1947 after the partition of the

subcontinent into India and Pakistan, impoverished Muslims from

North India moved to Sindh in Pakistan, and Hindu Sindhis moved

to India. Mumbai has a large concentration of the Hindu Sindhi

population.

not know about him yet and prefers that she search

for suitable matches on the popular matrimonial site

Shaadi Dot Com. She is now undergoing a strict phys-

ical ﬁtness and diet regimen in order to lose some

extra weight and look good for prospective suitors, as

per her parents’ wishes. As for the boyfriend, she will

tell her parents about him “soon”, once she works

up the nerve. Shuchi, 24, and Komal, 27, are look-

ing for matches through online portals in the hope

that a love story will come alive for them. Shikha, 24,

has a responsible position as a sales team manager

in a large mobile telecommunications company, and

contributes signiﬁcantly to her family’s income and

has good prospects at work. Yet, she would be hap-

piest ﬁnding a match on Shaadi Dot Com and settling

down. All these women are looking to move from

being teenagers and young adults to mature, mar-

ried women. Those who are older and working, like

Shikha, do not have a lot of time to meander through

social networking sites; everything around online

dating and match-seeking is focused and targeted.

All of them (with the exception of Meena who al-

ready has a boyfriend she wants to eventually marry)

want to ﬁnd partners on matrimonial sites; however,

this is not easy. First, there is the issue of arriving at

a suitable way to present themselves online – in a

way that satisﬁes their parents, potential in-laws, a

potential husband and themselves; and there is the

issue of parents’ concerns around whether ﬁnding a

match on the internet is reliable or not. It is some-

thing that these women have to carefully negotiate

but it is a task that they have set themselves to and

work at diligently.

The “Guardians”

Ranging from 26 to 44 years of age, the seven mid-

dle-class women in this group have spouses, parents

or in-laws and children to take care of; six are mar-

ried, six of them work outside the home, and six of

them have children. They see themselves as the glue

that holds their families together. They are Rati,

Malthi, Veena, Payal, Shipra, Sheena and Vrushali.

They work in diverse ﬁelds, from educational psy-

chology and school counselling to being cabin crew

on airlines. These women are primarily characterised

by their relative afﬂuence and access to personal

computers, mobile phones and the internet. They

have enough space and opportunities to access the

internet for work, leisure and pleasure. They enjoy

social networking sites to reconnect with old school

and college friends, unlike the Digital Natives who

use social networking to connect with new people.

Skype and chatting enable this further, and to keep

in touch with family across India and the world. Those

who do not have to use the internet for work access

the internet differently. Women with small children,

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET79 India

like Veena, 26, make time to get online when their

children are asleep. Those who have school-going

children ﬁnd that only after they have been sent to

school, and the household chores are completed,

can they sit down to get online. There are few other

restrictions these women face in their access of the

internet, although 35-year-old Malthi’s story stands

out as an exception. She has to share the computer

with her son, which prevents her from accessing the

kind of content she would like to view.

My son uses it a lot and I know he has a private

life and looks at lots of things online that he

doesn’t like to share or let us know about. Some-

times maybe even I want to watch blue ﬁlms but I

am worried about viruses and scared that my son

will see that I have saved these ﬁles and links on

the computer. Or maybe he will suddenly come

in while I am watching. I feel a bit shy to share

these things with my husband – you know you

can’t say these things to a husband. Everyone has

the right to a private space and the problem is

that I have to share mine with my son, so I have

to be extra careful.

Malthi was the only person interviewed who felt that

her internet usage was restricted because she did not

have a personal computer or an internet-enabled

mobile phone. She also realises the conﬂict between

her own need to access adult content online (an issue

all the women in this sample believed was a preroga-

tive and right for adults) and her concerns for her

teenaged son doing the same.

Other Guardians were equally candid about ac-

cessing blue ﬁlms, erotica and pornography online

for their own pleasure and to share with their part-

ners. However, they are similarly conﬂicted about

what is appropriate for children. They have fairly

strict views on censorship and children’s use of the

internet. There is one extreme like Shipra, 35, who

does not allow her sons to visit cybercafés, has given

them very basic mobile phones that do not support

video or photo features, and password-protects in-

ternet access at home. On the other extreme are

Payal, 39, and Rati, 28, who think it is important for

children to be aware of the risks online and face

them conﬁdently. Rati believes it is important to

be fearless online and know how to protect your-

self. She does not support the monitoring of young

people. Sheena, 44, is concerned about how read-

ily her sixteen-year-old daughter and eight-year-old

nephew use Facebook; they add friends too readily

and Sheena worries that there is no way to check

the background of people who befriend them. She

is clear about what worries her: online paedophilia.

Vrushali, 31, is an education consultant who also

gives tuition to a range of public school students. She

is concerned at what she has witnessed: that children

are today deeply embroiled in the internet without

fully understanding the implications. It is because of

their concern for their children’s safety within a par-

ticular construct of risk and danger online that we

have referred to this category as the “Guardians”.

The “Moderns”

The “Moderns” in this sample – Marina, Rekha, Sa-

haj, Sejal, Reema, Sakshi, Seema, Gurbani, Mohini,

Sara and Geet – range from 27 to 54 years of age.

They are writers, bloggers, journalists, academics,

entrepreneurs, novelists, or work in advertising and

the creative and media industries. They typically

have postgraduate educations and either freelance

or have regular jobs. Some are married with chil-

dren, others are single, and this group includes

self-identiﬁed lesbian women, one transwoman and

one woman with a partial disability. Two of these

women reside in New Delhi, and many of the oth-

ers are migrants to Mumbai, not originally from the

city but making it their home now, like Gurbani, 26,

who moved to Mumbai from her hometown Amrit-

sar a few years ago for postgraduate education and

stayed on to make a career for herself in the media.

In contrast to some members of the two groups men-

tioned earlier, we would consider this group to be

“modern” in the sense written about by the Indian

sociologist Dipankar Gupta, who says, “Modernity

is an attitude which represents universalistic norms,

where the dignity of an individual as citizen is invio-

lable and where one’s achievement counts for more

than family background or connections.”

The women in this sample have high expectations

of gender equality and freedom in relationships;

they manage multiple roles as partners, parents, am-

bitious professionals, and have families who support

these roles. Women in this group have taken personal

risks in forging new identities through their relation-

ships or their career choices. Reema, 54, after her

divorce unapologetically sought out the internet to

ﬁnd a community of people and to ﬁnd companion-

ship. In addition to their jobs, women in this group

take on roles as activists in their communities. Seema,

38, uses her blog to raise money for people affected

by the November 2008 attacks on the city. The four

queer women in this group, Marina (35), Sahaj (30),

Sejal (33) and Geet (27), are associated with local ac-

tivist networks working on sexuality rights. Rekha,

45, an academic in this group, works with and sup-

ports women’s rights activists and uses her research

to support disability rights movements. Everyone in

this group has a personal computer and unhindered

access to the internet. Distinct in their narratives and

43 Gupta Mistaken Modernity

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET80 India

through the interview process is a willingness to en-

gage with and reﬂect on the nature of the internet

itself, as a medium, as a technology, and its role in

society. Women in this category could also reﬂect on

their own internet use.

The Moderns’ views on a number of issues

around sexuality, censorship and internet regulation

are signiﬁcantly different from the Digital Natives

and the Guardians; as a group they generally believe

that the internet is a free space and that notions of

regulation need to be nuanced beyond strict mor-

al positions. Two of the bloggers – Sakshi, 27, and

Sara, 31 – write on issues pertaining to sexuality and

politics, putting forth an image of the contemporary

urban woman questioning and striking out of strict

gender roles. The two “mommy bloggers” in this

group, Seema and Mohini, 33, have different posi-

tions from the mothers in the Guardian group about

their children’s safety online. They do not believe it is

possible to monitor and police children strongly, but

they do think it is required. They are more in favour

of educating their children in responsible and safe

internet use. This group supports the rights of peo-

ple to be able to access whatever content they wish

to, while emphasising what content they believe is

harmful (such as advertisements for sex selection of

a foetus, or rape sites) but equally recognising that

regulation is often draconian and limited.

The men

The four men interviewed here merit a category of

their own, because this is primarily a study about

how women use the internet. Interviews were done

with a few men in order to introduce a small con-

trol element. The men – Bobby, Amol, Vikas and

Vijay – were aged between nineteen and 35. Bobby,

35, is married with a small daughter, and the other

three men are students. For women, the internet

was about making friends, social networking sites,

activism, chatting and social gaming. The four men

interviewed all talked about the potential for work

and business through the internet. Bobby uses the in-

ternet for work, as he is a garment exporter, and the

other three men, being students, use the internet for

college work as well as leisure, gaming and pleasure.

Vijay, 24, exempliﬁes this aspiration to make money

through the internet, even if it means writing a few

poems or case studies:

I am doing my MBA and networking has to be

done. From the job perspective I can ﬁnd peo-

ple working in the ﬁeld and connect with them.

Many ﬁnancial communities have websites,

companies where I can upload proﬁles. I read

blogs sometimes. Like MyPoetry.com, or through

Google search blogs. At MyPoetry.com you can

make money also. You write a para or a poem

and post it, payment is in dollars. Submit one or

two a week. The best ones can get 100 dollars

down to 10-15 dollars, minimum, sometimes 25-

30 dollars. Registration fee is 50 dollars. I have

made some money through this sometimes. You

can write case studies, poems, whatever is on

your mind.

The men’s access to the internet is not signiﬁcantly

different to the women in the same groups. The

three students, Amol, Vikas and Vijay can be consid-

ered part of the Digital Natives category, and Bobby

as a Guardian. They were all candid and open about

using the internet to access pornography and ﬁnd

dates and girls for “casual ﬂirting”; however, unlike

the women interviewed, men talked about using the

internet to “play pranks” on their friends. Vijay says

he created a fake proﬁle and masqueraded as a girl

for a whole year in order to fool a friend into think-

ing he had found a real girlfriend. Amol and Vikas,

nineteen, are adept at ﬁnding women to ﬂirt with

and know how to make them feel special, while Bob-

by says he has had numerous heartbreaks and love

affairs online.

Online activities: An overview

Amongst the everyday online activities of the sam-

ple, the most striking aspects are the popularity of

social networking sites (SNSs) and online chatting

(amongst both survey respondents and the interview

sample).

The Digital Natives in this sample were caught

up in the frenzy of SNSs like Facebook and Orkut,

with migration from Orkut to Facebook being one

of the key ﬂights at the time of interviews. The shift

was attributed to Facebook’s more secure privacy

settings as well as the appeal of quizzes and social

games – FarmVille, Maﬁa Wars, Café World and

Poker. Getting onto SNSs is essential for inclusion in

peer groups (“Now everyone is on Facebook, it’s a

social stigma if you’re not,” says Punita). Many have

had proﬁles on these sites since the ages of fourteen

or ﬁfteen years, moving from one SNS to the other

depending on what’s popular (“I used to be on Orkut

but now everyone is on FB, plus it has all the games”

is a common statement). Being part of SNSs was es-

sential to being globally connected and “in” with the

latest trend amongst peers; for Moderns and Guard-

ians SNSs are more about networking, reconnecting

with old friends and staying in touch with family. In a

globalising world, “People change cities, homes, jobs

all the time, but the only thing constant is their email

address,” says Vrushali.

People felt more secure on Facebook (which is

ironic, given worldwide protests, at the time of writ-

ing, about Facebook’s privacy controls), and also

thought it was more “classy”, whereas Orkut was

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET81 India

becoming a space that was for the masses, a plat-

form that was too open. Respondents have had their

Orkut accounts hacked into, and their personal pho-

tographs manipulated, so were hesitant to trust it

completely again. However, they did not delete their

accounts but reduced their activities on this plat-

form, and moved the majority of their time spend to

Facebook and its applications.

Following closely amongst popular online activi-

ties is searching for information online for work or

study. We go into these in depth later. What also

emerged were some interesting observations on cy-

bercafés and gendered use of the internet.

Perceptions of cybercafés

One of the dominant themes that emerged was

that since internet access is practically ubiquitous

now, there is no need to visit a cybercafé. The cy-

bercafé is now an embodiment of another kind of

digital divide, one that is based on the economics of

access and class. Those who have personal access to

the internet now only use cybercafés when they are

experiencing a poor connection, have infrastructural

problems, need printing, scanning or photocopying

services, or are travelling out of their homes. Accord-

ing to interview respondents, the cybercafé is now

for the poor and the transient person who cannot se-

cure (or afford) a personal connection. Vrushali says

that “even your watchman can get a bio-data typed

up” and Rati notices that now “everyone uses net,

not just high-class people, even small people from

villages and low-class people in cities can get onto

the net.”

Young peoples’ use of cybercafés is a source of

concerned discussion. That young people converge

at cybercafés to play video games and multiplayer

online games means that there are groups of animat-

ed and noisy boys and male teens clustered around a

monitor. This seems to upset older users who feel dis-

turbed; parents like Shipra and Malthi are concerned

that their teenage sons are using the cover of gam-

ing to watch pornography, while others worry about

addiction to these games or the violence believed to

be inherent in them.

Respondents were also aware that personal infor-

mation and data can be compromised when surﬁng

at cybercafés. They make sure that they delete brows-

ing histories, do not save passwords and do not do

ﬁnancial transactions from cybercafés. Non-branded

cybercafés are akin to small businesses,

usually

housed in small spaces with low rents; coupled with

their popularity and accessibility, this translates into

overcrowding and pressure to ﬁnish surﬁng quickly.

44 Nimmi Rangaswamy Representing the Non-formal: the Business of

Internet cafes in India (Microsoft Research India, 2007) research.

microsoft.com

The idea of “small people”, crowded together in a

small space, where data is unsafe, creates a percep-

tion that cybercafés are dangerous places. And this

sense is heightened by what is implied through legal

regulations, that these are locations for men to surf

porn, pick up girls on the internet, plot terrorist at-

tacks, and for young couples to meet romantically.

The perception that cybercafés are a cover for ro-

mantic meetings was more commonly held by older

people in the sample, not the Digital Natives, but it

was however mentioned by a small number in the

survey sample. Perhaps this is a function of class

and location. Being from a particular socioeconomic

background and living in a big city like Mumbai, this

sample had access to other urban settings for such

meetings, from malls to coffee shops and movie

halls, and did not perceive the “seedy” cybercafé as a

space for such interactions. In contrast, Gurbani says

of small-town cybercafés:

In Amritsar they were shady, with weird men who

came to chat and watch porn. You had to be well

clad, go in, do your work, get out fast. Till four

years ago, they were like dating centres with cab-

ins, in which couples used to go. But they were

banned after one of the places was shut down

because it was found out that this was going on.

Gendered ideas about gendered use

of the internet

Women think that men use the internet for work,

gaming and online pornography. Men think that

women use the internet to chat and look for recipes,

personal grooming products and meditation/yoga

courses. Both men and women are both amazed and

concerned at how savvy and conﬁdent children and

teenagers are with the internet. The interviewees

were asked to talk about how different members of

their families access and use the internet, so the re-

sponses here are not entirely stereotypical responses;

their perceptions are based on what they think they

have noticed about what their partners, siblings and

children do online.

The Digital Natives group of women were sure

that their male peers were “looking for hot-looking

girls in the area they are staying in” and were into

hacking and gaming. They believe that boys are “not

bothered” and are curious to see and share pornog-

raphy, “even knowing how to get through ﬁrewalls

and restrictions on computers.” The guys like rac-

ing and dishum-dishum

games, girls like Solitaire,

bowling or Pac-Man. Komal says that the way men

approach sex is the way they learn to drive: on their

45 Onomatopoeic word used to refer to an action-packed movie;

dishum-dishum refers to the sound of ﬁsts, guns, explosions.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET82 India

own, and conﬁdently. Women, on the other hand,

“have to go to driving schools.” Komal clariﬁes that

the internet is like a driving school that educates

women about sexuality whereas men have “already

learned” and now use the internet for pleasure.

The Guardians and Moderns both felt that

the men in their homes use the internet for work,

to manage their ﬁnances and to play games. The

Guardians say that the men in their homes use lap-

tops for work and not much else. “Men usually have

a ﬁxed agenda” and “women are all over the place”

says one mommy blogger. Very few male bloggers

are “daddy bloggers”, she ﬁnds; they usually write

about politics and “geeky stuff, stock markets.” An-

other blogger says that she tends to equate men

using the internet with pornography, although she

does admit to stereotyping.

The discourse around children on the internet

swings between concern for their well-being online,

and surprise at how conﬁdently and quickly they take

to the internet. There was little information gath-

ered about what exactly pre-teens and teenagers do

online, more about what the women interviewees

felt about children’s use of the internet. From their

observations, children like gaming but the internet

also allows them to satisfy their curiosity about sex,

and act out common rites of passage online. For

example, bullying, which has always happened in a

school yard, is now seen occurring online. In this way,

the internet has seamlessly become part of their eve-

ryday lives.

Other than the interviews, each respondent also

ﬁlled in some tables at the end of the interview to

enable us to get a sense of the frequency of certain

activities. Following from observations in the analy-

sis of survey data that survey respondents said they

did not access pornography, sexy images or erotica,

we were curious about how this sample would re-

spond to these questions. Like the survey sample, it

would appear that the in-depth interview sample

was similarly uncomfortable stating in a self-ﬁlled

questionnaire format that they accessed such con-

tent. This becomes signiﬁcant from a methodological

perspective because in their interviews they were

comfortable and vocal about visiting marriage and

dating sites and accessing pornography and erotica

online, reafﬁrming our belief that survey-based re-

search on internet and sexuality may be less likely to

get honest responses about access to sexual content

online.

The internet as information gateway

For Digital Natives, their earliest association with

the internet is for doing school assignments and

projects that required them to ﬁnd information

on various issues. In fact, this is a driving factor for

many households to buy PCs. Punita, now eight-

een, remembers, “I used to go to father’s ofﬁce or

cybercafés for my project work but then I needed

regularly, so parents bought a PC at home.” Hima-

ni also recalls using the internet in her early school

years, but more regularly after Class 8, “especially

for subjects like EVS, environmental sciences.” The

computer entered Unnati’s house as an educational

tool for her older sister, although for her it meant

keeping up with her friends. She says, “It was in the

9th that I ﬁrst got onto the internet. It was basically

peer pressure. Orkut was a big thing, I was fourteen

or ﬁfteen years old at the time. We got a PC and net

connection at home, mainly for my elder sister who

needed to do projects and needed a printer, net and

so on.” With school boards now opening up to do

more project-oriented curricula, the relevance of the

internet as a source of information is only going to

rise for coming generations.

For older Natives and Moderns, the internet was

critical for their work lives. Komal, 27, works as a

recruitment consultant, and the basis of her work is

locating CVs online and matching them with clients’

requirements. Komal identiﬁes the best thing about

the internet as ﬁlling in where our faulty college

education system fails, and hauling her out of a cri-

sis. “I was doing my graduation in literature and had

no notes, only knew name of the novel, not a single

sheet of paper. The internet helped to get notes from

which I studied, and passed my exams in the ﬁrst at-

tempt.” Gurbani, 26, used the internet more at work

when she joined an ad agency at 23, and needed to

do “research and ﬁnd images for print ads.” Seema,

38, and Reema, 54, who are both media profession-

als, used it in full force when it was introduced in

their respective workplaces, also learning how to use

it on the job.

Beyond the workplace, though, information on

the internet is also valued because it permeates eve-

ryday needs beyond study and work:

Can so easily access to anything in world, it has

written, visual and audio. And so much info – you

have a stomach ache, want to know whether to

turn left or right, Google has the answer. Your

car breaks down what do you do. It has the an-

swer to everything. It’s brilliant and it’s just a click

away. And now it’s on the mobile. (Gurbani, 26,

media professional)

Even if my baby’s poop is of a certain colour I

can go to Google and ﬁnd out what it could be.

This is sometimes counterproductive also, as you

don’t want to be relying on the net if you have

a life-threatening disease. But I don’t think any

other generation has had so much information.

My mom would max take out a copy of Spock to

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET83 India

help her through parenting. (Mohini, 33, mom-

my blogger)

One of the Guardians, Shipra, a 35-year-old house-

wife whose fourteen- and eleven-year-old sons use

it for their school projects, herself loves to surf the

net so she “can know about the world.” She says

with delight, “I love Google Earth – I can even see

the bungalow I have bought in Borivli with my own

money – it is there on Google Earth!”

Vrushali, 31, an educationist, regularly looks for

teaching information and materials online:

The internet can also be used for teaching in

quite wonderful ways. Like Google Earth I ﬁnd

is something really amazing. My husband is do-

ing a course in archaeology and will be going to

Hampi for some project work. So he was showing

me on the net and it is really like going there

yourself, a sort of virtual reality. You can relate to

the other person you know when you see things

like that in person, and I can share the experience

of being in Hampi with him a little bit at least,

even though I cannot go there with him.

It is an excellent teaching tool. If you want to

explain the Suez Canal strip and show it from

Google Earth, everything comes into perspective

and it becomes self-explanatory. A completely

new way to learn about geography and about

water bodies. Lessons don’t remain dry.

These sources of information are extremely valuable

for respondents, and they react strongly on things

they feel might threaten access to this free and vast

universe of global information. Vrushali, for exam-

ple, says, “What upsets me is things like hype that

terrorists are using Google Earth and so Google Earth

should be banned! Hanging Google Earth because

terrorists are using it is absolute nonsense.”

The internet is a primary tool for information

and education but moreover, in countries where

there are taboos around the articulation of sexuality,

sexual health and rights, the internet has a speciﬁc

and important role to play.

Sex education on the internet

in India, sex education is a controversial topic that

raises the hackles of right-wing leaders, religious

leaders and people who fear that such initiatives

may lead to increased and immoral sexual activity,

which may “corrupt the youth.” In 2008 a parlia-

mentary committee rejected a proposal from the

Ministry of Human Resource Development for a

comprehensive sex education programme called

the Adolescence Education Programme, saying that

“[our] social and cultural ethos are such that sex edu-

cation has absolutely no place in it,” and suggesting

that naturopathy and Ayurveda be taught instead.

The parliamentary committee’s comments reﬂected a

moralistic attitude with vague comments on decency

and Indian culture being the main logic for shoot-

ing down the proposal. Twelve states in India have

actively banned sex education in state-run schools.

This sets the stage for rampant ignorance about

sex-related matters, and no option for the young but

to seek information and answers to all their ques-

tions from other sources, including the internet. The

Agony Aunt columns in newspapers are ﬁlled with

questions ranging from the innocent to the absurd,

and are also widely read. Meena, 24, says, “I read a

lot of the section called ‘You Ask the Sexpert’ in the

newspaper. I’ve been reading it for three years reli-

giously. It answers many queries.” The other major

source of people’s information is internet porn, of-

ten a disturbing way for young people to ﬁnd out

about sex. Google searches often throw up porn sites

ﬁrst before the informational or educational sites on

sex. Vijay, 24, says, “In the way the searches come,

info[rmation] links should be there ﬁrst, then porno

stuff should be at the end, because people see the

ﬁrst few pages ﬁrst.” A blogger on political issues,

Sara, thinks it is a relief for Indians, remembering,

“Earlier you couldn’t ask family, and there was no

one to ask. Access to information (on sex) in India

wasn’t there, no one told us anything.”

Young women in the sample spoke about seeking

out speciﬁc information from the net, as opposed to

men who, apart from some research on HIV (for a col-

lege project) or personal curiosity on Viagra, did not

give details of what sort of sex-related information

they searched for online. Punita, eighteen, tells us:

There are some things they don’t teach you about

and which you need to ﬁnd out about. Like one

of my friends, for example, did some stuff with

her boyfriend and she wanted to know how to

use emergency contraception – you know, those

ads you see for the i-pill. So we went to the in-

ternet and looked for it, found out what are the

effects of it, that it has some bad side effects, and

should avoid it. A lot of people look online for

these things, where else will they go? You can’t

ask friends, as they will spread it around. You

don’t trust anybody in these things, and you have

to think thousand times before asking. You don’t

want others to know you want to know about

these things.

For Punita and her friend, such a query was under-

standably blasphemous in a social climate where sex

46 Anindita Sengupta “India in Denial over Sex Education” The

Guardian 16 August 2009 www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree

47 Monica Chaddha “Indian State Bans Sex Education” BBC News 3

April 2007 news.bbc.co.uk

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET84 India

before marriage is condemned. The parliamentary

committee on sex education deemed it “immoral,

unethical and unhealthy”

and a ﬁlm actress once

faced legislative action and social pressure for saying

there was nothing wrong with premarital sex.

Rupali adds, “There was also a project on HIV I

did where I searched on the net. After getting the

info, I realised we know nothing about HIV (from

the sex education class).” Rupali turned to the net

for things she was just curious about, like why some-

one her grandmother’s age does not get her period.

Rupali has also sought information from the internet

for a shy sister-in-law from Ahmedabad who asked

her to ﬁnd out information on pregnancy and con-

traception, implying that women from outside big

cities are less likely to be aware of such things, and

are more conservative. In such a situation then, the

potential of the internet as a source of information

for sexual health and sexuality rights becomes ampli-

ﬁed. Like Gurbani says, “Sex education in Amritsar

– no way. They are stuck in a backward society. So for

them it is different to have the internet.”

Colleges and schools often use ﬁltering soft-

ware to prevent such searches on their systems,

thereby precluding youth who rely on this access

to the internet. Vijay recalls that he could not do

an Advertising course project on condoms because

the word was blocked on search engines on college

computers. However, Wi-Fi, and having a plug-to-

surf card, allow students to access the information

they want and need. As Vijay says, “We are get-

ting information on an important issue. But [Indian

mentality] is like that.”

The government with its new amendments to the

IT Act is not helping these colleges to open up their

gates, and major businesses are falling in line with

government whips to avoid being caught in unnec-

essary crossﬁre on this volatile issue. Microsoft’s new

search engine Bing and Yahoo ensured that searches

for “sex” were not allowed on their Indian brows-

ers, in keeping with new laws that made accessing or

providing “lascivious content” illegal.

Even though

television and cinema are replete with images of sex

scandals and sting operations, it is this sort of blanket

ban which has been the interpretation of the IT Act.

48 Sengupta “India in Denial”

49 In 2005, Khushboo, an actress from Tamil Nadu, faced a public

outcry, and a number of cases ﬁled against her, for saying that

there was nothing wrong or offensive about premarital sex and

live-in relationships before marriage. In April 2010, the Supreme

Court of India ruled in her favour, overturning judgments of the

Madras High Court against her.

50 Gething Chamberlain “No Internet Sex Please We’re Indian. Web

Firms Observe New Law” The Guardian 28 December 2009 www.

guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/28/sex-internet-india-law

From these narratives, we see that because of

the nature of the internet – uninhibited, boundary-

less and anonymous – it lends itself to being a space

where people may explore things that are difﬁcult

or taboo ofﬂine. A signiﬁcant impact of the internet

all over the world has been the way it has opened

up access to and discussion of sexuality rights. In

India too, the internet has opened up possibilities

of intimacy and relationships, including marriages,

based on online associations. It has also opened up

routes of information on sexuality, sexual health

and sexuality rights. It has enhanced the possibilities

for individuals to assert their sexuality rights, gain

knowledge about sexual and reproductive health,

articulate their queerness and sexual preferences,

seek pleasure and sensuality, express their sexualities

and engage with their selves differently from what is

possible ofﬂine.

Intimacies 2.0

According to a global poll from the BBC World Serv-

ice, 30% of internet users consider it to be a suitable

place to meet signiﬁcant others. Among the nineteen

countries covered in the survey, India and Pakistan

51 Net surfers in developing countries tend to have a more

favourable opinion of online romance while fewer Americans,

British and French held similar beliefs, the same poll noted.

A life-changing experience

Geet, 27, was born a man, but always wanted to

be a woman. She did not understand what this

conﬂicting strong emotion in her was until she

read about gender dysphoria in her late teens on

the internet. Reading about other peoples’ expe-

riences helped her identify as gender dysphoric.

Accounts of sex change operations and details of

how to go about this also helped her decide to

go ahead with a sex change and she had the op-

eration at the age of 25. Geet is now a woman,

who identiﬁes herself as a heterosexual woman.

She says:

When I was seventeen I moved from Patiala

to Jaipur to do my engineering degree. It

must have been 1999/2000. That’s when I

ﬁrst started to use the internet in cybercafés

where it cost about 30-40 rupees. There was

internet at the University but it was not ac-

cessible to us. I got the help of a café owner

to make me an email account. My main thing

was searching about gender dysphoria and

sex change. “Search” essentially was the ﬁrst

thing I used. Chatting came much later. Read-

ing about other peoples’ gender dysphoric

experiences was the most important thing.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET85 India

had the highest percentage of respondents (60%)

who consider the net a worthy place to meet poten-

tial partners.

The intimacy of online chatting

Respondents who had access to the internet in the

mid-1990s when it became widely available spoke

of their ﬁrst tentative forays into cyberspace as mys-

terious and exciting, especially through “chatting”.

The idea of being able to have a conversation with a

complete stranger from another culture was a hith-

erto unknown experience. Chatting with strangers,

and strangers who become friends, remains extreme-

ly popular. As 54-year-old Reema says, “The risk and

danger that exists online is exciting so that’s why

we do it, that’s why we talk to strangers.” For Dig-

ital Natives, chatting is where they experiment with

and play out old and some new scripts of intimacy,

courtship and self-exploration. It is a signiﬁcant part

of adolescence for eighteen- to twenty-year-olds

who began chatting online at the age of fourteen

or ﬁfteen years. Online chats are common amongst

peers, those who know each other, but also an im-

portant way of making new friends. In fact, “it’s

about making new new (sic) friends only,” says

nineteen-year-old Vikas. It is common and mostly ac-

ceptable to make “friend requests” to strangers or

receive such requests. Before accepting a stranger’s

friend request, young women usually check if they

share any common friends, look at the picture of the

person on their proﬁle page, and check out what

they have written about themselves. Accepting a

friend request from and chatting with strangers has

potential beneﬁts: a greater number of friends is a

status enhancer; there is often competition between

people as to the number of friends they have; it is

fun, exciting and ﬂattering to ﬂirt occasionally with

strangers; and there is always a real possibility of

friendship, or even romance, that will translate into

an ofﬂine connection with someone, which could be-

come a real internet love story.

Through chatting with strangers, Digital Na-

tives can create versions of the self, engaging in a

range of online behaviours from friendship to casual

ﬂirtation, dating and cyber sex. Komal sums up the

general feeling: “Chatting with strangers is a differ-

ent feeling. It’s easier to disclose things to a person

you don’t know and speak what’s on your mind. It’s

a good release.” Amol ﬁnds that all strangers end

up being the same: women want to prove how “dif-

ferent” they are from each other, and men want to

display their material wealth. He also feels that men

lie about their appearance more. Men in the sample

were comfortable with webcam chats with strangers

52 Amar Toor “Online dating okay in India and Pakistan but Strange

to West” switched.com 18 February 2010 www.switched.com

but women were not, and generally used them only

when chatting with steady boyfriends. Unnati’s boy-

friend lives in New York so she gets online at 1:00

a.m. to be able to chat with him; she rushes to clarify

that they do not do “anything else” with the web-

cam because the boyfriend thinks that “girls who do

these things before marriage are not decent.”

For eighteen-year-old Himani, though, online

chats are like the neighbourhood pub on a Saturday

night: it is where the whole class gets together and

chats, gossips, at a time when they would otherwise

not be allowed out of the house to meet in real life.

She says, “On Saturday-Sunday nights, especially

Saturday nights, all friends sit online for one or two

hours at 12:30 a.m. or so.” The internet is “a normal

part of life” for Himani, where life’s excitements are

played out. “My boyfriend proposed on a status up-

date on Facebook and I accepted also on Facebook.

Damn romantic I thought,” she says.

Narratives imply that there is a general predict-

able banter that precedes a chatting session with

an interested person, a version of an elaborate mat-

ing dance, in which boys know what girls want and

girls know what boys want, and both know that the

other knows; another manifestation of hormonal

adolescents checking each other out as they would

in public, ofﬂine situations like festivals, marriages,

college canteens and so on. Vikas, 19, gives us the

male perspective:

I usually do the ﬂirting with the girls ﬁrst. I’ll

ask how was your day, do you have a boyfriend,

then if she says I don’t have, I’ll say I like her pic

[picture], then I’ll catch one quality and keep re-

peating it. Like if she is a singer or painter she

uploads her paintings so I keep praising that!

Girls like to hear praises. But girls are every time

hesitating to meet – we the boys initiate but they

do nakhra

like, “We are strangers,” “We are

chatting only for three-four days,” then we say

“So let’s meet na!” But she says yes in the end.

The mating rituals and games of courtship and

dating come with their own kinds of stress about

personal attractiveness, both for men and women.

Amol says that he prefers text messaging or SMS

because it is “easier to express” yourself and you can-

not be seen. “With a new girl you get too conscious,

text or phone lets me be in the groove and make the

best of impact.”

However, there is a limit to the “strangeness”, so

to speak. Most women chose to stay away from “for-

eigners”, being suspicious of their real identities and

believing them to be perverts. Women from Mumbai

53 Someone who “does nakhra” is demanding, difﬁcult and “high

maintenance”.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET86 India

chose to chat with men from Mumbai mostly, usually

from known colleges, only straying so far as Delhi

or other big cities. Some of the more conservative

women preferred to be friends with young men from

within their caste and community – in case it led to

an ofﬂine romance. Rupali, nineteen, says that she

met someone called Kushal (“from the same caste

as me”) and discovered that he had also been to a

youth camp organised by a social group called Ka-

lakruti for the Kutchi

community. This became the

basis for their online friendship.

Men on the other hand are more amenable to

chat with strangers who are foreigners. Both Amol

and Vikas like to chat with Arab women and women

from South-East Asia. Vikas feels that “foreigner or

Arabic babes” are bold enough to say things like

“how big is your dick” whereas Indian girls prefer

to comment on “good face, sexy hair.” Sometimes,

Vikas notes, even Indian girls behave like foreign

ones, asking more detailed questions about penis

size; however, it does not occur to Vikas that people

could be masquerading as “Indian girls”. He reveals

that one such “girl” who asked to see his long penis

via webcam turned out to be a ladyboy.

Chatting

with strangers allows Digital Natives to explore

their fantasies (like the fantasy of the “foreign

babe” for some Indian men). Punita “loooooooves

Punjabi men” and “fantasises about them all the

time.” So when she chanced upon a young Punjabi

man online, it was a secret fantasy of hers fulﬁlled.

Komal found an online friend who completed her

Bollywood fantasies. She had a “special friendship”

with someone called Rohit because he shared his

name with the character in a Bollywood ﬁlm played

by an actor Komal had a crush on. Amol speaks of a

male fantasy realised: older, married women, whose

husbands live and work elsewhere, wear sleeve-

less shirts and appear on the webcam in just their

towels, although he disapproves of this sort of “un-

cultured” behaviour.

Different strokes: How Moderns

and Guardians chat

For older populations there is also some resonance

of intimacy in online chatting, but it fulﬁls needs

particular to their personal situations. Rati, 28 years

old, married and from an upper-class background,

has a colourful chat life that she does not share with

her husband; she feels that harmless ﬂirting with a

stranger is exciting and keeps things spicy, “because

54 From the Kutch region of Gujarat.

55 The term ladyboy is very commonly used in South-East Asia. It

refers to an effeminate biological male who may or may not be

castrated, and takes hormone supplements and undergoes various

cosmetic procedures to appear more feminine. Many, but not

all, ladyboys in South-East Asia work as performers, porn actors,

escorts or sex workers.

married life can get boring after a while.” Reema,

54, runs her own strategy and branding consultan-

cy company. Newly divorced and single, she found

herself looking to the internet when she relocated

outside of the country, to ﬁnd dates, friends, ro-

mance and sex. Over time, Reema picked up the

nuances of online chatting and set up rules for her-

self so as to assess the person she was chatting with,

using it strategically to her advantage without ex-

pecting too much from it. She says:

I think it’s a myth that you can ﬁnd fulﬁlling

relationships on the internet. Most people you

meet online are crap. I have made great friends

through dating sites, and I have met a lot of weir-

dos, but I know how to take care of myself. When

I have gone abroad I have had people I’ve met on

dating sites take me out on dates, for parties […]

and it’s a totally okay and cool thing to do.

Sheena, 44, is also divorced, has two daughters and

moderates a lesbian email list. She says having access

to the internet has helped her explore her sexuality

and seek lesbian relationships. She is now conscious

of verifying that it is indeed a woman she is chatting

with; she once had a long online chat relationship

with a man masquerading as a lesbian woman. Geet,

who is a male-to-female transsexual and now identi-

ﬁes as a woman, sought solace in internet chatting;

as a man, believing she was gay, she used online

chats to ﬁnd other male partners. After her surgery

she had a new proﬁle and a new body that she want-

ed to “test drive”, for which she again turned to the

internet.

Chatting can sometimes turn into serious rela-

tionships. Sara, a 31-year-old blogger, recalls her best

experience on the internet as being a special rela-

tionship with another woman writer with whom she

could share anything, a friendship that was nipped

in the bud when the other woman just stopped

communicating. Rekha, a 45-year-old academic, had

a long-distance chat relationship for two years in

which she invested lot of time and energy. However,

the medium could not give her what she really want-

ed in a relationship:

The problem was that it wasn’t moving ofﬂine,

and that was to do with the fact that the person

was far away. There were few opportunities for

us to really meet and that’s why I had to end it. It

was intimate but it was also very cerebral. It was

not really emotionally fulﬁlling and it stayed as

an online relationship […] so it had to end. After

two years it was very painful to end it. Especially

because nothing had really “gone wrong.” We

didn’t ﬁght or anything. It was just not going

anywhere signiﬁcant.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET87 India

For others, though, even the online without the

ofﬂine is enough. Malthi’s is a moving story. She is a

35-year-old housewife, who after ﬁfteen years of a

lonely marriage ﬁnally found someone she could be

happy with thanks to the internet. A younger man,

from the same region in the state of Karnataka that

she hails from, who she believes is also unhappy in

his marriage, has been her online boyfriend for over

a year. She talks about this relationship as something

that has had a profound impact on her:

You can say that we are in love with each other

in the true sense. We really support each other

and help each other get through our unhappy

lives. We have never met but we have talked on

webcam. I always make sure that I delete my chat

histories but sometimes feel like saving them

so that I can go back and read about different

points in our relationship. Everyone needs some-

one they can rely on and talk to. After coming

to Bombay ﬁfteen years ago after my wedding,

I was so alone and I am still so alone. I had an

arranged marriage and left my family and home

and came here. It’s good to have a special friend.

The whole relationship has made me feel more

conscious of myself. After marriage, children, no

one is interested in you, no one is bothered and

you also lose interest in your own body. But the

desire is still there for attention. When another

person sees it and is interested, then you also

become more conscious and aware. I am more

conscious now of what I wear, how I am looking.

I buy my clothes more carefully. I like it.

The narratives reveal that sexuality, relationships

and intimacy form a signiﬁcant aspect of their lives

on the internet, primarily through the medium of

social networking sites and chatting. Strikingly, the

internet appears to allow these users opportunities

to exercise some agency, giving them a sense of mo-

bility that does not always exist in the ofﬂine world,

considering that (young) women face restrictions on

who they may talk to on the street, at work and in

college. Women seem to be using the internet to test

the boundaries of these restrictions; chatting, for

instance, allows women to meet men beyond the re-

strictive gaze of family and society and ﬁnd partners.

Nonetheless, the chat world has its own rules and

surveillance online, usually from peers and potential

partners, must be negotiated as well.

Matrimonial sites: Family, tradition

and a little bit of romance

Online matrimonial services are perceived to be a

modern and convenient way of arranging marriages,

with some extra leeway for the prospective bride

and groom to actively select or shortlist those they

ﬁnd suitable. Amongst our sample, the matrimonial

website Shaadi Dot Com was the most popular and

has been visited by almost all respondents for various

reasons, ranging from curiosity to setting up a pro-

ﬁle to ﬁnd a match for marriage – either their own

or for a sibling or a cousin. Stories abounded about

people they knew who had met on the internet and

got married, stories both good and bad. Vrushali

tells the story of her cousin, whose parents found a

match with a man living in the United States: same

caste, good job, seemingly decent and secure. They

did not bother to ﬁnd out more and a quick wed-

ding was organised. After the young woman moved

to the US to live with him she realised he was a vio-

lent man; luckily his own parents and sister helped

her ﬂee the country. Such accounts are now prompt-

ing people to be more careful and conduct checks on

people on the net. In fact, detective agencies that

check out prospective spouses from online matrimo-

nial sites are apparently an emerging trend in New

Delhi. A Google search with the terms “background

checks on matrimonial sites” results in lists of detec-

tive agencies from big and small cities specialising in

this service. Just like chat and SNSs, matrimonial sites

are not free from hackers, identity theft and cons.

Matrimonials on the internet present some ten-

sions between the traditional and modern versions

of arranged marriages. The ﬁrst is about how a girl

ought to represent herself in her proﬁle pictures on

the site. Parents typically want girls not to attract

the “wrong kind of attention.” The achievements

that need to be highlighted are of the traditional

kind: a good family background and a homely, tradi-

tional potential bride. In Vrushali’s home the entire

family participated in creating her younger sister’s

proﬁle. What potential brides may wear in their pro-

ﬁle pictures is a second source of tension. Parents

want them to be traditionally dressed, “sober and

decent”, whereas girls who do not wear traditional

Indian clothes everyday feel this misrepresents them.

Women generally have a say in selecting grooms’

proﬁles that appeal to them; after that, all communi-

cation happens, as before, through parents. Parents

are sometimes unwilling to let their daughters talk

to potential grooms directly at ﬁrst. Komal, 27 years

old and working as a recruitment consultant, has

been registered on these sites for a few months now.

Komal comes from an orthodox Sindhi family where

she has fought for the little independence she has.

She lied to them to go for a job interview, and once

56 In a startling revelation, one of the members of the alleged

terror outﬁt Indian Mujahideen (IM) confessed to the use of

information and photographs posted on matrimonial websites

to obtain fake student ID cards, which could be used to procure

fake driving licences. Press Trust of India “Terrorists Stealing Info

from Matrimonial Sites” Times of India 9 April 2009 timesoﬁndia.

indiatimes.com/india

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET88 India

she had the job, fought to go out and work. Komal

herself has asked that her father ﬁeld all calls from

the site to prevent any conﬂict with her parents. “I

have given my dad’s number so dad won’t have any

negative ideas about me, he will not suspect that I

am talking to boys through the site.”

There are others for whom online matrimonials

provide opportunities that are not available ofﬂine.

Respondents mention people they know – neigh-

bours, friends – privately seeking matches online

without the knowledge of their parents (who would

prefer to ﬁnd matches ofﬂine in the traditional

manner).

A big reason for the phenomenal success of the

matrimonial sites is that they do not rock the boat

of India’s caste system and preferred endogamous

(within the same caste) marriages. To the contrary,

they enable people to stick to traditional caste rules

and community norms. In addition, the relatively

cheap rates (roughly INR 5,000) for online matrimo-

nials make them appealing to those who do not have

regular access to the internet, or are unfamiliar with

the technology. With the internet, a wide net is cast

by the match seeker – all over the world – that adds

a robust section of NRIs (non-resident Indians) to the

groom pool (always a favoured category amongst

prospective brides).

Shaadi Dot Com offers subversive pleasures for

respondents who are not in the marriage market.

Rati ﬁnds that Shaadi Dot Com is a great site for ﬂirty

online chatting because the men on it are above the

age of 30 years, mostly divorced men who are “load-

ed”. Nineteen-year-old student Rupali also indulges

in playing pranks on friends; once she created a pro-

ﬁle for a friend and was amused to ﬁnd it actually

got some matches.

While matrimonial sites are popular, dating sites

are somewhat taboo, hinting at the different ways

desires (and spaces for expression of these desires)

are being constructed on the internet – the desire

to be married is always welcome but the desire to

date (for Indians) is quickly made taboo through

ofﬂine tensions. Marriage sites are where more

women are likely to be, for two reasons: wanting

marriage is a respectable desire for a young girl, and

women think that the men on these sites are more

respectable than those hanging around on dating

sites. Sara observes, “There’s a mismatch of expecta-

tions. Men are treating (matrimony sites) as dating

sites to get into conversation. People don’t usually

go to dating sites, in fact in these you will ﬁnd 90%

men and no women.” Shuchi, 24, who is ﬁnishing a

Masters in psychology and dreaming of her dream

wedding and husband, says she has heard “bad

things about dating sites” where people who do not

intend to get married and instead want one-night

stands or ﬂings congregate. “I want to ﬁnd a good

human being. So I don’t go to dating sites.” Good

human beings, it seems, are not to be found skulking

on dating sites – in fact, the bias against dating sites

is so strong that many respondents said they would

never go to these sites, sticking to social networking

sites or matrimonial sites from which to network and

seek out men/women to chat, ﬂirt with and eventu-

ally date.

Net romances, however, are the new format

love stories that young women like Shuchi fantasise

about. Shuchi’s parents oppose the idea of seeking a

match for her on the net, but Shuchi herself would

like nothing more than to set up a proﬁle with her

parent’s knowledge and approval on such a site and

wait for the proposals to ﬂood her inbox. Shuchi

says, with a faraway look in her eyes, “One of my

friends has found her husband like that only, they

just got married and now they are going for their

honeymoon. There are so many romantic stories like

this. It’s the thing to do now.”

Queer networking

Without a doubt, this is the age of social networking.

But the internet has also been the medium for an-

other kind of networking – for that of queer people

seeking a safe space to socialise, express themselves,

and in some cases, organise. “Queer” refers to a po-

litical and personal identity category that is inclusive

of a range of sexualities including lesbian, gay, bisex-

ual, trans, intersex, hijra, kothi, to name a few. The

term was popularised in the 1990s after activists and

academics reclaimed the word from being a “hurtful

slur” for those with “unusual” sexual orientations to

something that was a positive afﬁrmation of identi-

ty.

It is now used commonly as a synonym for LGBT

persons and communities.

On 2 July 2009, the Delhi High Court delivered a

historic judgment by reading down Section 377 of the

Indian Penal Code which had, since 1860, criminal-

ised same-sex sexuality. Under conditions of illegality,

a repressive and moralistic social climate and public

invisibility, the internet has been a powerful way for

queer people in India to connect with others.

Queer mailing lists have been popular since the

late 1990s – from the Yahoo Group LGBT-India to the

US-based Desi Dykes for queer South Asian women,

to the local site, Gay Bombay. In fact, before the “het-

erosexualisation” of social networking in the way we

see today, queer communities were perhaps the ﬁrst

groups to “socially network” in a sense; these email

lists and online spaces were how queer, marginalised

57 Calvin Thomas, ed. “Introduction: Identiﬁcation, Appropriation,

Proliferation” Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject

of Heterosexuality (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000)

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET89 India

groups (at that time also illegal in India) with access

to technology networked, organised, socialised and

lived out their “queer” lives.

Since then, there has been a growth of social

and political groups and collectives both online and

ofﬂine.

Pride Marches are now held in many large

(and some smaller) cities in India; bars and clubs in cit-

ies like New Delhi and Mumbai have exclusively “Gay

Nights”. Today, there are a slew of online dating sites

like Planet Romeo, and Shoe and Pink Sofa for women.

Mumbai also has groups like the L-Lounge and Rain-

bow Pride Connexion that use email lists and groups

to post information about parties and social events

for queer women. Gay Bombay continues to thrive

as a social space for gay men and their families and

parents. Queer Azaadi Mumbai is a loose collective,

hosted on a WordPress blog, that organises the yearly

Pride March in the city. The new magazine for queer

women, Jiah: The Magazine for Women with Heart, is

a Pune-based venture from the women’s group Birds

58 Queer themes have also entered the Bollywood discourse more

pointedly with the release of ﬁlms like Dostana (2008), My Brother

Nikhil (2005) and Girlfriend (2004). However, representations of

queer identity and life in Bollywood cinema reveal common, and

oftentimes negative, stereotypes. In 2007, the scion of the former

princely state of Rajpipla in Gujarat, Manvendra Singh Gohil, came

out as a gay man, and was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. All

these events indicate an increased visibility of queer life in urban

India.

of a Feather (BOAF). Blogs have also been popular

ways for non-funded queer collectives and individu-

als to have an online presence. Thirunangai, a Tamil

Nadu-based matrimonial website for transgender

people, is hosted on a blog, and Geet, a transwoman

interviewed here, used her blog to narrate her deeply

personal journey of confronting her gender dysphoria

and undergoing sex reassignment surgery.

The internet has enabled these groups to be-

come visible, and led to the building of transnational

movements for their rights. Yet, amongst our queer

respondents (including one heterosexually identiﬁed

transwoman,

four self-identiﬁed lesbian women –

of whom two are entrepreneurs who started India’s

ﬁrst queer-themed store in Mumbai – and one gay

media researcher and writer), there was some con-

cern about how this over-emphasis on networking

has led to the dulling of activism, and a culture of

consumption.

Networking vs. activism

There are now distinct online spaces for organising

and activism, politicised discussions around queer

identity, and socialising, shopping and leisure. Previ-

ously, a handful of email lists and groups were used

59 A male to female transgender person.

Looking back on the past ten years Sonali Gulati,

the founder and moderator of Desi Dykes, the ﬁrst

e-group for queer South Asian women, talks of some

issues for women organizing and ﬁnding spaces on-

line. Sonali began Desi Dykes in 1998, initially as an

email group, in order to connect about 12-16 South

Asian queer women living between Boston and New

York who were looking for friends and a community.

This small group began to grow as news of it spread

by word-of-mouth and women across the United

States began writing in asking if they could also join.

At present Desi Dykes roughly has a membership

of over 500 women from India, Pakistan, America,

Canada, Britain, Australia, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri

Lanka. The members either live in South Asia or be-

long to South Asian diasporas in Northern countries.

Anonymity is really what allows the list to thrive

and grow according to Gulati. She believes that

giving women the space to be anonymous online

allows them to feel secure when their ofﬂine re-

alities are not. Many women on the group are not

out about their sexual identities and this privacy is

something to be protected. “And it is not just about

being South Asian, that our cultures can be quite

un-accepting of queer sexuality. I ﬁnd this need

for anonymity quite strong in similar list serves for

Latinas and Chinese women as well. It is about being

queer and feeling marginalized.” Recently, in 2008,

while in New Delhi and helping organize the city’s

ﬁrst Queer Pride March Sonali did an interview with

the Hindustan Times newspaper hoping to get cov-

erage for the event and to popularize Desi Dykes.

She received 450 email requests for membership in

one day. Following this she did a phone screening of

applicants to ensure that they were in fact women

but found that many were men. “While I know that

something like a phone screening or a question-

naire potentially dissuades women from signing on,

it was something I absolutely had to do in order to

maintain the security of the space.” […] In the end,

Sonali feels it is worth the effort to ensure that the

space is safe for queer women. “There are so many

women who write in with their gratitude for this

space; some have even been suicidal and depressed

at the time when they heard about the group, so it

has really helped give queer women a very real sort

of lifeline. I am always amazed and touched by how

powerful this cyber community has become.”

Extracted from Bhattacharjya and Ganesh

EROTICS: An Exploratory Research on Sexuality

and the Internet. Literature Review

A queer women’s e-group

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET90 India

for queer people to connect and organise. However,

social, sexual and casual conversations and interests

were frowned upon on those lists because they were

constructed as spaces for “serious” discussions. De-

spite this, gay men used to post requests for casual

sex on groups like LGBT-India, which has a wide and

diverse membership and is used for more activist/po-

litical discussions. Stricter moderation controls have

now come into place on such lists, but equally, the

reduced costs and growing numbers of queer-iden-

tiﬁed people accessing the internet in urban India

means that there are more online spaces for social

and leisure interests. Sheena, the moderator of an

e-list, says that social groups are very important for

queer women in the city:

[N]ot very many of the women are into activism;

I would say about 20% of the lesbians I know ac-

tually want to come out and support any cause.

Women are still not out at their workplaces, so

for them to even be seen at the Mumbai Pride

is difﬁcult. Socialising is a different ball game

though, women love partying and turn up in

huge numbers for the monthly parties

Other respondents talk about the tensions between

keeping political and leisure interests and discus-

sions separate. Marina says that she has signiﬁcantly

restricted what she says on a particular list because

of an online argument with other members of the

group around the contested terms “butch” and

“femme” and their role in the construction of a

queer Indian identity. The online group wanted to

be a place for social connections, dating and fun and

asked her to restrict her political discussions; Marina

asks what activism means when “there is little space

for real ideological and political discussions” and it

is all about dating and sex. “Maybe there are other

kinds of activism possible through partying […]. But

I am not convinced of it.” She acknowledges, how-

ever, that it is now much easier for closeted and

marginalised people to ﬁnd partners online, and that

becomes the primary objective of people signing on

to groups, not activism and online organising.

In researching the evolution of Gay Bombay, the

city’s ﬁrst online social network for gay men, 34-year-

old writer and researcher Palash found that there are

few private spaces for young people who live with

their parents (a situation common in Mumbai, where

property is prohibitively expensive), and so the ano-

nymity provided by the internet allows queer people

to fashion their identities in new ways. But, he adds:

[T]here is no revolution outside perhaps, and it’s

a self-centred and selﬁsh, narrow version of em-

powerment. […] It’s a small change in the social

sense but a big change for individuals. People

here want it to change their own lives, but that’s

it. The info[rmation] etc., sure it’s useful, but is it

galvanising activism? Attending a party is an ac-

tive step forward, but not a political step.

Queer women, and hijras,

he believes, are using the

internet more actively, perhaps because their social

and political spaces are fewer. He points to the neigh-

bouring country of Nepal where signiﬁcant strides

have been taken in amending the law on same-sex

sexuality and creating a vibrant cross-class movement

on sexuality. Palash feels this has not happened in In-

dia, that there is still too little activism, dialogue and

idealism and the internet revolution is far too per-

sonalised. “People don’t even stop to comment on a

blog post. There are FB groups, Twitter, Gmail, groups,

Orkut – so many things and yet they do nothing.”

The age of consumption

Palash also acknowledges that the internet and mo-

bile phones have allowed queer people to “creatively

navigate their desires within social norms” but also

bemoans the “passive consumption” he believes the

internet has contributed to with the demographic

of young, queer people. Palash and Marina are per-

haps hinting at a discomfort with a well-documented

commodiﬁcation that sexual visibility hinges on in

contemporary capitalist times.

This depoliticisation of the word “queer” becomes

more apparent in the context of the Queer Store. The

entrepreneurs who started the Queer Store strongly

reiterate that they are not queer activists, but are

queer entrepreneurs. They do not want their store to

“promote” being gay, or sexuality politics, but want it

to be seen as an inclusive space to mainstream queer

identity through products that are non-threatening.

They go to great lengths to ensure that their store not

be threatened by right-wing political parties in Mum-

bai. Thus, they do not sell “I Love Bombay” coffee

mugs; they only have “I Love Mumbai” coffee mugs

and do not retail any products that have overtly reli-

gious symbolism or iconography either.

The entrepreneurs say they chose the rainbow

motif (what they felt was a “universally” recognised

symbol of queer identity) to imprint on a range of

products and T-shirts. Their online store now gets

shoppers from far-ﬂung small towns in Gujarat and

60 Hijras are either physiological males who are feminised, or are

true hermaphrodites who display feminine characteristics. Some,

not all, Hijras are castrated. Hijras are usually extremely poor and

socially marginalised across South Asia.

61 Rosemary Hennessey Proﬁt and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late

Capitalism (New York/London: Routledge, 2000)

62 The political party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, for example,

has attacked and threatened individuals and commercial

establishments who use the word “Bombay” instead of “Mumbai”,

citing, erroneously, that the latter is the “real” and “original”

name for the city.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET91 India

Jharkhand. The store accepts cheque payments,

which makes it easier for more consumers to buy their

products, particularly those who may have less access

to ﬁnancial services like credit cards. While this move

for inclusiveness is sincere, it can be read as a main-

streaming of sexual identity along the lines of what

Joseph Massad refers to as the “Gay International”.

Now, the queer person in a small town can wear a

rainbow stud earring or bracelet without ever neces-

sarily having a conversation around queer sexuality.

Queer Store co-owner Sejal comments:

We want to be a safe space for the queer commu-

nity as well which is why we don’t advertise as,

and neither are we, a “sex shop”. So our anti-377

T-shirts for example are not about sex but about

what’s wrong with the law. Through our work

we want to expand on and make mainstream

this “language” of being queer – and through

products – because people love to shop for stuff!

Interestingly, Sejal’s phrase “people love to shop for

stuff” – regardless of whether they are queer or not

– points to ways in which the internet erases “differ-

ences” like sexual orientation in key ways. On one

hand the easier access to queer spaces online and

ofﬂine – shopping, dating and partying – results in

framing freedom in terms of a lifestyle, replete with

rainbow-coloured stud earrings and rainbow feathered

boas. (Note that this is not very different from the way

freedom-as-lifestyle has been framed for non-queer

people.) On the other hand, it also begs the question:

Why would queer people always be expected to be ac-

tivists or non-consumers? Would it be something that is

asked of non-queer people on the internet?

Mobility and access through online dating sites,

gay and lesbian parties in upscale venues and the op-

portunity to anonymously buy rainbow-patterned

products provide a certain power and visibility for

queer people, but at the same time generate notions

and aspirations of how to be gay or have a queer life-

style based on consumerism. In a country like India in

the current context, where our urban metros have

set upon an age of consumption like never before,

this is only to be expected.

The internet and representation

of women

Self-expression online: Stories of blogging

Blogs or weblogs are a signiﬁcant aspect of how

women use the internet for self-expression and com-

munication.

Although the absolute numbers of

bloggers and blog readers in India is low compared to

63 Joseph Massad “Re-orienting Desire: the Gay International and the

Arab World” Public Culture 14, 2 (2002): 361-85

64 Bhattacharjya and Ganesh EROTICS: An Exploratory Research

many other countries,

blogging from the region is no-

table in the blogosphere, and is reasonably widely read

by a general user public, with Blogger ranking ninth

amongst the most accessed websites in the country.

was only after 2008 though, when ﬁlm actor and Bol-

lywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan began blogging,

that blogs caught the attention of popular media.

It is estimated that about one fourth of bloggers

in India are women bloggers.

Six of our women re-

spondents had their own blogs. Middle-class women

in India who have had access to the internet have

been quick to use blogs as a form of expression cover-

ing a range of formats – daily journals, commentary

on issues, literary and ﬁlm reviews, fashion trends,

urban life and quite dominantly, the “mommy blog”

about their children and parenting.

Mommy blogs

Seema, a 38-year-old media professional, has three

blogs: one about her six-year-old son, one “activist

blog” to connect people who want to help those

who need support and aid after the terrorist attacks

on Mumbai known as “26/11”, and a third she re-

fers to as her “me-only space”. She takes ten minutes

every morning to tend to her blogs and is disciplined

about her routine, managing to blog posts almost

every day. Seema believes that the mommy blog has

found a special relevance for many women because

it ﬁlls an existing gap in honest information about

motherhood and in women’s lives.

There is no support system (in cities) that wom-

en have, and they are often all alone, without

advice, and wanting some validation that what

they are doing [raising children] is okay or that

their experience is shared by others also. I get

mails all the time asking for advice. Especially

from women abroad, who are isolated, stuck in

countries where they don’t speak the language.

This is the gratifying part of writing these blogs, the

readership and community women can build. The

65 Data from 2007 indicate that only 14% of active internet users

were blogging, with only 39% of all net users being aware of

blogs. Some 40,000 Indians have active blogs while over ten

times this number have blogs but are not active on them. The

most popular platforms for blogs are Blogger, WordPress and

LiveJournal. Cities that are home to the IT industry like Bangalore,

Hyderabad and Chennai have the maximum number of bloggers

(exceeding 1,000) followed by Mumbai, Pune and Delhi. Smaller

cities (like Indore and Lucknow) are reported to have a maximum

of 200 bloggers each, with towns like Jabalpur having about 40

bloggers only. Ekalavya Bhattacharya “Blogging in India Part 2”

Watblog 1 May 2007 www.watblog.com/2007/05/01/blogging-

india-part-2-watconsult-research

66 Bhattacharya “Blogging in India Part 2”

67 He blogs at www.bigb.bigadda.com

68 Gaurav Mishra “Hindustan Times Story on Women Bloggers

in India” (Gauravonomics blog, 19 August 2008) www.

gauravonomics.com/blog/hindustan-times-story-on-women-

bloggers-in-india

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET92 India

readership is usually other mommy bloggers who are

dedicated to supporting each other, but there is also

a broad “unknown” readership base. From being a

personal journal, mommy blogs are also an interac-

tive space where conversations take place, debates

unfurl and advice is sought on different issues.

Bloggers like Seema and Mohini have found a

community they can turn to for many things: online,

mommy bloggers read and comment on each other’s

posts, ensure there is no online plagiarising or report

if there is, and attack trolls who post nasty comments

on their sites. They also have ofﬂine communities

that hold meetings, interactions, baby showers, send

each other gifts for their children, and sometimes

even stay with one another when they visit their re-

spective cities and become “friends” in a more real

sense. There is also the reﬂective change they feel

in themselves. Mohini says, “I think blogging does

change you in some way though. It becomes like a

voice in your head. It makes you more honest and

reﬂective, and can also change your point of view

about various things, like how you parent.” Com-

paring Indian mommy bloggers and their Western

counterparts, Mohini feels that “the big ones abroad

have monetised on their blogs, but this has not hap-

pened in India.”

The discourse of motherhood in India has been

traditionally held as a sacred and moral one, and

imbued with many gendered, cultural meanings.

However, mommy bloggers are talking about issues

affecting contemporary urban working mothers in

a signiﬁcant departure from the way motherhood

has been imagined and spoken of. Mommy blog-

gers discuss the more complex and thorny issues

around preparing for and having a child, and then

raising it. These include the absence of immediate

maternal love as soon as they see their offspring;

post-partum depression; the absence of any “innate

sense” of what being a mother entails; expectations

from spouses about sharing the load of parenting;

questioning a health system that makes Caesarean

sections the most common option, and the commer-

cialisation of health care; the dilemmas of whether to

stay at home or get back to work; the diminished sta-

tus from being a working mother to a stay-at-home

mom; the unpaid labour of parenting; commerciali-

sation of education; special education for children

with special needs; and so on.

However, mommy bloggers prefer to stay si-

lent on a range of themes too: sex and sexuality,

anything negative regarding their marriages and in-

laws, political issues, being judgmental of friends.

There is also the other reality mommy bloggers

struggle with, that when their children are going to

be online, how will they feel about their early years

being so public?

Comments on a post are a barometer of how contro-

versial, popular or relevant a post is (a popular post of

a non-celebrity blogger would get 30-40 comments),

and bloggers take note of the posts which elicit such

responses. Mohini, a 33-year-old management pro-

fessional, began her mommy blog in 2006; its tagline

is “life as a working mom in manic Mumbai” and it

reﬂects what it is like to be in a demanding corporate

job with endless travelling and managing home and

motherhood. Mohini’s post on her maid raised an

intercultural conﬂict, in which she felt many of her

readers outside India did not understand the context

of Indian middle-class life and the everyday reality of

maids, nannies and drivers.

“There were a lot of out-of-context foreign

bloggers who said, ‘You don’t value human dignity,’

‘How can you keep underage staff?’ and so on in

response to my post on a seventeen-year-old who

was part of my domestic staff. I had written a fol-

low up saying this was not illegal in India, but some

expressed disagreement, which is okay, but it is up-

setting when people are rude and out to hurt you.”

Seema’s post on domestic violence was also one

that brought forth an outpouring, while her post

on discrimination based on religion was a more con-

troversial one.

“I once wrote a post on urban ghettos, about

how you can’t buy a ﬂat in a non-Muslim building

if you are a Muslim or if you are non-vegetarian. I

have a mixed heritage and it was my personal ac-

count of my mother and I searching for a ﬂat to

buy. She was Christian married to a Muslim, and I

got married to a Hindu and took on his surname,

but my ﬁrst name has always been Hindu, so you

cannot tell I have this sort of background. The post

was a reﬂection on that experience. It caused some

controversy and I got comments from a rabid Hindu.

Peoples’ prejudices all come out on the internet; the

internet is like a security shield, all these little lambs

become lions behind it.”

Other controversial topics, she says, include

“working vs. being stay-at-home mom, breastfeed-

ing vs. not, disciplining the kids. […] I do blog about

these things but keep out examples from friends.

Some express strong opinions on these but I try

to keep it balanced. The maximum debates are on

working vs. stay-at-home mothers! This is a very

touchy issue amongst women.”

Controversies, conﬂict and comments

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET93 India

Sex and personal blogs

If the internet is proving to be a bonding space for

new mothers, it is also a space for young writers.

Sakshi and Sara are bloggers with backgrounds in

journalism, both of whom made blog-to-book deals

with leading publishing houses. Sakshi is the author of

a risqué blog that rapidly became notorious for its Sex

and the City style of talking about young single life in

the city and the adventures of its narrator, at that time

anonymous, depicted by a sketch of a slinky black cat

with smoke spiralling from her cigarillo. The blog has

a masthead that Sakshi believes reﬂects the content

of her blog – a cappuccino and a cigarette, books and

a Cosmopolitan – images rarely used to signify the

“young Indian woman”, but images of life in any glo-

balised, urban city anywhere in the world. For over a

year she blogged about being single, having sex and

going out on dates. It was one of the ﬁrst personal

blogs by an Indian woman about sexuality which be-

gan as a fresh insight into the lives of single, young,

urban women experimenting with their newfound

freedoms away from home, and independent enough

to resist the surveillance of society. The most popular

themes on the blog are “being me” (109 tags), “peo-

ple I love” (93 tags) and “sex and dating” (69 tags).

The blog became wildly popular because, for the ﬁrst

time, a woman was talking about her experiences

and emotions in a fresh, new way. It captured what

women felt and experienced but never really said out

loud. The blog is unapologetic about sex and made

no efforts to rationalise or justify desire. That it was

anonymous only made it even more popular.

However, Sakshi was discovered as the author of

the blog and her anonymity diminished, even meta-

morphosing into notoriety. TV talk shows invited

her, wanting to know how she wrote about such

issues and what her parents thought of her blog.

Her entries on sexuality reduced drastically, a point

she herself raised reﬂectively in one of her entries.

She also received a number of nasty personal com-

ments and veiled threats saying she was “corrupting

Indian morality.” While she says these things helped

her develop a thick skin, she expressed surprise at

how personal these attacks were, usually focusing

on her looks instead of her writing. A man at a

party told her, “You’re not as sexy as I thought.” A

blog post on another blog talked about how Sakshi

was “ugly” in real life. She even recorded in one

of her posts how Indian men are “allergic to the

Modern, Liberated, Sometimes-Writes-About-Sex-

On-Her-Blog girl.” Now, her blog reads more like a

daily diary. Sakshi does not write about sexuality or

dating because she is now in a steady relationship.

On her blog, Sara writes on a range of themes:

India, cities, media and ethics, stories of rural India,

vigilantism, justice, communalism, riots, globalisation,

malls, culture, new research on various issues, patriot-

ism, and other observations of life in changing and

unchanging India. Sara writes a lot of activist-oriented

pieces making a call to action on many issues, includ-

ing sexual harassment in public places, being part

of an initiative called the Blank Noise Project (BNP).

Other than this theme, which is part of her activist

concerns, she does not talk about sexuality as such in

her blog. “I have not written on sexuality, only about

Eve teasing

and harassment. I never felt the need to.

I write about gender, political issues. Is that a ‘sexual-

ity issue’? I haven’t thought of it this way.” She feels

that the blogging space is only partially important for

activism on this issue; it has to be complemented by

activities ofﬂine for it to be effective.

Most who come to Blank Noise come in through

the net. […] The methods of the BNP are more

effective in the real world (real protest on the

streets against sexual harassment), but it does

raise awareness. Like we announced a blogathon

for BNP – when at a certain day and time, every-

body blogs about it, so you get a lot of blog posts

on it and raise awareness.

Another kind of “sex blogger” was interviewed in

this study. Geet’s blog is about raising awareness

about gender dysphoria and transsexuality in India.

Geet was born a man but always wanted to be a

woman. She did not understand the conﬂicted and

strong emotions she felt until she read about gender

dysphoria in her late teens on the internet. Reading

about other people’s similar experiences helped her

identify herself as gender dysphoric. Accounts of sex

change operations and details of how to go about

this also helped her decide to go ahead with a sex

change and she had the operation at the age of 25.

Geet now identiﬁes as a heterosexual woman.

In March 2008 I started my own blog, anonymous-

ly, to document the changes I was experiencing

(after the surgery), the emotional highs and lows.

Only ﬁve or six friends knew about it. By October,

almost one year after surgery, I had been out on

TV, Facebook, Orkut. I got lots of messages from

gender dysphoric people in support, or needing

answers, or just asking me to be friends. [...] I felt

that I should do something to share [something]

about transsexuals, and a nice way would be to

start a blog dedicated to the subject.

The anonymous blog she started was extremely per-

sonal and a space for her to vent the extreme emotions

she was undergoing as she attempted to adjust to her

69 “Eve teasing” is the commonly used local term for sexual

harassment, criticised by women’s rights activists in India for

decades for reducing a criminal act to harmless “teasing” with this

nomenclature.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET94 India

new life, and to help her family adjust too. Her more

recent public blog is almost entirely dedicated to in-

formation and awareness about gender dysphoria and

transsexuality. Geet’s blog made her a public ﬁgure on

transsexuality, which had its negative side too. Even

before her sex change, she had experimented with

ﬁnding partners online, and after her operation she

sought relationships on the internet again, as a woman

this time. She met someone she liked from Delhi, and

they quickly developed a relationship, but she did not

reveal her real name because she knew she could easily

be Googled. She speaks of what happened next:

I was with my parents in Punjab and we were to

meet in Delhi. He said he would buy my ticket to

Delhi. That’s when I told him my real name for the

ticket. He did a search and found out everything

about my past. And it ended. He gave some excuse

and that was it. I couldn’t even meet him once. I

had thought that I would tell him about [the sex

change] when I met him. I had always tried to

protect myself from exactly this experience, it is

harmful for self-esteem. Google auto-completes

my name, it’s very easy to ﬁnd out about me.

Whether it is older women like Seema, working moth-

ers like Mohini, young girls in the city like Sakshi, an

activist/journalist concerned with changing India like

Sara, or a transwoman like Geet, the internet is ena-

bling a range of women to “come out” to the world.

Critically, it has given them visibility and a voice. In

particular, these are Indian, middle-class women who

have so far not been adequately represented in lit-

erature, ﬁlms, research or popular media. It is also

enabling women to experience fearlessness and famil-

iarity with relation to the internet. These women are

able to connect with each other, and connect across

cultures to engage in conversations about the eve-

ryday things that affect their lives. There are deeply

problematic silent spots, all those things that these

blogs do not talk about: sex being the most obvi-

ous one, relationships with husbands, in-laws, family.

What they do not say often reﬂects what sort of a

society they come from and where the tensions are.

Women are concerned about what people will think,

usually people close to them, and what the fallout of

their online expressions may be. The ofﬂine eventu-

ally conditions what they say online. Ultimately, the

limits on self-expression are self-imposed, albeit cir-

cumscribed by society.

Self-presentation online: “Hot pics”

and “cool names”

While Facebook or Orkut proﬁles are at the outset

about keeping in touch with friends and family, play-

ing games, for leisure and fun, the narratives reveal

that much of the excitement for Digital Natives lies

also in the potential for self-presentation and expres-

sion on Facebook and Orkut, not only textually but

visually through photographs, pictures and videos.

SNSs are attractive because they allow users to rep-

resent themselves as “sexy” – a catchall word. These

are women who have come of age in a heightened

image-culture driven by globalisation and consum-

erism where “never has it been so legitimate (or

so compelling) for women to be sexy.”

The mean-

ing of “sexy” is highly subjective, as we found from

the responses, depending on where that person is

coming from. For some women, a photograph in

snug-ﬁtting jeans is “sexy”, for another it is to be

wearing a sleeveless top, or showing her in an un-

inhibited mood, or with wet hair, or looking like her

favourite ﬁlm star. These are far cries from “sexy” in

the sense of nudity or semi-pornographic imagery or

“sexy” as understood in the West (wearing jeans?)

Some examples:

But I think for other things [the internet] is excit-

ing for women. Like for me, uploading sexy pics is

very exciting. I like it. It makes you feel good. I re-

alised that in pics I look hot. So mainly comments

on the pics make me feel good about the way I

look. Self-image goes up. In some pics I have put

up I am wearing a one-piece, and in some slim ﬁt

(jeans) and I know it, I am looking quite sexy and

hot. Then when other people, especially guys,

comment on it, you feel good. (Unnati, 21)

I like to put up pics of myself and the comments.

Guys who want to ﬂirt write comments on some

pictures. The sexiest picture I have put up on FB

is of me in a towel! I got 60 comments. My sister

took the picture and I uploaded it. She encour-

aged me saying it was looking really good. I took

it off after a week when it was getting too much.

(Shuchi, 24)

Both Unnati and Shuchi are conventional in their looks,

average girls-next-door, who would not attract a sec-

ond glance in the ofﬂine world and seem to have some

issues about their body image (Unnati about her whea-

tish complexion, and Shuchi about being heavyset and

overweight). Yet in the online world, they are learning

to love themselves through these presentations, and

make an impact amongst their peers.

This conscious representation of oneself as sen-

sual or cool through photographs is evident in boys

as well. Amol, who is 22, says pictures on SNSs affect

body image positively: “You take a pic, upload and

you get eight-ten comments. Comments make you

feel elated and happy.” He points out that people

“do self-censorship of photos also,” making sure they

hide their ﬂaws and enhance better qualities. Amol

70 Phadke “Some Notes Towards Understanding”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET95 India

himself puts up pictures “where I look fair, hair is

properly spiked, look decent and tummy is not show-

ing.” “Not that I don’t have a good body,” he adds,

“but it should look good.” Even though Amol once

had a girl write a poem for him on Facebook because

of the way he looked, boys do end up disappointed by

the dominantly gendered gaze. Vikas has found that

there are few interested in pictures of him shirtless or

in a swimming costume. Pictures of the girls in bikinis

beside him attracted much more commentary.

The Digital Natives are particularly involved in

such self-presentation, but women older than them

also used SNSs to represent themselves in ways that

they could not ofﬂine. Vrushali observes:

Maybe women have become a little more gutsy.

In front of your friends is what you really are,

not necessarily like you are at home (in front of

family, in-laws, parents). So the pictures they may

put up will be of the “real” them. It gives them

a freedom to represent themselves in this way.

Besides the pictures, though, there is also the ex-

citement in constructing names that become online

handles in chat rooms or gaming portals.

Other than the name, women also represent

themselves as young, usually in their teens. “The

younger you say you are, the more attention you

get,” observes Komal, who is 27 and admits that

she would give her age as “much younger than real

age.” Punita, now eighteen, gives her real age most

of the time although she rues that two years ago

when she said she was “sweet sixteen” she got the

most attention. Ultimately, though, women believe

that SNSs and chatting are “not real” and that like

them, others they meet online are also reconstruct-

ing themselves online.

It is difﬁcult to rationalise the implications of

these ways of self-presentation. On one hand, it

seems that in the online world women can bypass

the “real” public space – one that is predominantly

threatening and rife with the threat of sexual harass-

ment, where they are under surveillance, and have

to negotiate intrusive stares and a discomﬁting male

gaze – and enter smoothly into an online “public”

space wearing what they want, at whatever time

they want (especially at night, a time of restricted

mobility for women), safely presenting themselves

however they want. These forms of self-presentation

give the women not only a more sensual sense of

self, but also social currency that makes them more

“powerful” in online and ofﬂine social interactions

with their peers. On the other hand, one cannot

help being uneasy about the uncritical way in which

women are participating in scripts which have al-

ready been written for them by a potent mix of

capitalism, globalisation, advertising and the media.

Feminist debates have shown us that the social value

attributed to being “sexy”

has spiked in the last

two decades, leading to an unhealthy focus on wom-

en’s bodies and body image, which places too much

stress on how women look rather than their other

achievements.

Old debates, new forms: Pornography

on the internet

Any discussion on the internet and representation

of women will be incomplete without a reference to

that old ghost around which debates on represen-

tation and regulation have revolved: pornography.

It is commonly believed that all major advances in

71 Rosalind Gill “Sexism/Empowerment Figuring Female Sexual

Agency in Contemporary Advertising” Feminism and Psychology

18, 1 (2008): 35-60

Online handles:

Who will you be today?

When Rati chats online she does not use a real

picture of herself. She uses the picture of a

friend who is a model. She also has an online

alias: Sasha Kapoor. According to Rati, “Kapoor

is such a high-class name, such a great family,

and Sasha is a very international name.” The

inﬂuence of Bollywood is all pervasive. Rati

continues: “Guys also make up names. The most

common is Raj Malhotra – if you see that name

you know he is a really ﬁlmy type and kind of

old fashioned. That’s such a Bollywood name.

All the heroes in Bollywood ﬁlms are called Raj

Malhotra.”

Komal does not use her own name in chats

but “Tarrlika”, a name she borrowed from a

friend’s mother. “It was uncommon, unique

and people used to comment on my name so

it was a good conversation starter.” For Komal,

an alias was also a way of keeping herself safe.

She says, “Only lately I give my true name – now

I know I have conﬁdence to handle anything,

but before, never.” Punita uses “Emily” as an

alias, a name that came up as a result of a quiz

on Facebook. One respondent from the Sindhi

community used a speciﬁc online handle to

distance herself from her “Muslim-sounding”

ﬁrst name and surname. “I use the name that

my parents call me at home, which is Shikha, a

very clearly Hindu name. So I use that with my

surname in chats so that people will realise I’m

at least half non-Mohammedan.”

1 The Kapoors are a family of ﬁlm stars in Mumbai, often

called “the ﬁrst family of Bollywood”; the family has a ﬁlm

studio, RK Studios, located in Chembur, where Rati stays.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET96 India

internet technology and features have come at the

behest of pornography, the largest industry online. Al

Cooper’s “Triple A engine of Access, Affordability and

Anonymity”

continues to drive the trafﬁc to porn

sites on the internet, with another A thrown in for

good measure – Advertising. Pop-ups and advertise-

ments for pornography exist across the internet. For

India, the access to porn online is a giant leap forward;

generations of adolescents and adults (mostly male)

have thumbed through issues of Playboy smuggled in

from other parts of the world or secretly rented smutty

video cassettes in decoy jackets from the neighbour-

hood video store, or later, when satellite TV became

available in the 1990s, watched the TV show Baywatch

with their mouths wide open. Girls were rarely part of

such a subculture of procuring and accessing Western

porn. Features of the internet and digital technology

have vastly contributed to the opening up and circula-

tion of pornography: drastically reduced rates for the

production of pornography, easy ﬁle sharing and ﬁle

compression, search engines, privacy and anonymity.

The “naturalisation” of porn

This study shows that pornography is accessed by

practically everyone in this sample. It is not an over-

riding concern and is hardly a point of great anxiety,

although there were variations in respondents’ view-

ing habits and opinions about it. Narratives imply

that the desire to watch pornography is both pleas-

urable and “natural”, an idea that emerges from an

acceptance that sexual urges are also natural. How-

ever, pornography viewing is more naturalised within

the context of marriage. For those already married,

porn on the internet serves to “spice up marriages”

and enhance a couple’s intimacy. Shipra, a 35-year-

old housewife, believes it “seal[s] your relationship

with your husband if you can watch pornography

together.” Payal, 39, believes that since she has been

“married for so many years […] it’s okay.” Rati, an

avid surveyor of porn, believes that it ﬁlls the gap

in a boring marriage. Unmarried women in the sam-

ple also believed that pornography in the context

of marriage is legitimate. Unnati, 21, observes that

“even in a joint family set-up” where privacy is lim-

ited and family elders also reside, all that a couple

needs is a computer and a CD or an internet con-

nection. However, not all married women can share

pornography with their husbands. Malthi feels em-

barrassed so she watches pornography on her own.

Rati says that “some women are scared of their hus-

bands ﬁnding out. And women are not open about

what they are desiring.”

For others pornography satisﬁes curiosity about

sex, especially when it is “exciting and forbidden” as

72 Alvin Cooper “Sexually Compulsive Behaviour” Contemporary

Sexuality 32, 4 (1998): 1-3

Veena, 26, feels, and given the general absence of

holistic sex education. On more than one occasion

did we hear women say, “You don’t want to look

like a fool in front of your husband on your wedding

night.” Rati says she knows of women who want

details of the “ﬁrst night” but feel uncomfortable

asking their mothers for details. So, she slips young

unmarried women attending her cake-decorating

classes porn CDs. Women living with their families

also felt uncomfortable watching porn in case some-

one at home discovered this. Rupali says that “girls

are shy to say directly and always surrounded by fam-

ily and cousins, so how can you see on the net?” Sara

observes that while boys could access porn in a cyber-

café, for girls this was less likely because girls have

more restrictions on their mobility.

Gender and pornography

All respondents were of the opinion that it was a fal-

lacy that “men watch porn, not women.” “Of course

women watch pornography,” said Shipra. “I know,

because they talk about it at kitty parties.”

Some

common perceptions about gendered porn viewing

habits, and the gendered nature of the pornographic

image, include the following:

Women want to protect their reputations and re-

main secretive about porn viewing. [They] don’t

like to talk about it even if they are doing these

things. They might discuss it at sleepovers but not

outside. I also try not to talk about it too much

as they will think I am a bad girl if I talk about it.

(Punita, 18)

I was chatting with a girl from Delhi who said you’re

not a man if you don’t watch porn. (Amol, 22)

Porn shows women in crazy positions. It is unreal.

I prefer romantic movies and stories about being

in love. (Arushi, 23)

Even though there are many sites online, there is a

general impression that women are not the target au-

dience for these sites (“I don’t know what is exciting

about two-foot-long penises,” says Sakshi). Others ﬁnd

the imagery of blow-dried hair, an obsession with blow

jobs or male orgasms, stilettos (even in supposedly “les-

bian porn, a lot of it is geared towards straight men,”

says Marina) and so on more of a turn off.

What does raise hackles, though, is the easy

access children have to porn sites. There was an

73 Kitty parties are a middle-class, local ladies club phenomenon, in

which women (usually housewives) get together (usually monthly)

to socialise, but they are also an informal way of saving – a “self-

help group” of sorts. Each woman puts a decided amount into the

“kitty” every month, and by rotation the entire “kitty” goes to the

woman hosting the kitty party (usually) so that she has access to a

lump sum that month to make large household purchases or such.

All women in the group this way manage at some point to have a

large sum of money at their disposal.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET97 India

understanding that children accessing pornography

is inevitable, with evidence in peoples’ own lives

pointing to the fact that young children – age ten

onwards – were accessing inappropriate content, es-

pecially young boys. Measures taken to deal with this

include giving a list of sites that are to be blocked

to the service provider; keeping tabs on the sites

children go to; internet access in the presence of an

adult; and strategically placing the home computer

in common areas in the house so that what a child is

doing online is visible. Respondents who access porn

say that they are careful about hiding this content

from their children. On the whole, there is little clar-

ity about who the onus should be on: should it be

the sites’ responsibility to prevent this, the parents’,

cybercafés’ or the state’s? Rekha feels that the acces-

sibility of porn may reduce taboos around talking

about sexuality openly; however, she still “has some

issues with porn.” Sara shares this view: “I am ﬁgur-

ing it out still. There’s no quality control. Some things

are educational, entertaining, but some are just gris-

ly, demeaning, twisted nonsense.”

New questions

Arushi asks, “But what is porn actually? Nowadays

you can see other pics – someone gets drunk at a par-

ty and puts up pics online, pics of them sexily dressed

and making out with someone.” Is it the MMS clips

made by individuals and circulated on the net, is it

sexy pictures, is it the content made by deploying spy

cams in bathrooms? The ability to upload content

on the web with Web 2.0 has meant that traditional

understandings of porn are also changing. It is also

subjective, with viewers making distinctions based on

their own perceptions. Subjectivity has always been

the problem with deﬁning obscenity

but now this

is magniﬁed by the diversity and volume of conten-

tious images being easily produced and circulated.

With such ﬂuidity, how can that most slippery of con-

cepts – the obscene – be deﬁned? At the same time,

laws around censorship remain mired in old vague

deﬁnitions that do not account for these changes.

Language, as suggested by Marshall McLuhan,

is a sense like touch. This study has revealed that

textual and visual interfaces and platforms online

have led to certain articulations of the self, desire,

sexuality, sex and the erotic. Given the limited (and

largely appropriated) languages of sexuality that

exist, studying the expressions of the erotic and

the sexual online could reveal more about how

“sexuality” is being interpreted and imagined. This

is signiﬁcant in the Indian context where certain

expressions of sexuality, for particular groups of

74 With reference to the Hicklin Test used by US courts in legislation on

and prosecution of cases related to pornography: pornography has

come to be “known” through the phrase, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

people, remain unheard and silenced. These diverse

languages (verbal, textual, visual, haptic) of sexuality

also present a challenge to a monolithic notion of

“Indian sexuality”. The word “sexy”, for example, is

used casually and to connote a range of experiences

and subjectivities that this study has not been able to

exhaustively plumb. The conﬂations between words

in common parlance, like “MMS” and “blue ﬁlms”

and their distinction from the more academic (and

legal) “pornography”, is another case in point that

indicates ruptures in how sexuality is experienced

and articulated. This has implications for what is as-

signed as being “harmful” content or not. Further

understanding of these ruptures will contribute to

opening out the currently narrow approaches to on-

line content regulation.

Some of the ﬁndings (for example, women’s

active self-presentation as sexy and desirable on plat-

forms like Facebook) raise uncomfortable questions

for feminists of how to analyse and make sense of

these representations of women and female sexuality

given women’s participation in them. Feminist groups

Banning the Bhabhi

Savita Bhabhi, the cartoon porn site that was

banned by the Indian government, evoked

mixed responses. Some had seen it before it was

banned, some had heard of it (mostly after it

was banned) and some had no idea what it was.

Malthi remembers the ﬁrst episode about a bra

salesman who comes to Savita Bhabhi’s house.

“It really reminded me of comics from child-

hood and it was really attractive because it was

a proper story. It was much more attractive than

blue ﬁlms. Other sites just show the same things

and morph actresses’ faces onto the models. It

gets boring.” Entrepreneurs Sejal and Sahaj,

who run a queer-themed store, say they liked

Savita because it catered to everyone, “even the

gay men who wanted to see hot male bodies, to

femme women, to butch women, to in-between

queer women, to men […] And it was more real,

more believable, it was in Hindi as well, so it’s

playing to a very attainable Indian fantasy. It

is culturally relevant and shouldn’t have been

banned.” Ironically, it was this aspect of the

comic – the cultural context and the image of a

sari-clad, Hindu housewife – that triggered the

anxiety that led to the ban. Shipra, a 35-year-

old housewife, watches other sorts of porn

occasionally but felt offended by Savita Bhabhi.

“I have not seen it but have heard about it. It

is illegal and it looks really cheap. You cannot

show a woman in a sari doing these things. WE

have some culture. We are more used to seeing

Hollywood models doing these kinds of things.”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET98 India

in India have long debated notions of “obscenity” and

censorship (or not) of certain kinds of representation

of women – sexual and otherwise. But now that sexu-

al representation of women and self-presentation are

overlapping in many ways thanks to new technologies

like the internet, feminists all over the world, and not

just Indian feminists, need to revisit some of the issues

around sexual representation of women.

Harm, violence and security online

Even though people spoke at length about their

negative experiences online and strategies to be

safe online, none of them saw the internet as inher-

ently dangerous because of this. A cluster of themes

arise when talking of the perils of the internet: easy

access to pornography, even for children; deceptions

in online chatting and SNS; hacking, manipulation

of images and other data; unwanted attention,

harassment; addiction to the internet and its over-

whelming hold on everyday life; spam, viruses, fraud

and embezzlement; speciﬁc risks faced by women

and children; and the complicated connection be-

tween the online and the ofﬂine world.

Pornography: Harmful or harmless?

There is a perception that the internet’s most virulent

characteristic is the easy access to porn. We have seen

previously respondents’ rationalisation of the view-

ing of porn online, but the question of pornography

as being “harmful” comes up time and again. Most

Respondents to the survey and in-depth interviews

reported on the following as offensive, abusive and

harmful content online.

Interestingly, pornography and blue ﬁlms were

not considered as harmful or offensive as the law,

and recent incidents of content ﬁltering, would

have us believe. Internet addictions, however, are a

signiﬁcant source of concern. The other risks respond-

ents believe exist in the online world are: economic

and ﬁnancial crimes, fraud and embezzlement; hav-

ing personal information, social networking proﬁles

and images stolen or manipulated; personal email IDs

being hacked, spammed and phished; being misled

by strangers; being preyed upon by men.

What is “harmful” content?

FIGURE 1. Which of these is offensive, abusive or harmful content online?

100

In Percentage

Pornography/blue films

Child pornography

Adverts for sex selection of fetus

Penile enhancements/Viagra

Viruses

Hateful remarks against a community

Anti-Indian remarks

Rape sites

Sex tourism sites

Homosexuality sites

Other

Qualitative interview data Quantitative survey data

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET99 India

recently the Chief Justice of India called for a ban on

online pornography. Is this justiﬁed? What is it that is

“harmful” about pornography? As those interviewed

reﬂected at length, the harms of viewing porn were

notional, and related to embarrassment and stigma

(“It is embarrassing if other cousins who come to our

house and use computer ﬁnd it so deleting history is

important,” says Punita), and at a practical level, to

viruses attacking the computer (“Virus comes in a lot.

Porn sites are only for namesake, they are fully loaded

with viruses,” says Vikas). Also deemed dangerous

was how the media could be manipulated; practically

everyone in this sample talked about the dangers of

“mix-matching”, where faces, bodies and positions

can be cut and pasted into new montages.

Moreover, it is the assumptions about the person

accessing porn that are difﬁcult to negotiate, and

represent the real harm – being known as a “bad

girl” or a girl of “loose morals”, the concomitant

hazards of this. As Rupali says:

One guy friend of mine he took BP [blue pictures,

meaning pornographic] videos of his girlfriend

and sent it around. A guy’s a guy’s a guy. Girls

should never show even friends even if you have

downloaded. Impression of them changes.

In the absence of sex education, and because of the

societal silence around sexuality, a teenager who sees

“proper intercourse” ﬁrst through the access of online

porn can feel a sense of shock, feel “scared, shattered,

embarrassed” – but none would say they were “harmed”

by it. Respondents recall their ﬁrst time saying “I was

taken aback […] but we didn’t talk about it, pretended

it was normal, but deep down all of us were shocked,”

in the words of Gurbani. This initial shock is also experi-

enced by boys. Vikas says he ﬁrst watched pornography

at the age of ﬁfteen and was “open mouthed”.

Part of the harmlessness about porn is the fact

that viewers see it as something unreal. Rati says, “All

porn is fake, the man-woman porn, the group sex, the

lesbian gay porn, […] even rape scenes. It’s all made

up.” Arushi, 23, talks about other kinds of question-

able content on the internet, recalling that videos of a

gang of ﬁfteen-year-old girls ﬁghting and beating up

one of their classmates were very popular online, as

well as footage from “spy cameras” installed in peo-

ple’s bathrooms or public toilets. It is this more “real”

sort of voyeuristic sexual content, rather than “un-

real” porn, which is seen to be problematic.

The risks of chatting and social networking

Respondents spoke of years-long chat friendships

that never culminate in an ofﬂine meeting; those

that do can be either afﬁrming, or terribly damag-

ing. Arushi has a male friend in Delhi who she chats

with regularly online and meets ofﬂine. Then there

is Rati, who chatted with someone for a few months

before ﬁnding that he had grossly misrepresented

himself. When they ﬁnally met she was devastated

to ﬁnd that he was neither tall and handsome nor

wealthy as he had portrayed himself to be; instead

he was a short, dark, unattractive student. Rati says

she was “humiliated”. A queer respondent talks of

being befriended and led on by a man pretending

to be a woman; again, it was only after a personal

meeting that she discovered the deception. Shikha

found that something that seems promising can go

sour. Looking for a marriage partner on Shaadi Dot

Com, she met someone online from Varanasi, and

pursued an (online) relationship for a few months.

Then, they had a ﬁght. “I kept ignoring him. Then

he really started harassing and threatening me, say-

ing he would tell people publicly private things I had

said to him. It took a long time to block him and get

him out of my networks.” In response to open-ended

questions about what they disliked about the inter-

net, interviewees consistently said that they did not

like having to be constantly mistrustful of people

they met online.The other oft-mentioned, annoying

and sometimes offensive aspect of online chatting

is how men use it to pester women online – from

opening lines like the harmless “ASL” (as a question,

referring to age, sex and location), to the direct “Are

you horny?”, “Do you like to watch blue ﬁlms?”,

“Tell me about your body” or “Gimme your phone

number so we can have phone sex.” Needless to say,

women do not believe such opening gambits will do

much for these hopefuls. Reema, 54, comments:

If anything, Indian men’s behaviour online re-

veals that they are chasers ofﬂine and […] just

don’t know how to talk to a woman, and how

to deal with her rejection. There was one time

when I actually asked such a young man if I could

give him some etiquette training because I was

sick of how men talk to women online.

For young women in the grip of social network-

ing mania, Facebook and Orkut are full of exciting

possibilities, but equally, risks and dangers. Harass-

ment on social networking sites is not unusual. Some

experiences:

Once a guy on Orkut stole my entire ID. […] He

just used my picture and name and used it to

make another ID. He did things like, under “fa-

vourite movies” he listed porn movies and stuff.

But I have friends who are ethical hackers and

they helped me ﬁght back. (Arushi, 23)

When that fake proﬁle of mine was created by

someone else, that was very harassing. I usually

don’t care about these things, but when strange

guys call up and ask how much you are charging

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET100 India

it feels bad. […] Then there was an incident of

hacking, someone went into my Orkut proﬁle

and deleted it. See, guys talk about me. I am one

of those girls who don’t give a fuck. So for them

it’s like, okay, if you don’t give a fuck, let’s play

around. But ya, it does hurt me. (Punita, 18)

While there is an understanding that privacy settings

are supposed to provide some protection from stran-

gers, there is little that prevents known people from

taking advantage of the access they have. The inci-

dents reported in the popular media and in this study

suggest that stalking, harassment, manipulation and

harm from known people are as signiﬁcant threats as

those from strangers.

Risks from the ofﬂine world

According to existing Indian laws on violence against

women, the perpetrator is rarely considered to be

the enemy in your home.

The discourse around

the dangers of the internet revolves around stran-

gers who are online predators.

But what of the

intrusions and omissions from people known to the

75 For example, there is no comprehensive sexual assault law in India

that recognises and distinguishes the different grades of violence

women experience from strangers and intimate partners or family

members. In the letter of the law there is no mention of marital

rape nor familial child sexual abuse (or any form of child sexual

abuse except a generic notion of “rape”).

76 Mabel Bianco and Andrea Mariño EROTICS: An Exploratory

Research on Sexuality and the Internet. Policy Review (Association

for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking Support

Program, 2008) www.genderit.org/content/erotics-exploratory-

research-sexuality-internet-policy-review

women, sometimes intimately? This reﬂects another

signiﬁcant thread that emerges from the qualita-

tive interviews: often, the harm to women can come

from people known to them rather than from stran-

gers.

Punita’s fake proﬁle was put up by a guy from

her locality who was in her wider circle of friends;

Himani was harassed online by a “stranger” who she

later found out was a senior at school whose friend-

ship requests she had repeatedly ignored.

Young women in this sample were conscious of

their online behaviour and reputations being po-

liced by ofﬂine social norms and regulations. With

social expectations of untarnished reputations that

will ensure family respect and marriage prospects,

young women fear being betrayed by family mem-

bers, boyfriends or others who could report online

activities to family members and social acquaint-

ances. Then there is the fear of punishment when

“someone ﬁnds out,” which also seems to be gener-

ated by those closest. Unnati does not put up “really

sexy pics” of herself (although she would like to) be-

cause her boyfriend objects. Punita contends with

an elder male cousin living in her home looking

77 The ﬁrst cyber-crime conviction in India reﬂects this: the case of

The State of Tamil Nadu Vs Suhas Katti in 2004. The case related

to posting of obscene, defamatory and annoying messages

about a divorcee in a Yahoo! message group. The accused was a

known family friend of the victim and was reportedly interested

in marrying her. However, she had married someone else. This

marriage ended in divorce and the accused started contacting her

once again. On her reluctance to marry him, the accused resorted

to harassing her through the internet. “Chennai Cybercrime Cell

Gets its First Case in Record Time” NAAVI 5 November 2004 www.

naavi.org/cl_editorial_04/suhas_katti_case.htm

Women who regularly use SNSs to ﬁnd partners

speak of a series of graduated moves once someone

interesting is identiﬁed:

1. Check out his Facebook or Orkut proﬁle. “On Ya-

hoo chat there can be people with fake IDs. And

you know someone is fake if their Orkut proﬁle

doesn’t have comments, if he isn’t a member of

any communities, if there are no friends or pho-

tos or videos. So you should always check that

ﬁrst,” advises Meena, 24.

2. Next, exchange emails to see if there is some

compatibility and if you can have a good con-

versation. Be aware of the information you are

giving out. “Never use webcams for chats in the

beginning,” continues Meena. Do not divulge

all your personal identifying information, espe-

cially telephone numbers and location data, at

the beginning either. “Be aware that you are in

a public forum and talking about yourself,” says

Reema, 54, “even though it may be a private

conversation.”

3. Exchange more emails. Make sure you have a

“connection”.

4. If the relationship progresses well, move to hav-

ing phone conversations.

5. The last and ﬁnal stage, only if you are very sure,

is to meet ofﬂine.

There is never any guarantee that even the most

cautious measures will not result in heartbreak,

given the nature of online communication. Geet,

27, says wistfully, having recently been dumped by

someone she had enjoyed an online relationship

with, “One has to realise that internet is just a me-

dium which lends itself to use as well as misuse. If

one chooses to go a certain path on it, one must

own up to one’s own choices and take responsibility

for one’s actions as well as safety.”

How to ﬁnd an online date in ﬁve steps

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET101 India

over her shoulder to see what she is doing online,

and it is “damn bugging.”

Women learn quickly that the cardinal rule ofﬂine

applies online as well. Himani, nineteen, says: “You

have to manage your image and reputation.” Like in

the ofﬂine world (especially in instances of sexual har-

assment or rape), it is presumed that any untoward

attention that comes their way will be because “they

asked for it.” A male respondent, nineteen-year-old Vi-

kas, concurs that “for Indian people image is prestige,

dignity is the main thing. If they are affected, they are

gone.” While he admits that “boys play pranks using

the net,” he does not think it is right. Eventually, “no-

body will dig your past, but if she’s a girl it will have bad

effect in her life.” Incidents involving the manipulation

of personal information and identity online can be dev-

astating for young women because of the implications

for their image and reputation, both being intrinsically

linked to family and family honour. Many respondents

feel that being called a “prossy” (prostitute) in a public

forum like the internet is a terrible thing that causes

them a fair amount of trauma, besides having possible

implications in their social life, family relationships and

future prospects of marriage and career.

Ultimately, the risks that concern young women

more are the ones that reach into the real world

from the virtual one. In a dramatic incident, Marina,

a young woman journalist, was victimised for her on-

line behaviour by her ofﬂine colleagues.

In my ﬁrst job I had internet access and I used to

surf on the net a lot, including queer sites. I was

on the Desi Dykes list and I was on Gay Dot Com

to try and connect with people. There was NEVER

any porn that I looked at. My ﬁrst email ID was on

Excite Dot Com. I was relatively new to the net so

I think I downloaded a virus from there by mis-

take. To seek out this virus all our personal stuff

was checked and seen by the ofﬁce IT people and

it quickly spread round that I had looked at these

queer sites and I was hauled up for it by the editor

for using the internet for “personal gain”, [and

she] also revealed to everyone that I was looking

at gay sites. That’s how she outed me. It was dev-

astating. It was terribly humiliating because I had

no choice in deciding to let everyone in the ofﬁce

know that I am gay. There was a guy in the of-

ﬁce who used to play online games constantly but

no one ever said anything to him about “personal

gain” so when this happened I began to wonder

if this was just homophobia. I ended up getting

ﬁred from this job and it took me a long time to

recover. At that time I had no voice, no queer com-

munity. I was new in the city and had just begun

my career. If this happened now I would be much

better equipped to deal with it.

Eventually, a universe of morality, anxieties about

Indian culture, and notions of shame and honour

curtail and temper the agency and freedom young

women experience through SNSs, chatting and the

display of sensual pictures. Young women have in-

ternalised the limits to looking sexy, which if crossed

could result in stigma and restrictions. When pictures

are considered “too sexy” or when chatting “gets

too much” young women are advised to stop chat-

ting and remove the pictures, citing the reason: “It’s

for your own good.” Rupali says:

Like I have one friend who had a pic in a towel, it

was a wet and sexy look, and she uploaded it. But

another friend copied it and then blackmailed

her. In masti [“fun” in Hindustani] only. He told

her please delete it otherwise I will blackmail

you. It was for her good only.

Strategies for safety

The women we interviewed were not victimised into

inaction by these risks or negative experiences. If an-

ything, after the initial shock of violation, a sense of

conﬁdence and mastery in dealing with offensive, abu-

sive men develops. Blocking, ignoring, signing out and

consistently avoiding offensive chatters are how they

retaliate. Reema says that it is critical to “rely on your

instincts and gut feelings that you use in everyday life.

These are not to be suspended when you’re online.

Especially on chat, I use my gut instincts to ﬁgure out

people and read them carefully.” With the exception of

three interviewees, the remaining 28 had a clear list of

“dos and don’ts” for keeping themselves safe online.

Compared to other strategies, being wary of divulging

personal information and details to strangers was the

most common. Eighteen-year-old Punita says:

You should secure your ID. Block users you don’t

want. Don’t make random friendships. Once in a

blue moon I make friends with strangers, not regu-

larly. I don’t use my real name or location in chats.

The 150 college students surveyed generated a very

similar list of cautionary measures, with 44% saying

they did take certain measures to ensure that they

were safe online. The giving out of personal infor-

mation and details, divulging location data, and

allowing access to personal photographs are all con-

sidered strict “don’ts” now. The highly publicised

2004 MMS Scandal and the Miss Jammu Scandal

continue to serve as warnings of what can go wrong.

78 In this 2003 case referred to as the Miss Jammu Scandal, local

beauty pageant winner Anara Gupta from Jammu was arrested

with seven others for featuring in a pornographic CD. She claimed

it was not her in the ﬁlm. Forensics found the Miss Jammu CD to

be doctored; it was not the young woman arrested.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET102 India

There was a high degree of awareness about

“mix-matching” and of being misled or stalked and

preyed upon by men. One young male respond-

ent even went so far as to say that women’s proﬁle

pictures could be downloaded and then used in

advertisements and pop-ups for pornographic sites

– because he had actually done it. Rupali, nineteen,

explains: “The DP (display picture) I make sure shows

top half only face. Pics in sexy top or corset, don’t

put them up. Yes, I would want to, but still the fear

is there.”

The initial brush with harassment results in the

development of strategies for maintaining safety on-

line, although a persistent fear and worry remains.

Rekha, 45, who confesses to being awkward online

and with new technologies, sums up her approach:

“It is like when you travel to a new city and you have

to be safe and aware and keep your wits about you.”

“With the internet your maturity level increases;

you’re on your own and you learn on your own,” says

Rupali. However, she adds:

Even if something happens (bad) I don’t think

girls will report. If it’s a police case then it’s a

big issue and parents will come to know. Parents

blame us only. They will say she shouldn’t have

added friends like that. No internet for her if her

parents found out. Then the rest of the family

can ﬁnd out. So no one will tell the parents.

There is a persistent sense of worry about internet

access being restricted and moral judgement being

passed on them, hence most strategies do not involve

reporting harassment to any ﬁgure of authority, be

they parents or the police. Unnati echoes Rupali’s

view when she reﬂects:

My worst internet experience was when that

guy was after me. I didn’t like it. I think it must

be happening to many girls, maybe even worse

than my case. I’m not sure what one can really

do. Maybe the girl should tell her family and they

can help her, but it depends on the family. They

might just tell you to stop going on the internet

and chatting. So then it’s better to keep quiet

only and deal with it on your own.

Yet, women ﬁnd ways to manage the harms they

may face from strangers and intimates. They were

blasé about having at least two digital proﬁles – one

for the family, and the other for friends – as routine

“online identity management”. And Unnati man-

ages a sly manipulation of the boyfriend who does

not want her to post sexy pictures of herself on Fa-

cebook: “He is not my friend on Facebook. I told him

my family members are there with me on Facebook

and I don’t want them to know about him, so that’s

why he is not there.”

Risks for children online

A statement often made by interviewees when asked

about children and the internet was, “Oh, kids these

days – they know everything” or “Kids are very smart

these days, they ﬁgure out things fast.” The state-

ment is usually made with a mixture of awe and

pride that people so young are so adept with tech-

nology that appears complex to adults, and concern

about the content of what they engage with. There

is genuine concern amongst parents that their chil-

dren play in an entirely new landscape that they, as

adults, have no maps and signposts for.

Respondents referred to inappropriate content

children are exposed to as: sexualised and violent

metaphors in gaming, online pornography, sexual

chatting and speech with peers and with older

Ignore or delete? The dilemma

of women bloggers

Women bloggers reportedly receive the bulk of

trolling and personal attacks on their blogs: sex-

ist comments; name calling; personal comments

targeting the way they look, act, their fam-

ily or background; proposals for friendship to

marriage and “lovesick sexually explicit mails”;

threatening comments telling them to “watch

out, you’re going against society” or are cor-

rupting India’s moral fabric, and so on.

Sakshi, whose blog posts often touch upon

issues like relationships, sex, smoking and city

life, says of the harsh responses she has got:

“There needs to be a ‘Kindness Censor’.” She dis-

likes that she is personally targeted and would

prefer that her writing be attacked instead.

However, she feels she has developed a very thick

skin about it all. “Even when people say things

like I am really ugly or a bitch or something. You

just have to let it go and move on.”

Mommy bloggers are particularly concerned

with remarks about their children, and around

controversial issues. There are fears of children

being kidnapped, of paedophiles preying on chil-

dren and their images through mommy blogs,

and of inappropriate comments about children

being posted on their blogs. Bloggers who write

about controversial issues come under attack for

their views as well, and there is a fear of being

stalked and attacked ofﬂine and online. The

other concern bloggers have is of plagiarism.

What is the solution? Delete abusive posts? Some

do, although they are conscious this amounts to

some sort of censorship. Some don’t, they just

post them, for it is part of the turf.

1 Mishra “Hindustan Times Story”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET103 India

people, and imagery children produced of them-

selves, or of others, through photographs or videos.

A recent cover story in the newsmagazine Tehelka

revealed the extent of urban, upper-middle-class and

upper-class children’s sexualisation through access

to television and digital technologies.

Interviewees

were quite clear that pornography, blue ﬁlms and

erotic imagery and text were all right for adults but

not for children. Children’s and teens’ fascination

with gaming was also a source of concern.

Young people are always trying to get around

the restrictions placed on them by the adult world.

Ofﬂine, there are restrictions on being served alco-

hol, and being allowed into discos. Online, however,

it is as easy as clicking “yes” to a veriﬁcation about

being above the age of eighteen years. Arushi was

aghast to ﬁnd that her ten-year-old brother and his

friends “liked Jenna Jameson more than Pamela An-

derson” (the former being a porn star and the latter,

an actress on the popular US TV show Baywatch). Pu-

nita and Amol both mention their pre-teen siblings

and cousins being exposed to advertisements and

pop-ups for pornography online. Malthi knows that

her fourteen-year-old son is curious about and inter-

ested in sex and tries to access pornography online.

“It’s not the right age” or “There’s an age for eve-

rything” are frequently heard when respondents talk

about children’s access to pornography. When asked

what that age was, they would be at a loss for an an-

swer. The “right age” moved ﬂuidly between fourteen

years to 24 years, an extremely broad range, establish-

ing that there is confusion around a legitimate age at

which sexual content was acceptable. Mommy blog-

ger Mohini puts the confusion across well:

Depends on how to deﬁne “young”. I haven’t

ﬁgured my position on this yet. Kids today have

better mouse proﬁciency and [are] introduced

to technology very early on. My son is ﬁve and

has an hour of online games every day. What are

the implications for this? We have to yet evolve

our thoughts on kids/teens online. With time I

guess we have to keep evolving. […] I think till

the right age one has to be careful about these

things. What is the right age you can’t write in

stone, as things keep changing, but until a cer-

tain age you can’t have that free access to the

net, the age being maybe ﬁfteen-sixteen or later.

The other concern interviewees had for children’s

safety is that they could, and do, end up talking to

adult strangers. Shikha, a 24-year-old sales execu-

tive with a mobile phone company, says that her

sixteen-year-old sister is “addicted” to online chat-

ting and ended up becoming the “Orkut girlfriend”

79 Nisha Susan “Sex, Lies and Homework” Tehelka 24 April 2010

of someone in Australia. “Eventually it turned out

that he started pestering her, wanted her to do a

lot of sexy stuff online, like sending him pictures.

He wanted to visit her here in India. She got damn

scared by all this. She has learned her lesson now.”

Strategies for children’s safety online

The most common strategy suggested to keep chil-

dren safe online was that children and parents need

open lines of communication, and that adults need

to guide their children and be open about sex. In

actual practice, though, those with children employ

monitoring children’s internet use and installing ﬁl-

tering software. More speciﬁcally, these strategies

include the following actions:

I think when you’re a kid, there are things you

shouldn’t learn from Google. Someone older

needs to be able and around for you to talk to –

your parents basically. (Sakshi, 27)

I think it would be a bad idea to give him a PC

in his own room, I will probably go for a fam-

ily computer in the middle of the hustle bustle.

(Mohini, 33)

Sex, violence and online games

“I think we have some dated ideas about what

is violent or harmful online for kids. When I see

kids in cybercafés playing online games that are

violent, I get upset and wish they were playing

outside. And I think they can be groomed to be-

come violent by seeing all this violent imagery.

There are games I have seen like ‘kill the babe’,

etc. What does it do to a twelve-year-old if he

constantly hears ‘kill the babe’ in these games,

every single day?” asks Marina. Vrushali agrees,

“Some of the activities are quite shocking, like

you have to do a rape or some violence to get

past one level. This is all part of the ‘game’ and

I ﬁnd it quite damaging.” Younger members of

our sample were excited by gaming, however,

with girls showing a preference for social games.

Cybercafés are locations where young people

gather to play online games. Parents on the

other hand were concerned that their children

would use cybercafés to get past the restric-

tions placed on internet use at home. Shipra, the

mother of a fourteen-year-old and a seven-year-

old, says that her children are forbidden from

visiting cybercafés for this reason; and Malthi

fears that her teenaged son will access pornog-

raphy from cybercafés under the guise of playing

online games. Malthi also worries that children

will get too absorbed in the world of the internet

and gaming and “ignore their studies.”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET104 India

My husband has installed a ﬁltering software

that blocks those porno pop-ups. (Payal, 39)

I’ve told my sixteen-year-old that she is not to

add people without knowing who they are on FB

or Orkut and since I am a friend of hers on these

sites I monitor it by checking out her friends list.

(Sheena, 44)

My husband gives a list of URLs to the service pro-

vider and asks them to block them. (Malthi, 35)

There’s no way to do this. At least I am not aware.

I’m working so I cannot monitor my son the

whole day. If I do it, then he’ll go to his friends’

house and do it. If you take away the net, they

will have the phone. I see students nowadays,

they know everything and they have everything.

I don’t think this sort of monitoring of children

on the internet is possible. (Payal, 39)

Payal is a mother of two pre-teenagers, and a coun-

sellor and educational psychologist working with

International Baccalaureate schools in the city. She

is aware that her children are curious about sex and

that they are playing out their natural, healthy ado-

lescent curiosity and budding relationships through

the internet and mobiles. She is less sanguine

about what she observes in schools: thirteen- and

fourteen-year-olds hacking into the SNS proﬁle of

a younger child and posting “ﬁlthy things” about

his sister; teenagers accessing pornography in a

classroom and showing it to the teacher; posting

malicious sexual content about peers; defacing

proﬁle pages on SNSs, and other forms of cyber

bullying and harassment, all peer-to-peer. Her ap-

proach, however, is to be “cool and calm” and “not

make a big deal out of it.” She does not think it is

useful or effective to monitor children closely. She

believes in talking to young people and educating

them. She thinks that most parents have a hard time

reconciling with their children’s curiosity and inter-

ests because of their own discomfort and morality

around sexual issues.

Do parents actually talk to their children? And

what do they say if they themselves are uncomfort-

able talking about sex and sexuality? With little

guidance for parents and a culture of silence around

sexuality and sexual pleasure, this seems to be a real

problem. Interviewees all admitted, some more re-

luctantly than others, that even restricting access

to the internet does not necessarily limit children’s

exposure to sexual content. Neither were parents

happy with having to impose restrictions, recognis-

ing the importance of the internet as a learning tool,

and the mobile phone to monitor children’s where-

abouts and safety, ultimately giving up. A mommy

blogger, Seema, sums it up:

It’s not possible. At best you can be a snoopy

mom or dad, an expert hacker or get control over

the computer, still ten-year-olds in the building

will be circulating MMSs. All you can do is make

sure the kid’s head is screwed on straight.

FIGURE 2. Interview respondents’ strategies and suggestions for keeping children safe online

Talk to

and educate

your children

Install software,

filters &

passwords

Physical

restrictions

on use of

technology

Monitor what

kids are looking

at online

There is nothing

you can do

I would give

them total

freedom

Websites should

be blocked

MEASURES

NO. OF RESPONSES

Base = 31

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET105 India

Concluding comments

In India the online world is inextricably linked to the

ofﬂine – a world that is characterised by caste, class,

gender, poverty, communal issues and regionalism.

Freedom of speech and expression is a constitutional

right but in practice, it has often been challenged

on arbitrary and controversial grounds – as a mat-

ter of politics, exercise of state power, a muzzle on

dissenting views or moral policing. Most censorship

anxieties have been around representations of reli-

gious symbols and sex, especially female sexuality.

The internet is a radically different medium, but

the existing approach to policing it is reminiscent of

how old media like cinema, radio, television and ad-

vertising have been policed,

with an emphasis on

maintaining speciﬁc ideas of “Nation” and “National

Culture”. We can see how the ways in which women

are using the internet for their own pleasure and

leisure pose a challenge to these ideas. By putting

power in the hands of users to invent themselves and

transgress subjective boundaries of “Indian-ness” in

how they dress, what they do and who they speak

to, there is a challenge to monolithic and vague no-

tions of Indian culture and Indian femininity. No one

we interviewed has any doubts about their Indian

identity; they are exemplars of Indian womanhood,

wifehood and motherhood. Even though they be-

lieved that some sexual images could be damaging

for children, very few actually favoured banning,

blocking or ﬁltering of content, believing that adult

users have their rights to such content, while chil-

dren need to be talked to openly about these issues.

Responses strongly indicate that current trends of

content regulation do not mirror the concerns of in-

ternet users

The current approach to content regulation on

the internet is strongly inﬂuenced by existing laws

on indecency and obscenity (ill-deﬁned as they are)

such as the Indecent Representation of Women (Pro-

hibition) Act. Sections 67 and 67B of the Information

Technology Act of 2008 deal with “cyber pornogra-

phy” and child pornography respectively. According

to Section 67, anyone who “publishes or transmits or

causes to be published or transmitted in electronic

form” explicit material is guilty of an offence; by

this logic then, many in our entire sample (a fairly

conservative, well-to-do, educated, professional

community, representative of a good proportion

of urban India) – across sex, age, educational back-

ground – are guilty of breaching this law, as are

most Indians who have access to the internet. Sexual

80 Namita Malhotra The World Wide Web of Desire: Content

Regulation on the Internet Association for Progressive

Communications Women’s Networking Support Programme,

November 2007 www.apc.org

content like blue ﬁlms are fairly normalised within

the context of adult sexual experiences and are not

considered something that only lewd, perverted or

abnormal people access. Even the 28-year-old mar-

ried woman and the 22-year-old young man who

saw “rape sites” do not necessarily ﬁt into the cat-

egory of the “abnormal” or “perverted” as their

narratives denote. They state their right to this ma-

terial in terms of curiosity and arousal, which they

believe are private choices.

In many ways “pornography” is a red herring. Us-

ers’ excitement and exploration online lies not only

in the one-way gaze of looking at porn but at the

interactive intimacies that come from consensual,

sensual chatting with friends and strangers using

text, speech and webcams; putting up “sexy” images

(according to extremely subjective ideas of “sexy”)

of oneself and inviting an appreciative sexual gaze

through proﬁles, photo albums and chatting on

SNSs, online dating and matrimonial sites. In an

age of all-pervasive images, every person with a cell

phone camera is a potential creator of “porn” or

“obscene” images. Every person who indulges in sexy

online chats or posts hot pics may appeal to “pru-

rient interests”. Given this reality, rather than limit

the discussion to contestations around “pornogra-

phy”, another framework might consider the trafﬁc

in images.

To users it is not the images themselves which

are problematic, but as the narratives and recent

cases in India have shown, it is their manipulation

and trafﬁcking without consent that is of concern.

Women in this sample, irrespective of age, say they

are nervous and concerned about the risks they

face online when they cite “mix-matching”, or the

manipulation of personal images on social network-

ing sites. Another concern is the ubiquitous “MMS”,

or multimedia messaging service, which because of

numerous “scandals” has now become shorthand

for sexual content shot on personal mobile phones

and then circulated via the internet and mobile plat-

forms. There is a clear tension that can be read in

these narratives: between the desire to take risks,

access and play with erotic imagery, and the fears

around the repercussions of trafﬁcking of these im-

ages. The fears women have directly relate to the

context of ofﬂine moralities, raising questions for

discussions around privacy and regulation.

The responses to these MMS scandals have been

weak and confused, and there is little clarity still

about how these could be dealt with in proactive and

extra-legal ways. The public response to them contin-

ues to be unclear, with no studied response system

being put into place. This is a situation that calls for

greater awareness raising amongst women and men

users (and also women’s groups and civil society), and

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET106 India

more information and knowledge about how tech-

nology works and how personal boundaries may be

transgressed, and protected.

Women face risks online but are learning how to

deal with them, and are not seeking protectionist in-

tervention. Among our respondents, 92% felt that it

is possible to leverage this space with some awareness

of the risks that exist online: “The internet may have

its dangers, but it is not a dangerous place,” many

opined. Like they would in any new environment,

women are learning to read the signals, devise their

own strategies to be secure, and learning to be alert

and read people and situations. That said, there are

few institutionalised methods or curricula for them

to learn to be secure online before they actually get

online. Responses from the survey revealed that the

majority of respondents felt there was too little in-

formation available on online security and privacy. In

spite of having to use the net from their early teens

for school projects, there was no guidance for young

people from either schools or parents about how to

manage oneself online. Schools and parents them-

selves are uncomfortable broaching issues of sexuality

or harm, and are less comfortable with new technolo-

gies than young people are. As they always have, the

young navigate this new world learning from peers,

siblings, cousins, hearsay and experience.

We also ﬁnd from the narratives that online harm

is considered harmful if there is an ofﬂine implica-

tion. Women secure themselves from the fallouts of

this – character assassination, a “damaged” image or

social perception of them being “bad girls”, being

outed in homophobic workplaces leading to loss of

job and so on – by being anonymous, routine image

management or drawing their own boundaries. This

right to be anonymous on the internet needs further

exploration.

The myth of strangers lurking in cyberspace to

prey on innocent women and children is challenged

in this study. Much of the harm is from people they

know, not necessarily strangers. With regard to child

abuse, paedophilia and violence against women, one

has to take the cues from the ofﬂine realities and

how the state has viewed and addressed these prob-

lems ofﬂine – all of which have been lax. Activists are

still struggling to get a separate law on child sexu-

al abuse because there is reluctance to accept that

danger comes from family, neighbours and relatives;

and addressing violence against women holistically

and sensitively does not seem to be a priority for the

state given that a comprehensive Sexual Assault Bill

languishes between bureaucracies. Online security

can be taught and learned, but the issues that exist

ofﬂine for women point to the deeply unequal, bi-

ased cultural and social values that reinforce silence

around violence and harm.

Towards rights

The internet has had implications for the practice of

human rights in India as much as anywhere else, par-

ticularly two sets of rights: communication rights

and sexuality rights.

On one hand, the ability to access technologies

like the internet and mobile phones has enabled

women to practice freedom of speech and expres-

sion and gain visibility and a voice. At the same

time, this freedom of speech and expression has

been curtailed by social conditioning and gen-

dered ideas about what women should and should

not say. Self-censorship operates at a subconscious

(and sometimes conscious) level so as to maintain

the status quo. Nonetheless, young women, in par-

ticular, negotiate freedom and censure by using

online spaces to challenge cultural taboos and social

restrictions around sexuality, relationships and self-

determination. This is perhaps the ﬁrst demographic

in the history of independent India that is able to

do so in such a manner. There has been a signiﬁcant

impact on queer people in organising, activism and

for the most essential liberties: self-recognition and

self-expression. A gender dysphoric man – now a

transwoman – found the greatest comfort and vital

information through the internet; considering that

she is from a middle-class and relatively afﬂuent fam-

ily, fear of rejection and for family reputation forced

her to look for information online rather than access

a doctor or psychologist, which she had the ﬁnancial

means to do.

Vitally, the internet has also opened up a sea of

information for those with access, and people are

moved by the difference this has made to their lives

and the sense of empowerment they feel. It gives

81 The Internet Rights Charter by the Association for Progressive

Communications (APC) describes the rights to communication

in terms of ICTs and the internet, and the internet as a space for

“social mobilisation and development, resistance to injustices

and expression of differences and creativity,” despite the fact

that the process of globalisation, to which the internet is central,

has yielded uneven results and exacerbated social and economic

inequalities. Organised around ﬁve thematic areas, their

deﬁnition calls for the protection and respect of the following

rights: the right of men and women of differing backgrounds,

languages, locations and abilities to affordable, public access to

the internet and to the skills and infrastructure required to access

its power, and the beneﬁts for social justice and development it

can contribute to; the right to freedom of expression, freedom

from censorship and the right to online protest; the right to

knowledge, freedom of access to information and access to

publicly funded information; the right to shared and open ﬂows

of information, knowledge and culture, including free and open

source software that can create local innovations, open technical

standards that make the internet more inclusive and the right

to convergent media platforms; the right to freedom from

surveillance and the right to encryption and to privacy; the right

to internet governance that is transparent, open, accessible, with

decentralised and collaborative inter-operability; the rights to

awareness and information about rights; and the right to recourse

in case of rights violations. APC Internet Rights Charter www.apc.

org/en/node/5677

82 See footnote 12.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET107 India

users spaces to articulate themselves, be heard, form

communities, make friendships and ﬁnd partners,

conduct their professions and business, and so on.

Access to information is seen to be one of the most

empowering aspects of the internet. But can infor-

mation break taboos, especially those that revolve

around issues of sexuality in India? From our nar-

ratives we ﬁnd that people are turning to the net

for information on sexual health (difﬁcult to ﬁnd

accurately, though, because of the way search en-

gines operate to push up adult content ﬁrst) but this

does not necessarily challenge the silences that exist

around sex in society.

The study recognises that the communication

and sexuality rights under discussion extend to a spe-

ciﬁc group of urban Indians; the research would have

yielded different results with a less privileged socio-

economic category, small-town users where women

may not have free and easy access to the internet, or

with users with disabilities.

Interestingly, the study reveals a loss of status

that democratising access to the internet implies for

some urban, middle-class users. With the increasing

access to technologies and the internet across ur-

ban and rural India, middle-class users in this sample

showed a mean-spiritedness about “small people”

having access, implying that they derive a certain

power from this access. For the middle-class user,

connectivity implies global reach, social identity and

achievement. But now “everyone’s on the internet.”

There are worries around not knowing if someone

you are chatting with online has “class”. We believe

that this small fact bodes well in challenging the

deep divides and class and caste discrimination that

exist in this country. The cybercafé, where less privi-

leged users converge, is already a heavily regulated

zone. That this has more serious implications for

working-class people’s communication rights needs

to be ﬂagged.

A rights-based approach is absent from current

IT policy, as are the voices of users. Security takes on

a highly speciﬁc connotation, one that is relevant

only to the notion of the “Indian state”; there is

little appreciation for how ﬂuid and particular pri-

vacy is; that individual sexuality cannot be publicly

and morally regulated is not recognised. Eventually,

the current version of the IT Act and internet policy

directions appear to be an exercise in reinforcing im-

aginary, imminent moral outrages and panics rather

than to recognise the different sorts of liabilities

users face. Our research as we have presented here

illustrates that despite the regulation, control and

commodiﬁcation of digital media spaces, users resist

and innovate, navigating risks and surveillance, gen-

der inequalities and social control, towards agency

and self-expression.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank:

s The Department of Post Graduate Studies and

Research in Home Science, University Depart-

ment of Extension Education, SNDT Women’s

University, Santacruz, Mumbai, who were our

partners in gathering survey data; Head of the

Department Dr. Ratna Tiwari for enabling this

partnership; the 21 postgraduate students who

went into the ﬁeld to gather the data; and in

large measure, Dr. Mira Desai who led the proc-

ess and gave valuable inputs at every stage

s Arrow Consultants, who efﬁciently recruited half

the interview sample

s JAGORI, a Delhi-based NGO on women’s rights,

for hosting the ﬁrst conversation with feminist

groups on the issue for us and sharing their ex-

periences with us

s Gayatri Ganesh, who supported this report with

a comprehensive mapping exercise and did a

broad review of literature and media reports,

and also helped in making the charts and writing

up the quantitative survey data

s All the respondents who gave us their time and

shared their online lives with us

s Friends and colleagues who gave us insightful

feedback on the ﬁrst article

s Each other, for being partners-in-crime and mak-

ing this a wonderful experience

s The EROTICS international research teams in

Brazil, USA, South Africa and Lebanon for their

critical comments at important junctures and

helping us ﬁne-tune our research plan

s And ﬁnally, Jac sm Kee, Chat Garcia Ramilo, Kat-

erina Fialova and the whole team at APC WNSP,

without whom this research would not have

been possible.

Feedback on this report or further queries are wel-

come at: eroticsindia@gmail.com

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EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET109 Lebanon

On 15 June 2010, the Lebanese

online community heaved a

collective sigh of relief as the

Lebanese Parliament voted to

indeﬁnitely postpone discus-

sions on a newly proposed

e-transactions law. “The ESSA (Electronic Signatures

and Services Authority) [would be] established un-

der this law with discretionary, selective, subjective

and very broad and unjustiﬁed powers,” said Gabriel

Deek, secretary general of the Professional Compu-

ter Association of Lebanon, adding, “Its prerogatives

are almost repressive for all ‘service providers’ of

electronic services and economic sectors at large.”

The law, which ostensibly aims to protect e-com-

merce from fraudulent activities, would have the

power of Dabitat Al-‘Adliyyeh, or the power of law

enforcement without judicial oversight.

Though Lebanon had long enjoyed an internet in

which law enforcement authorities do not intervene

– a situation that stands in sharp contrast to that

of its neighbouring countries – many in the online

community expected this day to come. “The Leba-

nese government is writing yet another chapter in

the endless mockery of our rights as private citizens

and social entrepreneurial agents of progress and

change,” said Imad Atallah of the Lebanese daily,

The Daily Star. “The state is extending censorship

[…] into the last frontier of freedom – the internet

and its supposed neutrality.”

An investigative probe into the vulnerable rela-

tionship between Lebanese citizens and the internet

uncovers a series of incidents of lawsuits, censorship

and police threats. Additionally, slow and expensive

internet connections, which had long been a source

of jokes and mockery for the online community,

gradually turned into a source of anger and rebel-

lion. By early 2011, a number pressure groups had

formed out of the bloggers, techies and Twitter com-

munities, in addition to the private sector, to create

lobbying and awareness campaigns calling for a

faster, freer and more affordable internet. The most

1 Gabriel Deek “Major Pain Points in e-Transaction Law” (Gabriel

Deek, 12 June 2010) blog.gabrieldeek.com/2010/06/major-pain-

points-in-e-transaction-law.html

2 Imad Atallah “Lebanon is Stiﬂing your Digital Freedom” The Daily

Star 8 June 2010 www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/

Jun/08/Lebanon-is-stiﬂing-your-digital-freedom.ashx

active of these has been the “Ontornet” campaign

which played on the Arabic word ontor meaning “to

wait” to refer to the Lebanese internet.

Twenty-something years after the end of Leb-

anon’s Civil War, it appears that civil society in

Lebanon is beginning to make important inroads in

advancing progressive social and economic issues in

public and policy-making arenas alike. The number

of grassroots organisations that focus on individual

and group rights has mushroomed, and for probably

the ﬁrst time in the country’s history, the Interior

Ministry (up until June 2011) was controlled by a

politician who has emerged from civil society, rather

than from one of Lebanon’s many dynastic political

parties. Of this diverse and active civil society, one

particular community that has enjoyed a long and

complex relationship with the internet is the Leba-

nese queer rights movement, which has become a

dynamic, cohesive component of a rising civil society.

It is likely that there is no other movement in Leba-

non that has beneﬁted more from information and

communications technologies (ICTs) for its growth

and for the sophistication of its strategies.

This research aims to examine the dynamics of the

queer

movement as they relate to ICTs. In particular, it

will trace the intricate ways in which queers in Lebanon

have used various ICT tools to create, build and empow-

er their liberation movement. The research will focus on

women within the queer movement, because queer-ICT

dynamics are especially pronounced in this area, and it

will be carried out in the context of the movement’s

national and regional environments. Historical, socio-

political and economic factors will be considered in

order to provide us with a clear understanding of the

relatively recent phenomena that we study.

In parallel, we will also examine the ICT environ-

ment and its development in relation to technology,

politics and human rights. At a time when policy

makers are beginning to raise the prospect of the

internet as a space where Lebanon’s many social,

economic and legal “unfreedoms” will soon be

implemented, such a study is expedient. It is more

important now than ever before to understand the

extent to which queer freedoms are intertwined

3 Ontornet website www.ontornet.org

4 See section on “Conceptual frameworks” for an elaboration on

“queer”.

LEBANON

Who’s afraid of the big bad internet?

NADINE MOAWAD and TAMARA QIBLAW

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET110 Lebanon

with the internet so that queers may use this knowl-

edge to tackle those prospective conditions.

In January 2010, web-based Arab queer magazine

Bekhsoos

published a series of articles celebrating

a decade of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender

(LGBT) activism in Lebanon. “It’s actually been over

a decade,” says the magazine’s Arabic editor, who

writes under the pseudonym Aphrodite. “We con-

sider the registration of GayLebanon.com in 1998

as a marker of the start of an organized movement.

But we wanted to celebrate the past decade in which

most of the crucial developments occurred.” Most of

the articles in the commemorative issue featured a

Top 10 listing of different queer categories: the most

prominent hang-out places, the best LGBT publica-

tions, music videos, ﬁlms, etc. Among these was one

that listed the top seven online tools that played a

major role in the LGBT movement and community

building. These ranged from “ONElist that later

became eGroups that later became Yahoo! Groups

that then branched off into other mailing lists”

Twitter.

In many ways the development of queer use of

software tells the history of its growth. At both the

personal and political levels, the internet has fa-

cilitated the interactions of queer women and the

movement for recognition and dignity since the late

1990s. We begin to examine the relationship be-

tween the internet and queer women by studying

the regulatory processes of the internet in Lebanon,

in relation to the politics of the region. We then de-

tail the ways in which the LBT women’s community

has made use of internet technologies to build a

powerful and tech-savvy movement for social justice,

highlighting formative interplays that occurred be-

tween the queer women’s movement and both the

national and international queer movement in this

virtual arena.

Research methodology

This research occurs on two planes of activity that we

try to show to be highly interrelated: the Lebanese

queer women’s movement and the ICT environment

in Lebanon. We study, ﬁrst, the ICT environment as

an independent sphere and aim to ﬂesh out its dy-

namics by making the issue of censorship a central

component of this. We then proceed to study the

queer women’s movement in Lebanon by highlight-

ing its interactions with ICTs in particular. Queer uses

of ICTs in Lebanon represent a number of turning

points in the development of the queer women’s

movement, and allow us to paint a comprehensive

picture of the subject at hand. This research project

5 Bekhsoos website www.bekhsoos.com/web

6 Shant “Cyber Queerness” Bekhsoos 1 February 2010 www.

bekhsoos.com/web/2010/02/cyber-queerness

is primarily feminist and auto-ethnographic and

depends on a number of methods and conceptual

framings which we will elaborate on in this section.

These frameworks enable us to collect data that pro-

vide us with representative samples of our subjects

of study and allow us to synthesise and analyse the

information in ways that help us to arrive at coher-

ent and nuanced ﬁndings. The research methods and

concepts are as follows:

Interviews and crowdsourcing

The research depends primarily on ﬁrst-hand ac-

counts of Lebanese queer activism and interactions

since 1997. Interviewees discussed personal experi-

ences on the internet with regards to queer issues

and helped to ﬂesh out intersections between per-

sonal identiﬁcation and personal growth and the

internet. Interviewees also traced the development

of the Lebanese queer movement, from the creation

of local spaces on the internet to the emergence of

NGOs and support groups in the Lebanese public are-

na. There was a great deal of consistency between

the accounts of the queer movement’s history; the

interviews were always cross-checked.

Throughout the course of our analysis we have

tried to incorporate the diverse experiences of our

interviewees into our ﬁndings while also identifying

a common trajectory for the personal and political

development of the movement. In order to under-

stand the ICT environment that the queer movement

has developed within, we have scanned the online

community cross-sectionally. We did this through

the crowdsourcing method. The basic idea of crowd-

sourcing is to broadcast a question about a problem

and to study the responses. For this research, we

published a blurb

on one of the researchers’ blogs

about our research question and spread the word

about it, mainly using the micro-blogging network-

ing platform, Twitter. We asked for tips, contacts,

opinions and links to websites that would help. This

method proved fruitful because it required an ac-

tive engagement with the online community that

responded to our call with tweets, comments and

emails, subsequently enriching our observations of

the ICT environment.

A regional context

During our preliminary research, we noted some

important interactions between Lebanon and its

regional environment that helped to explain some

central features of the queer women-ICT relation-

ship. We noted that in several instances, other

countries have sought to alter Lebanon’s censorship

and surveillance policies in order to manipulate

7 Nadine Moawad “ERoTICs Research” (What If I Get Free, 11

February 2010) www.nadinemoawad.com/2010/02/erotics-research

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET111 Lebanon

certain national political dynamics. This reinforces

the notion that the state of ICTs in a country, and par-

ticularly the censorship laws that accompany them,

cannot be understood without an understanding of

a country’s geopolitics. We therefore study the ICT-

queer relationship in the context of an extra-national

environment. Due to time and space restrictions we

have placed the frame of our research around a cer-

tain region that we identify as more immediate than

others. This region consists of countries with which

Lebanon shares a border, namely Syria and Pales-

tine, as well as Jordan, the Gulf Countries (United

Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

and Kuwait) and Egypt. We also believe that a com-

parison of the state of technologies in Lebanon and

this region will help to reveal important information

about the state of ICTs in Lebanon.

It is also crucial to note that the signiﬁcant and

historic regional revolutions since December 2010

reassessed the role of ICTs and social media as politi-

cal tools for change. While very little material (and

indeed, very little faith in social media) was available

before this time, a plethora of articles and studies

have since emerged about the internet and social

change in the Arab world.

The research team has also noted that there

are budding relationships between queer groups

in Lebanon and those in the identiﬁed region that

have inﬂuenced the course of the movement in some

fundamental ways. In June 2010, Lebanon’s queer

women’s group Meem participated in a conference

for “Arab queers” entitled Mantiqitna, an Arabic

word that translates as “Our Area” or “Our Region”.

According to one of the coordinators of Meem, the

name was decided upon after a drawn-out debate

among the organisers about what an “Arab” con-

sists of and what the geographical boundaries of the

Arab world should be. Mantiqitna chose to resolve

that debate by emphasising the obscurity of the con-

cept of Arabness to show that these boundaries are

blurred and organic. We believe it necessary to tease

the geographic boundaries of our research too in or-

der to reﬂect these intellectual and strategic trends

in Lebanon’s queer women’s movement.

Research target groups:

Meem and Meem-facilitated spaces

Meem,

which literally means the Arabic letter “m”,

is an organised queer women and transgender com-

munity founded in August 2007 with the vision of

better quality lives for lesbian, bisexual, queer and

questioning women and transgender persons in

Lebanon. Since its inception, Meem’s activist philoso-

phy has revolved around creating safe spaces (online

8 Meem website www.meemgroup.org

and ofﬂine) for individuals who shared a common

oppression, mainly one that intersects gender with

sexuality. Meem membership rules include strict

guarding of the privacy of individuals, activities and

spaces, as evident in the following excerpts from the

rules available online

for individuals who are consid-

ering joining the group:

Everything we do is conﬁdential, and we trust

you to maintain the privacy of Meem and all its

members if you join the group. We are very strict

about this. Meem is not a lesbian or trans zoo.

We do not exist to provide you with a display of

women of different sexualities or persons of a

variety of genders for your university project or

TV program or sexual fantasies […] Meem does

NOT out people. We guard the privacy of our

members in every way we can. You are forbidden

to repeat the names or any private information

of the members outside of the group, even to

your friends.

We particularly chose to focus our sample of inter-

viewees on Meem members and activists because

of the group’s ongoing sophisticated ways of inter-

acting and negotiating with technology for their

strategies. Issues of anonymity, pseudonymity, com-

munity building, and self-expression were recurrent

themes in the interviews. Meem’s large membership

(over 400 members at the time of our research com-

pletion) represented the broadest sampling of the

lesbian, bisexual, queer, questioning and transgen-

der communities in Lebanon.

It is also important to note that the group is gen-

erally “unfriendly” towards researchers who are not

personally invested and engaged with the issues.

Because of the popularity of the topic of Arab les-

bians and the myths and secrecy that surround them

– especially through a Western gaze – Meem coor-

dinators receive many email requests every month

from researchers and journalists for interviews. Their

security measures led the members to tighten the

conditions on interviews they are willing to give.

And, therefore, only by involving a good number of

researchers and interviewers from within Meem (and

the membership as a whole) in this research through

discussions and consultations were the interviewers

able to reach the targeted sample from within the

community.

Meem’s priorities do not include “coming out” or

raising public visibility of queer women and transgen-

ders. Instead, it focuses on personal empowerment

and building a network of support. According to Lynn,

9 Meem Join Us www.meemgroup.org/news/what-is-meem/join-us

10 Read more about this in the “Positioning of researchers” section.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET112 Lebanon

who was group co-coordinator from 2009 to 2011,

“[Meem’s] philosophy of support is to sustain the

building of a healthy community of queer women and

transgendered persons whose bonds are strengthened

by values of trust, respect, positive energy. Support

may come in many forms and is usually comprehensive

– from peer-to-peer support to psychological, medical

and legal support; from a heart-to-heart conversation

over a cup of coffee on the house’s balcony, a coun-

selling session with one of Meem’s counsellors, to a

small ﬁnancial contribution for temporary housing and

transportation, for example.”

While Meem started out as a lesbian group fo-

cusing on women having same-sex relationships,

its collective understanding of sexuality and gender

developed over the years to focus more on queer

identities and feminism. These changes, viewed as sig-

niﬁcant and deﬁning by members of the group, were

a result of countless conversations around individual

experiences and identities, in addition to workshops,

trainings and writings, both local and international. In

order to understand the experiences of queer women

in Lebanon, this study targeted speciﬁcally individuals

active in Meem’s work. Over the course of the con-

versations, the concept of spaces emerged as a key

understanding that required ﬂeshing out. The na-

ture of Meem’s self-identity does not align itself with

traditional NGO structures but rather as a “common

thread” that holds the community together around

values of solidarity and empowerment.

Therefore, the “looseness” of deﬁned locations

of members’ diverse activism led us to identify a

number of “Meem-facilitated spaces” which were

crucial to examining the progression of the move-

ment. “Meem-facilitated spaces” consist of any

space, both virtual and physical, that Meem members

adopt in order to foster communications between

queer women as well as to conduct Meem-related

activities. These include Meem’s support headquar-

ters (the “Womyn House”), its online publication

Bekhsoos, its Twitter page, some Facebook fan

pages, some websites, spaces within other organi-

sations (online and ofﬂine), spaces “inﬁltrated” by

members, and more temporary spaces that Meem

borrows in order to coordinate activities.

The signiﬁcance of looking at Meem-facilitated

spaces rather than Meem as a traditional organisa-

tion is that it allows for a more in-depth look at the

diverse community – and its diverse issues – that is

represented in Meem. It also promotes a movement-

oriented lens, rather than one that focuses on a

particular organisation and its controlled environ-

ment. It can be posited that all spaces strategically

place themselves as components of an over-arching

11 Meem’s coordinators serve a two-year term and are selected by

consensus by the group members.

feminist queer movement that identiﬁes as Arab,

radical, and important. Meem enjoys a membership

of over 400 women, all of whom receive nearly daily

emails with information about upcoming events as

well as about logistical, strategic developments at

Meem’s ofﬁces.

Our ﬁndings are based primarily on interviews

with users of Meem spaces on the internet. This in-

terviewee group consisted of fourteen of Meem’s

members, who provided us with an understanding

of queer women’s use of ICTs and the intellectual,

personal and strategic strands of thought that ICT

usage falls within. The same set of questions was

discussed with every interviewee, coupled with an

open-ended discussion of the internet’s effects on

their personal and activist lives. Since many Meem-

facilitated spaces, notably Twitter and Bekhsoos,

involve many non-Meem members, we also inter-

viewed several non-queers (six in total) who offered

important insight about the mechanisms that respec-

tive ICTs function through. This also enabled us to

look at Meem’s ICT usage within the broader frame-

work of Lebanese civil rights activism and the Arab

online community. In addition to these two groups,

we also interviewed four male LGBT activists to elab-

orate on the historic dimension of queer organising

and ICT usage and also to provide a gender contrast

to the ﬁndings of the women’s interviews.

All interviewees in this research are referred to

by their chosen online nicknames unless explicit per-

mission was given to use their full names.

Conceptual frameworks:

Queer and feminist

Interviewees who were Meem members identiﬁed

themselves as both queer and feminist. Their queer

self-identiﬁcation indicated a transgression of main-

stream gay/straight dichotomies as well as a strong

challenging of gender binaries and a rejection of

narrow understandings of transgender identities

which they also saw as often promoting transsexual/

cisgendered binaries. They insisted that the term

queer meant not only personal identity but also was

a political stand that deconstructed alignment with

any heteronormative discourse. According to an ac-

tivist who goes by the nickname Zee, “queer identity

challenges the normalisation of rigid gender and

sexual stereotypes in society, including stereotype

deﬁnitions of what being gay or what being trans-

gendered means.” In addition to self-identifying as

queer (both as individuals and as the movement),

interviewees repeatedly described “queering of

spaces” as a key strategy to advance their work and

mission.

“Queering” involves problematising heteronor-

mativity and homonationalism and is employed at

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET113 Lebanon

a number of levels. Meem distinctly sees itself play-

ing an ongoing role in queering LGBT movements,

locally and globally, through challenging imposed

LGBT identities, strategies and discourses. It also

works on queering non-LGBT spaces and in its simple

format, members see queering as “inﬁltrating spaces

not by being out as queer women but by simply im-

posing a presence and our opinions and thoughts

in these spaces, in addition to making others feel

safe when we come to their space so they won’t be

scared of the lesbians,” according to Zee. The process

of “queering” cyberspace, in this context, involves

not only creating online LGBT content and social

networks, but also in making connections to other

social struggles, especially feminist and freedom of

thought movements, through the internet.

The feminism adopted by the group focuses on

gender as social constructs and can be described as

radical, sex-positive and post-colonial. Deems, one of

Meem’s members most focused on feminist theory,

describes its evolution: “I think our personal experi-

ences as queer women is what guided our feminist

politics, and maybe sometimes when we compare

our lives to gay men. I think like with everything re-

lated to Meem, it’s something that has grown with

us, where members continue to challenge themselves

and each other about our sexual lives and politics.

Our feminism is post-colonial because even though

we are still subject to Americanisation of LGBT issues,

at the end of the day, we’re negotiating our lives and

our relationship with our families and surroundings

in the best way we can.”

Positioning of researchers

The research team consisted almost entirely (with

one person being the exception) of researchers who

have been active participants of the queer move-

ment in Lebanon over a number of years. The team

was made up of two writers and seven interviewers,

a number of whom were also interviewed by others

and asked the same set of questions. This position-

ing of researchers as “insiders” resulted in a number

of advantages: in-depth knowledge of the subject,

ease of gaining trust from the community, and access

to individuals who are otherwise difﬁcult to identi-

fy and interview, to name a few. It raises, however,

some issues around politics of positioning. Linda

Tuhiwai Smith notes:

Insider research needs to be ethical and respect-

ful, as reﬂexive and critical as outsider research.

It also needs to be humble [...] because the re-

searcher belongs to the community as a member

with a different set of roles and relationships,

status and position. [...] One of the difﬁcult risks

insider researchers take is to “test” their own

taken-for-granted views about their community.

It is a risk because it can unsettle beliefs, values,

relationships and the knowledge of different

histories.

Therefore, the research process was coupled with

critical reﬂection on the potential biases of research-

ers, in addition to engaging other members of Meem

– interviewees included in the analysis and direction

of the research ﬁndings.

The internet environment

In this section, we will examine the evolution of the

internet environment in Lebanon while situating it

within the larger Arab environment. Challenges to

freedom and ease of expression online, in particular

when it comes to discussing sexuality, can be divided

along two main axes: legal censorship, which is heav-

ily inﬂuenced by culture and public morality, and

infrastructural censorship, which includes ﬁltering,

high costs and slow internet connections.

The rise of internet usage

Most of our research was conducted in the pre-revo-

lutionary period of the Arab world. Public opinion of

the internet and its signiﬁcant role changed drastical-

ly after the historic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt

in January 2011 and the ongoing protests happening

at the time of writing this paper in Yemen, Bahrain,

Syria, Libya, Algeria, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon.

Discourse around Facebook and Twitter usage went

from discussing “slacktivism”

to recognising the

catalyst role of social media in overthrowing dicta-

torships and enabling freedom of expression from

online to ofﬂine spheres.

A report launched by the Center for Internation-

al Media Assistance in February 2011 stated:

[T]he Arab world has witnessed the rise of an

independent vibrant social media and steadily

increasing citizen engagement on the Internet

that is expected to attract 100 million Arab users

by 2015. These social networks inform, mobilize,

entertain, create communities, increase transpar-

ency, and seek to hold governments accountable.

To peruse the Arab social media sites, blogs,

online videos, and other digital platforms is to

witness what is arguably the most dramatic and

unprecedented improvement in freedom of ex-

pression, association, and access to information

in contemporary Arab history.

12 Linda Tuhiwai Smith Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and

Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999) 139

13 A term coined from “slack” and “activism” to describe “lazy”

forms of activism mostly done online (“liking” a Facebook page,

signing an e-petition).

14 CIMA “Social Media in the Arab World: Leading up to the

Uprisings of 2011” cima.ned.org/publications/social-media-arab-

world-leading-uprisings-2011-0

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET114 Lebanon

There are over 65 million internet users in the Arab

region today.

This is the result of a recent boom

in internet usage in the region. Egypt, Morocco and

Saudi Arabia have seen the highest increase in in-

ternet usage, with the United Arab Emirates (UAE)

showing the highest internet penetration rate at

60%,

although Egypt still has the highest number

of internet users in the region. However, mobile

phones remain the most popular and most accessible

means of communication. While there is an increase

in internet usage, access to information and expres-

sion on the internet is also restrained due to low and

expensive bandwidth and internet connections. Lan-

guage is also a difﬁcult issue since the internet is not

very Arabic-friendly. However, this is slowly changing

and companies like Google are customising special

programs for their Arab audiences. These include

“Ahlan, Online”

to help Arabic users, especially

ﬁrst time users, navigate the net. Also, recent tech-

nological developments allowed Egypt to launch the

world’s ﬁrst Arabic language domain name URL.

Internet in Lebanon has a penetration rate of

31% whereas mobile market penetration is at 68%,

according to a study by the Telecommunications

Regulatory Authority conducted in December 2010.

Legal restrictions on the internet

Freedoms in the Arab region are hampered by the

authoritarian systems that rule them. Global Voices

lists ﬁve Arab countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Mo-

rocco and Saudi Arabia) in its Top 10 list of countries

with the most bloggers arrested, imprisoned or

tortured. In total, 93 out of the tracked 234 – a stag-

gering 40% – are Arab.

Lebanon has long enjoyed relative freedom of

expression, association and speech, although this

record is mixed, owing to Lebanon’s infrastructural

deﬁciency and frequent relapses in the rule of law.

Sami Moubayed, a Syrian political analyst and jour-

nalist, writes for GulfNews.com:

It is no wonder that Lebanon ranks ﬁrst when it

comes to internet freedoms in the Arab World.

There is no censorship, and active Lebanese can

go to great lengths to market their views on

15 Internet World Stats Internet Usage in the Middle East www.

internetworldstats.com/stats5.htm

16 Communicate “RELEASE: Middle East Internet Users Increase to

56 Million” Communicate 6 June 2010 www.communicate.ae/

node/3392

17 www.google.com/intl/ar/ahlanonline

18 BBC Staff “Egypt Launches Arabic Web Domain” BBC 16 November

2009 www.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8361676.stm

19 Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) website www.tra.

gov.lb

20 Committee to Protect Journalists “10 Worst Countries to be a

Blogger” 30 April 2009 www.cpj.org/reports/2009/04/10-worst-

countries-to-be-a-blogger.php

politics and life on the world wide web. The

fact that most Lebanese are young – and are ﬂu-

ent with languages – makes internet use all the

more easier. So does Article 13 of the Lebanese

Constitution, which guarantees “freedom of ex-

pression, verbally or in writing, freedom of press,

freedom of assembly, and freedom to form as-

sociations”. Internet cafes are everywhere to be

found, and there are no age or ID requirements

to log-on to the internet. Unlike other countries

in the region, neither political sites, nor por-

nographic ones – not even Israeli propaganda

– are proxied. The only exceptions are at schools

and universities, or in some workplaces, where

certain sites are restricted to ensure a more pro-

ductive environment.

While the constitution of Lebanon identiﬁes Leba-

non as a secular republic, religious institutions still

wield a great deal of inﬂuence over several facets of

political and social life. Personal and familial status

issues fall under the jurisdiction of religious courts

and the public sphere is ruled solely by state institu-

tions. Religious institutions, however, weigh in very

heavily on a variety of issues, and chief among them

is media content.

Censorship in the Publications Law

Lebanon’s print and audiovisual media are governed

by a Publications Law that dates back to 1977. Article

5 of Section 3 states that it is forbidden to publish

“reports, books, letters, articles, photos, or news that

goes against public morality and manners.”

The

realm of public morality includes matters related to

expressions of sexuality: pornography, homosexual-

ity, sex work, sex education, sexual health, among

other things. Violators of this law are punished by

imprisonment from three months to one year. Sec-

tion 5 of the law describes penalties against libel and

slander towards persons or groups and Section 6 pro-

hibits attacks against the “dignity” of heads of state.

The implementing arm of censorship in Leba-

non is the General Security, established in 1921 and

tasked with the surveillance of audiovisual mate-

rial, media outlets and channels, and the press, and

“ensuring the right implementation of the laws and

verdicts related to the affairs of censorship and Me-

dia,” according to their website.

A draft law that

was circulated in April of 2009 aims to “encourage

transparency and accountability of government

entities, which would have the responsibility to

21 Sami Moubayed “No Restrictions on the Net” Gulf News 11 April

2008 gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/no-restrictions-on-the-

net-1.97272

22 The full text of the Publications Law is available in Arabic at www.

pogar.org/publications/other/laws/media/amend-leb-77-a.pdf

23 General Security website www.general-security.gov.lb

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET115 Lebanon

provide any requested information swiftly and with

no justiﬁcation.” The National Network for the Right

of Access to Information said the draft law is for the

“protection of ‘whistleblowers,’ or those individuals

who report corruption.”

Yet the General Security

has long acted with impunity in Lebanon, often cen-

soring audiovisual material haphazardly and with no

public justiﬁcation.

In October 2006, the Ministry of Interior pro-

posed the creation of a Technology Committee to

draft a policy to regulate online fraud, cyber crimes

and pornography. Following the adoption of Telecom

Law 431

in 2002, a Telecommunications Regulatory

Authority (TRA) was formed under the Ministry of

Interior with the mission to “establish a regulatory

environment that enables a competitive telecommu-

nications market to deliver state-of-the-art services

at affordable prices to the broadest spectrum of the

Lebanese population.”

Censored themes

Lebanese media censorship is concentrated around

three main themes: Israel, religion and sexuality, with

the third being an area that General Security has

been least active in censoring. An AFP article from

2008

described Lebanon as a “liberal Middle East

country with unfettered Internet access, but state

censorship is also rife on any topics that touch upon

Israel or sensitive issues such as religion.” A Lebanese

law dating back to 1955 prohibits all communica-

tions with Israel, an enemy state, and boycotts all

Israeli artists, writers, academics, and anything that

contributes to Zionist propaganda. The same article

states:

“I know that with the Internet censorship may ap-

pear to be ridiculous, but we ban works damaging

to religion because it is such a sensitive topic in a

multi-confessional state,” General Waﬁq Jizzini,

head of the general security department at the

interior ministry, told AFP. “Sensitivities must be

handled carefully,” said Jizzini, who implied that

he comes under pressure from the country’s all-

powerful religious leaders.

Religious censorship affects many forms of expres-

sion, including music. Heavy metal, for example, is

often banned from the country because it is seen

to incite anti-Christian sentiments. However, some

24 NOW Staff “Conference Highlights Citizen’s Right of Access to

Information Regarding All Government Entities” nowlebanon

29 September 2009 www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.

aspx?ID=116795

25 The full text of Telecom Law 431 is available at www.tra.gov.lb/

Library/Files/Uploaded%20ﬁles/Law431/Law-431-EN.htm

26 AFP “CENSORED: Lebanon May Be Liberal,

But...” AFP 14 April 2008 afp.google.com/article/

ALeqM5gHVCMu9wKX22D99NqoUDGfbAQtwQ

high-ranking ofﬁcials have spoken out in favour

of abolishing censorship, most notably Lebanon’s

Culture Minister Tareq Mitri, who called it an “out-

dated” practice. “A draft law is in the works that

would abolish censorship and set up an independent

‘committee of wise men’ instead,” he is quoted as

saying in the same AFP article. It was unclear, howev-

er, who would qualify as “wise men” and how such

a practice would be any different from the current

laws that are mostly inﬂuenced by religious leaders

and cultural traditions.

Censorship of sexuality-related media, however,

has been far less controversial in Lebanon. The term

“damaging to public morality” is ambiguous and

unclear in its deﬁnition of what public morality is.

Besides the problematic of state control of that to

which people are allowed to be exposed, the issue

of what is moral and what is damaging is highly con-

troversial within activist communities, although this

debate has yet to reach public levels. When it comes

to the Lebanese cyberspace, however, the censorship

laws have not been applied. While the Publications

Law could, in theory, expand to e-publications (blogs,

websites, social networks), the law has not been en-

forced in cyberspace thus far.

Internet vulnerability in the regional

censorship environment

The Lebanese advantage strongly contrasts with

neighbours in Syria and Egypt. Those two were listed

among the Top 10 worst countries to be a blogger

(third and tenth on the list, respectively) in a report

published last year by the Committee to Protect

Journalists.

Random arrests, detentions at the air-

port, even fabricated court cases commonly occur

in Syria and Egypt among bloggers and website

owners. International rights groups have warned of

heavy government censorship inside Egypt, with sev-

eral bloggers and political dissidents being arrested

for “security reasons”. Government ofﬁcials in Egypt

also target websites and servers of political move-

ments. The website of the April 6 Movement was

blocked this year while activists were protesting in

the streets.

Even Jordan, long considered an exception in

the region due to its booming IT start-up industry,

now succumbs to similar restrictions. On 13 Janu-

ary 2010, the Jordanian blogosphere woke up to

devastating news of a new decision by Jordan’s Su-

preme Court to govern all internet websites by the

already controversial Press and Publication Law. The

court ruling came as a result of a public defamation

27 Committee to Protect Journalists 10 Worst Countries...

28 Zeinobia “6th April Movement Ofﬁcial Website is Blocked”

(Egyptian Chronicles, 6 April 2010) egyptianchronicles.blogspot.

com/2010/04/breaking-news-6th-april-movement.html

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET116 Lebanon

lawsuit against two Jordanian men who run online

news websites. Some journalists hailed the move as

well-intentioned, allowing “[journalistic] integrity

to extend to the Internet, as well as extending the

rights of citizens for protection from attacks on their

image to apply on the Internet.”

Most bloggers,

however, were outraged at the restriction levels such

a move places on freedom of expression online.

Geopolitics has historically played a strong role

in determining Lebanese stability and the inﬂu-

ences of neighbouring Arab countries seep into

cultural norms, political afﬁliations and laws. The

overarching atmosphere of moving towards stricter

censorship in places like Jordan, in addition to the

most recent shutting down of the internet in Egypt

and Syria to hinder the public from sharing informa-

tion about ongoing protests, all contribute to the

vulnerability of regional freedoms online. This will

be made more clear in the section that discusses the

proposed ICT control law that caused panic in Leba-

non’s online spheres. Before that, we will examine

some of the legal cases that unfolded the vagueness

around Lebanese internet regulation – the case of

GayLebanon.com being the most relevant to our re-

search topic.

Facebook lawsuits

In January 2008, Lebanese security forces arrested

four young men who attend Saint Joseph Univer-

sity after accusing them of “electronic defamation

against a female classmate” on the social network-

ing site Facebook.

The female classmate ﬁled a

legal complaint against the four students after she

joined a group that had a defamatory description

of her, photos of her that were posted without her

consent, and “disgusting comments and sexual de-

famatory words.” The lawsuit was ﬁled against the

four boys under Articles 531 and 582 of the Lebanese

Penal Code, which cover defamation. Controversy

over the arrest ensued because Lebanese law prohib-

its cautionary arrest in defamation cases. The young

woman refused, however, to withdraw her com-

plaints and was backed by her family, friends and

lawyer, Micheline Bardawil. Bardawil argued that in

what she called the “information age”, the internet

is available to everyone and so social networking

sites like Facebook should be considered publishing

venues. Thus, prosecution based on “material pub-

lished on its pages” should be valid.

Lawyer Ziad Baroud, who later became minister

of interior, said that e-crimes are new and people

29 Eyas Sharaiha “Websites and the Publication Law”, 7iber,

16 January 2010 www.7iber.com/2010/01/websites-and-the-

publication-law

30 Layal Abou Rahal “In Lebanon, Facebook Can Land You in Jail”

Menassat 21 January 2008 www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-

articles/2750-lebanon-facebook-can-land-you-jail

are not used to them yet. He referred to Article 209

of the Lebanese Penal Code that deals with slander

and argued that slander can also happen online and

prosecution in such cases is lawful. The case, at the

time, raised questions about the lack of speciﬁc leg-

islation for electronic media in Lebanon. Menassat.

com reported that the case was a ﬁrst in Lebanon

and might be one of the ﬁrst in the world.

In July 2010, a group of four men were arrested

for insulting the president of the Lebanese Republic

on Facebook and the Ministry of Justice found that

the case met the criteria for a slander and defama-

tion lawsuit.

Censorship through defamation

accusations: The case of GayLebanon.com

While a number of cases have been made public in

recent times concerning the internet and freedom of

speech, the ﬁrst serious case dates back ten years and

involved the ﬁrst Lebanese LGBT website: GayLe-

banon.com. The domain name was registered on 29

September 1999 and is considered one of the mani-

festations of the beginning of an organised LGBT

movement. Gay and lesbian activists and individuals

who were unable to come out publicly were able to

use the website to ﬁnd information, resources, links

to chat rooms and mailing lists, and a connection to

a larger community. On 3 April 2000, a vice squad

conducted a raid on the ofﬁces of Destination, the

Beirut internet service provider (ISP) wrongly asso-

ciated with the website. Ziad Mughraby, owner of

Destination, was interrogated to reveal names of

people responsible for GayLebanon.com but did not

have the information that Hobeish Police Station,

Beirut’s morality station infamous for its violations of

human rights of detainees, wanted. A human rights

organisation led by Kamal Batal, MIRSAD (Multi-

Initiative on Rights: Search, Assist and Defend) took

up the case issuing a press release that highlighted

“the unlawful attempts by the police to interfere

in the freedom of the Internet and the freedom of

expression of the gay community.”

Both Batal and

Mughraby (who are civilians) were then transferred

to a military court and charged with “tarnishing the

reputation of the vice squad by distributing a printed

ﬂyer.” They were eventually released with ﬁnes of

USD 219 each.

GayLebanon.com is the only known Lebanese

website to result in a prosecution and court case,

albeit arbitrarily against the only two people the

31 Alexandra Sandels “LEBANON: Arrests Over Alleged Facebook

Slander of President” Los Angeles Times 29 July 2010 latimesblogs.

latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/07/lebanon-arrests-over-alleged-

facebook-slander-of-president.html

32 Warren Singh-Bartlett “GayLebanon.com Case Causes Stir” The

Daily Star 25 September 2000 www.onlinepolicy.org/turing/000925.

dailystar.gaylebanondotcom.shtml

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET117 Lebanon

police could ﬁnd remotely connected to the owners.

The website, registered in the US, survived as a por-

tal of knowledge and paved the way for many other

websites that came after it. On 17 March 2010, Kho-

dor Salameh, who blogs at jou3an.wordpress.com,

became the ﬁrst Lebanese blogger to be threatened

by ofﬁcials for criticising Lebanese President Michel

Sleiman. The Lebanese security forces asked him to

change his tone, close his blog or stick to writing po-

etry. He was threatened with being prosecuted for

defamation. Global Voices tracked Khodor’s case.

Self-censorship

In addition to legal censorship, certain cultural norms

govern online activities and expression, imposed by

political regimes that have long thrived on the si-

lence of people. Governments employ various tactics

of intimidation and violence to make sure informa-

tion available to the masses is controlled. Laws both

written and unspoken create a general environment

of self-censorship, the ramiﬁcations of which can be

clearly detected in the Lebanese blogosphere. Blog-

ger Antoun Issa tackles this topic in a post on Global

Voices by stating that “an element of caution ex-

ists on the Lebanese blogosphere when it concerns

political debate. A portion of Lebanese bloggers

deﬁne their work on their political expertise, whilst

others engage in a variety of topics and thus may

avoid political discussion so as to not offend their

readership.”

At the ﬁfth Arab Media Forum that

took place in Bahrain in December 2009, artist Shey-

ma Buali describes the issue of censorship as follows:

Beyond the political considerations, there is a

cultural dimension to censorship too. Politically

a free press and free expression should be pil-

lars of any society, even more so among those

working towards developing “democracy”, but

more broadly, when people are not allowed

to speak for themselves, others will speak for

them. This, as we have seen throughout time,

whether in cases as simple as the caricatured por-

trayal of Arabs in popular and specialized media

or as dramatic as foreign intercepted processes

that result in social and political changes in the

region, can be very dangerous. But overall the

ideas, concerns, encouragements and so on lay

a thick layer of what looked like censorship in

action: censorship of the topic of censorship. It

wasn’t that “press freedom” didn’t come up at

all: it did, but it then got stuck in that web of lay-

ers that separate ideas from practice. Even in the

33 Threatened Voices website threatened.globalvoicesonline.org/

blogger/khodor-salameh

34 Antoun Issa “Lebanon: Is a Politics Social Media Taboo?” (Global

Voices, 18 March 2011) globalvoicesonline.org/2011/03/18/lebanon-

is-politics-a-social-media-taboo

wake of post-colonialism, the days when Arabs

had to be “thought for” or “spoken for” have

not yet passed. The region must protect itself

from leaving holes that will otherwise be ﬁlled

by outside intellect and debate. It is human na-

ture to criticize one’s own, whether it be country,

people or even family, while not accepting criti-

cism of those groups by outsiders. But ironically,

the Arab world sometimes seem to systematically

allow, in fact at times invite, outside minds to

come in and discuss what needs to be changed

in the region. The door is, on many levels, open

for others to come in and ﬁll that which the Arab

national cannot.

In the coming sections, we will see clearly from the

research ﬁndings how the issue of self-representa-

tion and breaking self-censorship play a central role

in the queer movement’s writing and activism. It can

also be argued that the interviewees were more en-

gaged with this form of cultural censorship than with

legal restrictions when it comes to the online expres-

sions of sexuality.

Child protection and the politics of funding

In February 2009, the United States Agency for Inter-

national Development (USAID) funded the TRA with

three million US dollars to fund the procurement of

spectrum management equipment and the related

technical assistance and training. The implications

of USAID funding on the policies of the TRA include

the import of child protection discussions and plans

to limit access. The TRA is a member of the Higher

Council of Child Protection (HCCP), and “makes

constant efforts to ensure the participation and

commitment of all players in the Lebanese market

in adopting self organization measures to protect

children in cyberspace.”

On their website, the TRA

have a special section for child protection including

links to protection tools. One of these is a ﬁltering

system which comes as an option with your internet

subscription. This offer is mainly used with services

such as schools that are aimed at targeting children.

This system is based on a code of conduct by the in-

ternet industry, governments, law enforcement, and

institutions that educate children. In May 2009, of-

ﬁcials from the TRA held roundtable discussions with

the HCCP and came up a list of recommendations

that included:

35 Sheyma Buali “The Cultural Limitations of Censorship” Arab Media

and Society Issue 10, Spring 2010 docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Ac

T2dKIHNCThZGZkNHM5Z3ZfNzhkYnczNXFjdg&hl=en

36 TRA “Children Protection” www.tra.gov.lb/Children-protection

37 TRA “Recommendations Brought About by the Stakeholders

During the Round Table Discussion on May 14th about Children

Protection in Cyberspace” 2009 www.tra.gov.lb/Library/Files/

Uploaded%20ﬁles/Recommendations-TRA-Telecom%20Day%20

2009%20EN.pdf

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET118 Lebanon

s A hotline to receive complaints of immoral be-

haviour contributing to the security of children

in cyberspace

s Raising awareness among parents about tools

to be installed on their PCs by the points of sale

of computer stores with the collaboration of the

Professional Computer Association (PCA)

s Monitoring cyber cafes to make sure they are im-

plementing the initiative

s Investigating a potential legal framework for

internet cafes in collaboration with Internal Se-

curity Forces.

These supposed goals of the TRA’s recommenda-

tions stand in strong contrast to the situation on

the ground, where there are no intentions or meas-

ures to limit access to harmful content online, nor

to assess what harmful content entails. It afﬁrms the

blind importation of policies used in other countries

without a comprehensive study that shows how chil-

dren in Lebanon are accessing content online and

what sort of risks they are facing. Without opening

up the space for organisations working on sexuality,

women’s rights, child sexual abuse, sexual harass-

ment, and other active topics in civil society today,

the measure could potentially ﬁlter out important

information that young people have a right to

access online. For example, efforts to update Leba-

non’s school sex education curriculum were met with

strong opposition and raised a lot of controversy in

2007

and a new progressive curriculum remains on

the discussion table at the Ministry of Education. In

the meantime, the internet serves as a free, open

space for youth to access information. The decision

to implement policies (as indicated in the TRA rec-

ommendations above) to ﬁlter or restrict content on

sexuality for the sake of child protection without al-

lowing room for debate on what “harmful content”

actually entails could result in the blockage of useful

material and the violation of free access to informa-

tion online in Lebanon.

The proposed ICT law and the vulnerability

of the Lebanese internet

Voice over internet protocol (VoIP), a cost-effective

and sometimes free way of long-distance voice call-

ing and video conferencing, is one example of legal

versus practical contradictions in Lebanese internet

regulation. VoIP is technically illegal in Lebanon,

according to Telecom Law 431 of 2002, a testament

to the restrictions the government has repeatedly

put in place in Lebanon, constraining access to ICT.

38 Zahra Hankir “Sex in the classroom” nowlebanon.com 20 October

2007 www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.aspx?ID=16836

The law bans services like Skype by requiring pro-

viders who want to offer this service to apply for

special licensing.

Unlike instant messaging, VoIP allows users to

speak from phone to phone via the internet. Despite

the fact that the existence of this law goes back sev-

eral years (2002), it is only this year (2010) that the

Lebanese government began implementing bans on

VoIP communications. Recently, Egypt began apply-

ing a similar ban on VoIP services via mobile phone

internet, due to the disappointing revenue that was

reported by the state-owned monopoly Telecom

Egypt. “The NTRA [National Telecommunication

Regulatory Authority] had tolerated mobile internet

telephony until a drop in international call volumes

over recent months pushed them to tell Egypt’s op-

erators to enforce the ban,” said Amr Badawy, head

of the NTRA.

The internet in Lebanon is quite a loose and

relatively unsupervised domain, but using the inter-

net to cut down on communications expenses, thus

diverting funds from the pockets of the overpriced

services the companies provide, poses a problem to

Ogero, MTC and Alfa, the only phone networks in

the country. And, therefore, a ban on VoIP plays to

these private companies’ advantage and their con-

tinued monopoly of communications prices, which

poses problems of affordable (and free) access. The

Telecoms Ministry issued a statement on 9 June 2010

saying it was aiming to “ﬁght the illegal use of VoIP,

adding that the government generates $150-million

yearly from international calls, revenues which VoIP

affects severely.”

On its website, the TRA states that

its policy to ban VoIP is currently under review.

The vulnerable nature of Lebanon’s internet

freedom was most highlighted in June 2010 when

a proposed ICT law was presented for a vote in Par-

liament without comment allowed. The draft law

dictated that an independent body called the “Elec-

tronic Signatures & Services Authority (ESSA)” which

is “not subject to the provisions of the general sys-

tem of public institutions and is under the control of

the Audit Bureau” would be responsible to create a

“more monitored online environment in Lebanon.”

The draft law was originally written up in 2003 by MP

Ghinwa Jalloul, a member of the Future Movement

Party – one that is notorious for its push towards pri-

vatisation in Lebanon.

39 “Egypt Bans Mobile Phone Skype Access” Meedan news.meedan.

net/index.php?page=events&post_id=296173

40 Dana Halawi “Telecom Ministry to Prohibit Commercial Use

of Voice-over-IP” The Daily Star 1 July 2010 www.dailystar.

com.lb/Business/Lebanon/Jul/01/Telecom-Ministry-to-prohibit-

commercial-use-of-voice-over-IP.ashx?searchText=voice-over-

IP#axzz1Q3ZKAV4q

41 Jessica Dheere “Emergency: Help Delay the Vote on E-Transactions

Law” (Social Media Exchange, 13 June 2010)

www.smex.org/2010/06/stop-the-vote

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET119 Lebanon

The proposed law had several contentious points

and the Lebanese blogosphere and leading tech

organisations such as Social Media Exchange were

quick to form a campaign called “Stop This Law” to

defer the vote. Direct results of the law included the

restriction of internet usage for business or leisure,

for personal reasons or academic ones, without a li-

cence given out by a special governmental body. Said

body would also have access to raid and conﬁscate

any information, hardware or software, whether it

be personal (like Facebook) or ﬁscal (like e-banking)

or business-related (e-commerce). Not only were

the suggested regulations preposterous and of dire

consequences to the blogosphere and online com-

munity, the formation of the proposed body and its

independent jurisdiction meant serious risks in Leba-

non’s politically unstable environment.

According to Gabriel Deek, ESSA was to be giv-

en “very broad and unjustiﬁed powers, beyond the

objectives of the law and its functions.”

Deek also

highlighted some of the problematic aspects of this

law, namely that ESSA would have powers of law

enforcement without judicial oversight, the clear

conﬂict of powers between ESSA and relevant minis-

tries (Economy, Telecoms, Finance), and the fact that

ESSA would have both regulatory and operational

powers, in addition to conﬂicts and ambiguities in

the language of the draft law. Deek goes on to men-

tion that these alongside other observations will

“result in a negative impact on the economic activity

and investment panorama.”

Mohammad Najem, one of the founders of Social

Media Exchange (SMEX), a Beirut-based organisation

that works to support organisations using ICTs for so-

cial change, said in a phone call to us in June 2010:

The new draft law took us by surprise. It was in

the drawer since 2004 and has been revised many

times but is not up-to-date at all with the needs

of Lebanese internet users, consumers, vendors

or bloggers. One of our main issues with the draft

law are articles 82 and 84 that allow the new reg-

ulatory entity to search and print all information

from private computers, in addition to ﬁnancial

records of companies or individuals, based on a

ﬁled complaint. It is a very wide-reaching law,

and allows too much room for abuse. Also, while

the draft law doesn’t mention censorship directly,

it will be very intimidating for bloggers and activ-

ists whose computers can be searched at a simple

complaint. Another vague article is number 92,

which says that we need licences, granted by this

entity, to perform any activities online. The way

it is phrased now, this can include e-commerce,

blogging, or even sending emails!

42 Gabriel Deek “Major Pain Points in e-Transaction Law”

Through SMEX’s lobbying and meetings with depu-

ties, alongside Facebook groups, Twitter action and

blog posts, a large aggregation of people were able

to spread the word and get the voting on the law

postponed an entire month (and then indeﬁnitely)

for the draft to be revised, in an attempt to make

more sense and infringe less upon personal freedoms.

Infrastructural obstacles to free

and open internet usage

In sharp contrast to the online freedom enjoyed by

the Lebanese online community is the daily agony of

a very slow and very expensive internet connection.

The lack of infrastructure for a broadband connec-

tion and other advanced networks such as 3G is the

leading source of frustration with bloggers and on-

line entrepreneurs, a group of whom launched “The

Broadband Manifesto: Economic Growth and Social

Development for Lebanon”.

Their manifesto de-

mands a 100 Mbps connection speed (among other

things) and that “citizens should be able to choose

the services they wish and should have access to

unrestricted information. Online content – ranging

from government, media, culture, health, business,

learning, entertainment, sciences, and inclusion – all

need to be made accessible to all.” Lebanon is cur-

rently among the lowest-ranked countries in the

world in terms of download (rank: 165/178) and up-

load (rank: 175/178) speeds.

The Ontornet group, mentioned earlier, com-

piled information showing that Lebanon has one

of the highest priced internet service sectors in the

world compared to speed and bandwidth caps. “Leb-

anese authorities indirectly monopolize everything

related to [the internet] sector, minimizing any im-

provements or competition between ISPs.”

Telecom

experts and IT advisors continue to press the gov-

ernment to improve the internet and cut prices of

subscription so that more individuals and companies

can use it with relative ease. Little effort has been

undertaken by the government to respond to this is-

sue, save for a broadband project that costs LBP 140

billion (USD 93 million) currently on the table. “Ac-

cording to a study by the World Bank, [for] every 10

percent broadband penetration growth in Lebanon

the GDP growth will rise by 1.35 percent annually

or the equivalent of LL600 billion. This project will

also generate an additional tax revenue of LL140 bil-

43 Broadband Lebanon website www.broadbandlebanon.org

44 Nadine Moawad “How Slow Internet in Lebanon Is” (What If I Get

Free, 14 June 2010) www.nadinemoawad.com/2010/06/how-slow-

internet-in-lebanon-is

45 Ontornet Group “The Internet Situation in Lebanon. Special

Report” 11 March 2011 www.slideshare.net/ontornet/the-internet-

situation-in-lebanon

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET120 Lebanon

lion each year,”

said Lebanese Telecommunications

Minister Charbel Nahas to the Daily Star on 12 April

2010 – but no changes or improvements have been

made to date.

A strategic lobby group called Flip the Switch

pushing to activate ﬁbre optics that would boost

Lebanon’s internet connectivity attributes the delay

in improving the infrastructure to political bickering

among three main groups: the Ministry of Telecom-

munications, Ogero (the national phone company)

and the TRA. The nature of the political ﬁghts is a

reﬂection of ongoing political disputes in Lebanon,

driven mostly by the sectarian nature of everybody

in power.

Data retention and monitoring

All ISPs, of which there are seventeen licensed in Leb-

anon, are required by Telecom Law 431 to maintain

logs of all sites visited by their users for at least two

years. These logs can be made available to the Inter-

nal Security Forces or General Security for criminal

investigations. Encrypted connections to password-

protected accounts, however, prevent ISPs from

tracking personal emails and chat logs. A Lebanese

internet expert and hacker who identiﬁes himself

as LoCo says: “[ISPs] can keep logs, yes, but when I

was talking to some people inside ISPs they said they

don’t keep much of the logs. They probably keep

only the connections you open, but not the details.”

In an article on Al Jazeera,

a Lebanese Internal

Security ofﬁcer revealed that the United States has

access to the Lebanese communications network

(TETRA) as part of a “donation deal”. The logic be-

hind it is to make the network and its data available

for maintenance and efﬁciency purposes. In addition

to giving access to mobile and land communications,

TETRA also provides the GIS, which is a system that

contains all the geographical data such as streets,

buildings, banks, embassies and main internal secu-

rity quarters. The network can be accessed by any

laptop with the appropriate settings. Although the

ramiﬁcations of this deal pose huge question marks

related to Lebanon’s national security, privacy of in-

ternet users, and full exposure of sensitive data, the

revelation caused little stir amidst the public sphere

in Lebanon.

General Wehbe Qatisha, treasurer of the Leba-

nese Forces, a right-wing political party, stated that

accusations that the US is trying to inﬁltrate TETRA

for intelligence purposes are not credible, since the

46 Daily Star Staff “Broadband Project Finally in Fast Lane” The Daily

Star 13 April 2010 www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Politics/Apr/13/

Broadband-project-ﬁnally-in-fast-lane.ashx#axzz1QNz2bWN0

47 Khadr Awarkh “Washington Penetrates Lebanon’s

Communications Security Network” Al Jazeera 10 April

2010 aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FE35E432-0DF2-4D82-A407-

22DBC8004A15.htm

US possesses the advanced technologies that would

allow them to do so without any consent from the

Lebanese government. Meanwhile Dr. Hussein Rah-

hal, chief of the electronic media unit in Hizbullah,

an armed resistance party, believes that any coopera-

tion with the Americans is suspicious because of their

relations with Israel, which is in a state of war with

Lebanon. And in the event they could access the in-

formation, it is considered a major breach of national

security and the cooperation should be discontinued.

Internet access and ﬁltering

In 2009, the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) carried out

technical tests in Lebanon using several ISPs and dif-

ferent connections and found no evidence of the

use of technical ﬁltering to limit access to web con-

tent.

To date, public or religious concern with open

access to internet pornography or sexuality-related

material has not been voiced, despite common vo-

cal interference in traditional ofﬂine portrayals of

erotic material. The production or dissemination of

pornography in Lebanon is prohibited under Article

533 of the Lebanese Penal Code.

Pornography is

categorised as harmful material that violates “pub-

lic decency” in both the law and in general public

attitudes.

However, access to pornography is widespread

and sites like PornHub.com, RedTube.com, YouPorn.

com and LiveJasmin.com are consistently among the

Top 50 on Lebanon’s Alexa.com rankings. One article

on the popular online news site NowLebanon.com

made a reference to these websites on Valentine’s

Day, advising women to “pull up the blinds and set-

tle down in front of the computer for some RedTube

before bed.”

Online pornography usage is especially common

in internet cafés (known as “networks” in Lebanese

Arabic) where fees are cheap (around USD 0.66 per

hour) and opening hours extend until the early hours

of the morning. A combination of online pornogra-

phy, network games that promote violence (such as

the popular Counter-Strike), swearing, smoking and

alcohol consumption have caused parents to tag the

idea of internet cafés in Lebanon as unsafe spaces

for their daughters. These factors add to the gen-

der inequality in using and becoming familiar with

technology, as girls from working class homes whose

48 OpenNet Initiative “Lebanon” 6 August 2009 opennet.net/

research/proﬁles/lebanon

49 Article 533 states that anyone who manufactures, exports, imports or

owns writings, drawings, photographs, ﬁlms, or other material that

violate public decency with the intent of commerce or distribution, or

who advertises or shares information on how to access such material,

faces imprisonment from one month to one year.

50 Louisa Ajami and Dana Moukhallati “A Single Girl’s Guide to

Valentine’s Day” nowlebanon.com 12 February 2010 nowlebanon.

com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=145863

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET121 Lebanon

families cannot afford computers or an internet con-

nection are denied access to cheap internet cafés.

The ONI research that looked at internet ﬁltering

in the Middle East and North Africa determined:

Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank

do not currently ﬁlter any material […] But even

though the state in Lebanon does not practice

surveillance, many private spaces do. Some inter-

net café operators in Lebanon have admitted to

using surveillance software to monitor browsing

habits of clients under the pretext of protect-

ing security or preventing them from accessing

pornography.

Similarly, on all university campuses in Lebanon,

wireless internet connections are censored using

different techniques from keyword ﬁltering to site

blockage to bandwidth limitations. At the Ameri-

can University of Beirut, a number of websites are

ﬁltered by keywords such as “lesbian” or “porn”. On

the same blockage page, the university links students

to a request form should they wish to report the

website as safe and remove it from ﬁltering.

In September 2009, an Islamic search engine,

ImHalal.com, was launched with a pre-ﬁltered search

that allowed Muslims to avoid surﬁng across any web-

site that was not Halal (i.e. permissible within Islam).

When the CEO of ImHalal.com was asked about the mo-

tivation behind creating the search engine, he noted:

We had picked up that many Muslims avoided

the internet because they were afraid that they

or their children would bump into explicit con-

tent, which is a shame because it’s important

everyone is able to collect information and get

him or herself informed about certain subjects

[…] We don’t believe Google Safe Search is re-

turning “clean” and safe enough results.

The launch of ImHalal.com could signal the begin-

ning of a movement towards restricting the internet

based on cultural traditions and practices. Bekhsoos

reported on the new website noting that:

“Nipple” will get you a Haram [sinful] level 1 out of

3, while “breast” gets you 2 out of 3. When I ﬁrst

checked the site in August, “lesbian” would get

you a 3 out of 3 Haram level (in red!) but now it’s

been reduced to level 2. Fastest Ijtihad [process

of reinterpreting the Qor’an] I’ve ever seen.

51 Jillian C. York “ONI Releases 2009 Middle East and North Africa

Research” (OpenNet 12 August 2009) opennet.net/blog/2009/08/

oni-releases-2009-middle-east-north-africa-research

52 Khaled AlSaleh “Interview with CEO of I’mHalal” The Next Web,

11 June 2009 thenextweb.com/me/2009/11/06/interview-reza-

sedaha-ceo-imhalal

53 Nadz “On Censorship” Bekhsoos 20 September 2009 www.

bekhsoos.com/web/2009/09/on-censorshi

Internet ﬁltering: The case of Bing

In the ﬁrst two weeks of January 2010, ONI conduct-

ed a test on Microsoft Bing

to study Arabic keyword

ﬁltering in Arab countries. The results of this test

appeared in “Sex, Social Mores and Keyword Filter-

ing: Microsoft Bing in the ‘Arabian Countries’”.

Microsoft Bing’s ﬁltering practices are customised

according to region, and in this report, ONI looks at

Bing’s ﬁltering practices in the Arab region in par-

ticular – or what Bing generally names “the Arabian

countries”. The methodology spreads across four

Arab countries with contrasting levels of social and

political internet censorship in place. By using the

engine to manually search for a set of 100 Arabic

keywords and a set of 60 English keywords, ONI at-

tempts to identify which keywords are ﬁltered out

by Bing.

The results, according to ONI, show that Bing ﬁl-

ters out keywords that may yield sexually explicit

results, especially those related to homosexuality and

non-normative sexual behaviours. In the report’s con-

clusion, ONI explores the motives behind Microsoft’s

homogenising ﬁltering initiative for the Arab region

and its implications, especially after Microsoft signed to

be part of the Global Network Initiative that seeks to

protect freedom of expression around the world. Nev-

ertheless, ONI’s focus on derogatory terms in the testing

process may have affected the study’s results. ONI fails

to observe, for example, that politically correct terms

such as “LGBT”, “heterosexual” (ϡύ΍ϱέ), “transgender”

(ϡΕΡϭϝ) and “homosexual» (ϡΙϝϱ) are not ﬁltered out

by Bing. On the other hand, derogatory terms such as

«ϝϭρϱ» (faggot) and «αΡ΍ϕϱΓ» (dyke) are.

This could possibly mean that Microsoft’s

intention is to ﬁlter out hate speech and not homo-

sexuality as a topic, although the distinction among

the terms (which is perceived as offensive and which

is not) is relatively new to the Arabic lexicon. LGBT

organisations like Helem (Lebanon) and Aswat (Pal-

estine) have made noticeable progress in advocating

for the use of neutral terms to address homosexual-

ity instead of the commonly used Arabic equivalents

of “faggot”, “deviant” and “pervert”. On the other

hand, efforts to reclaim derogatory terms are also

part of the queer movement’s agenda, with events

such as the International Day Against Homophobia

held in Beirut in 2010 upholding the slogan “΃ϥ΍ε΍Ϋ”

or “I Am a Deviant”.

Filtering out these terms in

Arabic-language search engines restricts access to

online material advocating for reclaiming the terms.

54 www.bing.com

55 Helmi Noman “Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft

Bing in the ‘Arabian Countries’” OpenNet opennet.net/sex-social-

mores-and-keyword-ﬁltering-microsoft-bing-arabian-countries

56 Phoenix “Beirut Deviates with its Deviants” Bekhsoos 17 May 2010

www.bekhsoos.com/web/2010/05/beirut-deviates-with-its-deviants

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET122 Lebanon

Therefore, legal and cultural censorship restric-

tions in addition to poor infrastructural access to the

internet make for a risky environment for freedom

of expression in Lebanon. Issues of both censorship

and access are key in examining queer women’s

usage of online technologies to further their move-

ment over the past ten years. Many of the themes

outlined in this ﬁrst half of the research will resur-

face in the second half, which focuses on the sexual

rights movement. In the midst of this vulnerable,

slow and expensive internet environment, the queer

community has both worked to protect individuals’

security and privacy while joining forces, often in

implicit ways, with campaigns for a freer, cheaper

and faster internet. This is in addition to a continued

examination of best online practices and ways of us-

ing the different tools to promote rights and causes

important to sexual minorities.

The sexual rights movement

In parallel to the development of the internet over

the past decade, both in terms of increased access and

technological sophistication, the queer movement in

Lebanon has also developed its usage of the internet

for personal and political gains. The relative freedom

of posting and accessing content online has undoubt-

edly facilitated and empowered Lebanese queers and

offered them a virtual space to further their goals

towards justice. In sharp contrast to neighbouring

countries in the Arab region, Lebanon has a vibrant

and developed queer movement that has been active

for over a decade. In countries like Egypt, Syria and Jor-

dan, small LGBT communities have emerged in recent

years but are still in nascent stages in terms of organis-

ing on the ground and even in their online presence.

By comparing the movement in Lebanon’s relatively

free internet environment to the movements in other

Arab countries’ heavily restricted internet environ-

ments, we can see a clear proportional relationship.

An open cyberspace will enable and strengthen the

work of activists working on taboo and/or illegal top-

ics in their countries.

The following section will enumerate the ways in

which the queer women’s movement in Lebanon has

operated within the developing ICT environment. It

will aim to gauge the effects that ICT has had on the

size, voice and shape of the movement and the nu-

anced ways in which this has played out.

Sexuality in Lebanon

and the political system

The religious institutions here in Lebanon and

the sectarian institutions are a main obstacle for

us as LGBTs, as women, as persons who choose

to live their sexuality in a different way. […] Al-

though Lebanon does not adopt religion as a

main source of its Constitution, yet the sectar-

ian system gives religious institutions the only

authority regarding our personal status – to

marriage, to divorce and to all issues related to

family.

While Lebanon’s constitution identiﬁes the repub-

lic as one that is secular, religious institutions have

historically made important forays into its legal

framework since the early days of the republic’s

founding. Political power in the country is distribut-

ed according to a confessional agreement, whereby

members of different Lebanese religious sects are al-

lotted different forms of political power. Lebanese

historian Fawwaz Traboulsi explains, “The [Leba-

nese] constitution is characterised by a fundamental

dichotomy. It establishes the political equality of all

Lebanese as citizens, inasmuch as it institutionalises

their judicial and political inequalities as subjects be-

longing to hierarchised access to political power and

public ofﬁce.”

This has had many potent and en-

during implications for political, economic and social

life in the country.

Religious institutions in Lebanon maintain ju-

risdiction chieﬂy over Lebanon’s private sphere,

ruling over proceedings that relate to inheritance,

marriage, guardianship, divorce and custody. While

they may not, constitutionally, issue rulings over

individual behaviours, sexuality-related behaviours

and otherwise, they are often eager to pressure the

government to implement controls in their favour.

Several movies and books have been banned or

censored over the years for religiously “offensive”

content; most prominent among these was the inter-

national bestseller The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown.

The authorities often submit to these pressures,

likely for fear of disrupting the confessional agree-

ment on which Lebanon’s political stability is hinged.

Previous sections mentioned several incidents in

which the General Security exercised censorship

on behalf of the church in Lebanon. There is a fear

among the queer community that censorship of

sexuality-related content will develop into a police

crackdown on the LGBTQ community because the

amount of inﬂuence that churches and mosques

wield in Lebanon is so pervasive.

But likely a more immediate effect that reli-

gious institutions have in Lebanon takes form within

households. A vast majority of Lebanese citizens ad-

here to religious doctrine and social taboos against

homosexuality are potent. Most queers in Lebanon

that we interviewed expressed a strong fear that

their identities as queers should be disclosed to their

57 An activist member of Helem in a lecture entitled “One Day, One

Struggle” at the American University of Beirut, 9 November 2009

58 Fawwaz Traboulsi A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto

Press, 2007)

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET123 Lebanon

families. They expressed a fear of ostracism and har-

assment. These sentiments would come to shape a

core component of the queer movement in Lebanon.

Homophobia entrenched

in the legal system

Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code criminal-

ises “sexual acts against nature” with up to a year

in prison. A leftover law from the French mandate,

Article 534 has been a pivotal point of advocacy for

the LGBT movement, which calls for its annulment.

The national LGBT organisation Helem

provides le-

gal services for individuals charged under Article 534

and continues to highlight its detrimental effects on

the LGBT community. In addition to this particular

article, a myriad of other laws affect the LGBT com-

munity, including laws against “offending public

morals” and “promoting lewdness”.

Although Article 534 is widely known as an

anti-sodomy law and targets men more than wom-

en, women still face acute and different forms of

homophobia – both as a direct result of homophobic

and misogynist legislation and as a result of public

perceptions of women’s bodies and sexuality.

A quick history of queers and their internet

On the personal level…

As soon as the internet got to Lebanon in the ear-

ly 1990s, gay and lesbian individuals used search

engines to ﬁnd other people like them. Many un-

dertook this research thinking they could only ﬁnd

other individuals internationally and not in Lebanon.

The ﬁrst dating and matchmaking websites for ho-

mosexuals were in English and hosted in the United

States or Western Europe, and many Lebanese LGBTs

found themselves on these websites connecting with

English- or French-speaking LGBTs with the very odd

chance of ﬁnding an Arab or Lebanese gay person

online. Internet chat sites contributed to the rapid

formation of gay self-identities, with a growing

number of people actively seeking out others like

them to date, befriend and talk to. One user who

goes by the nickname “eagle” explains her ﬁrst

interaction:

I remember Googling – Wait, no we didn’t have

Google at the time. I remember searching for ho-

mosexuality on Yahoo! as soon as I had internet

access at home. It was in the late 90s. I found a

bunch of links, a lot of them were about AIDS,

and most of them were American. Although it

felt good to ﬁnd positive information about ho-

mosexuality, it still felt alien to me. One night I

was chatting on FreeTel, the popular chat client

59 Helem website www.helem.net

at the time and I found a nickname that was

“lesbian4lesbian” and rushed to chat with it. She

(actually I’m not sure if it was a she) was from

London and freaked me out when she started

talking explicitly about sex. I was too shy to con-

tinue the conversation. But I do remember that

she was the ﬁrst person to teach me that :) was a

tilted smiling face.

A similar experience is described in the story “My

Quest to Find Lesbians” in the book Bareed Mista3jil:

The ﬁrst word I ever searched for on Yahoo! was

“homosexual”. It was the ﬁrst day my dad got

me a dial-up internet connection for my birthday.

It was October 1998 and internet back then cost

a fortune. I remember it was something like $6

an hour, so I had to be very quick and I got right

down to the point. I had to ﬁnd some lesbians!

The online tools of communication that the LGBT

community predominantly took advantage of in

the early days of the movement were chat rooms

(on mIRC or Yahoo! or websites). Many, however,

reported feeling frustrated that online spaces were

predominantly Western. So they were spurred to

create a local forum using mIRC; the chat channel

#gaylebanon was created by a group of ten queer

Lebanese. “It was much easier with a local chat room

for individuals to discuss local matters and meet each

other. With global spaces, it was much harder to ﬁnd

one another,” said TouchE, one of the founders of

#gaylebanon, adding, “It was also hard for us, Leba-

nese, to relate with other queers who lived abroad,

who had their very own rights and freedoms.”

While the queer virtual network in Lebanon

ﬂourished – as detailed in the next section – Leba-

non’s queers slowly began to emerge from the

underground into the streets of Beirut. Queers

converged in Acid, an after-hours nightclub that

sits among a cluster of industrial warehouses in the

capital’s outskirts. “The few times that, when I was

sixteen-seventeen, I went to Acid, it was like, you

know how you go to have one night stands and you

don’t mention your name or anything or where you

come from and you just dance with a person,” says

Shant, a queer activist and member of Meem, “and

then at the end of the night you just go home as if

nothing happened.”

… and the political

In parallel to the chat room, a small group of individ-

uals also ran a ONElist (which later became Yahoo!

Groups) mailing list. Membership on the list reached

a few hundred within a year and dozens of emails

were exchanged daily on the topic of homosexuality

in Lebanon. From the mailing list emerged a group

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET124 Lebanon

who met in person to form what they called then

ClubFree. SS describes it:

A few of us who used to meet weekly and

organise social events (nothing political or ac-

tivist) decided to start moving forward. An ILGA

[International Lesbian and Gay Association] indi-

vidual member suggested that we form a group

that we would register with ILGA and we start-

ed meeting at someone’s house every week. We

put bylaws and created the name ClubFree. We

all had full-time jobs elsewhere, so it was very

difﬁcult to do. […] It took a long time to write

the bylaws and agree on them, and then we’d

have GAs so after a year we had the bylaws ac-

cepted. Then there was the ILGA conference in

San Francisco that I went to, I was funded by

IGLHRC [International Gay and Lesbian Human

Rights Commission].

When Helem (Lebanese Protection for LGBTs) was

later founded in 2004, also by another group of in-

dividuals that sprung out of ClubFree, the internet

continued to play an important role in LGBT activ-

ism. According to Georges Azzi, who directed Helem

for ﬁve years from its inception, Helem’s online com-

munications strategy developed very “naturally”. He

said: “The work on the internet was very present,

and there were very few places ‘on the ground’ that

we could use to target the community. There was

just Acid, and they didn’t really let Helem be there.

So, the use of the net, the mailing lists, the website,

were the most important things.”

Helem’s online tools included a website, multiple

mailing lists, a chat room that never came close to

competing with #gaylebanon, forums that were very

active for a year between 2005 and 2006, an online

donations account with PayPal, the downloadable

magazine Barra, a regular PDF newsletter, and after

2008 a Facebook group and Twitter account.

In addition to the organised activism, other ini-

tiatives sprouted online in the mid-2000s, the most

notable of which is the Raynbow Media Monitor that

archived all press clippings about homosexuality in

the Lebanese media since 1998.

With the creation of Helem Girls in September

2006 and then Meem in August 2007, lesbian organis-

ing gained more prominence among LGBT work and

over the years it morphed into its own movement and

became focused on queer feminist organising. From

its start, Meem adopted a low-proﬁle strategy to pro-

vide support and services, aiming to create a strong

grassroots movement where women are empowered

and can, within ﬁve years, become more visible in

their advocacy work. Meem today has around 380

members and runs a Womyn House in Beirut, which is

an apartment that houses all of Meem’s activities and

meetings and is open only to members. The house’s

location and details are strictly conﬁdential.

Instant messaging is one of the more popu-

lar online tools that maintained its usefulness over

the past ten years for personal connections and for

organising as well. MSN was the most popular of

these and guaranteed mIRC chat room and Gaydar

(a worldwide LGBT dating website) users follow-up

with people they met in chat rooms. LGBTs would

use MSN to romance with others and also introduce

people to each other on chat. A young woman user,

Bloody Mary, recounts:

It will sound pathetic now, but back in 2004-

2005, every time I would get a private message

from a girl on Gaydar, I would wonder to myself:

is she the one? Am I going to fall in love with

her? […] Friendship was an option, of course, but

it came after love. What I really wanted was love,

even if its possibility was in the form of weird

online strangers.

MSN Messenger was also then used for organising the

queer women’s movement that started with Helem

Girls. The coordinator created a special MSN address

to maintain daily contact with all the members of the

community. Ran, a member of Meem, explains:

[O]ne person on MSN was talking to the girls and

spreading information about meetings through

personal messages. I know it might sound like a

very stupid tool right now, but back then it was

very powerful to have. […] Lesbians back then

and still right now are scared to have a face-to-

face meeting right away with someone from the

community. So to have a person on your MSN

contacts list who you can talk to and express your

fears to and someone who can convince you to

come to the meetings – I think it was a very pow-

erful tool. This was the tool used to gather all the

girls and get the numbers.

Meem’s early relationship with the internet

From the start, Meem built most of its communica-

tions, community-building, awareness-raising and

support strategies using the internet. One of the

founders says in an interview:

Some [organisations] go to learn about ICTs to

support their work. At Meem we had no other

choice. We were using ICTs before they became

tools for change. Because we had no other

choice. Was I supposed to go hang a poster that

Meem had a meeting at so-and-so location? We

used to send emails. And that’s why we became

really experts at [using the internet]. The Meem

blog was created because we needed a place to

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET125 Lebanon

write. The YouTube channel was launched be-

cause we needed a place to post our videos. That

[was] the only creative way that we can think of

doing things. Now everyone is using ICTs.

Shant, also one of the Meem founders and coordina-

tor of the communications committee, also explains:

I don’t think Meem would really exist without all

[the ICTs]. I sincerely don’t. […] I wonder if it’s

because ten years after the civil war – because

usually they feed us this crap that “it’s not your

time now” so maybe it was the timing: ten years

later. I don’t really know...

ICTs also play a crucial role in the creation of alterna-

tive media, something that much of civil society in

Lebanon now seeks to improve, and which the queer

movement sees itself as an important part of. Shant

notes that because of the Lebanese mainstream

media’s afﬁliation with established political parties,

they are often reluctant to discuss progressive issues

or to portray them positively, so the communica-

tions strategy must be crafted delicately. “Basically

all you can do with alternative discourses that are

underground is create alternative media to house

them,” said Shant. “And also when you want to do

something mainstream, be smart enough to write

something that can pass, but at the same time be

very radical in a discourse that is hidden in a way.”

Therefore, Meem’s strategy focused on creating

alternative online media to use as channels for self-

expression (and self-discovery at times) as well as to

reach out to the public without compromising the

security of individuals or the group.

Main themes around queers and ICTs

Throughout the course of the nearly thirteen-year

old queer movement, a variety of socioeconomic,

geopolitical and gender issues surfaced. This paper

contends that these issues necessitated and inﬂu-

enced the structural and ideological development

of the movement and that the same themes con-

currently appeared in both the internet sphere and

the queer movement, sometimes in recognition and

other times in complete oblivion of each other.

The authors of this paper identiﬁed a number

of overarching issues that the movement faced and

sought to tackle and that continue to form an en-

during feature of the movement. The ﬁrst of these

is sociopolitics and privacy, which highlights the pri-

vacy policies that the queer movement moulded

in accordance to societal conditions. The second re-

lates to gender particularities of access, privilege and

politics of queer women within both LGBT and het-

eronormative social structures. The third is an urgent

progression towards self-representation within a glo-

balised gay movement. The fourth is an appropriation

of and contribution to social and geopolitical strug-

gles. The ﬁfth is a conscious strategy of queering,

often a reciprocal process with internet usage, and

which stemmed from radical feminist politics.

Among all of these is a perpetual engagement

with censorship and circumvention, discussions

around language, class and technology, in addition

to management and negotiation of personal and

political identities online. Debates around private

versus public and online versus ofﬂine spheres of ac-

tivism, plus acceptable versus harmful expressions of

sexuality, surface regularly as issues that young queer

activists are tackling on a daily basis, often and still

in the face of massive challenges. Panning the history

reveals crucial shifts in agency and power in the rela-

tionship between queer women and their internet.

Sociopolitics and privacy

Perhaps one of the most obvious distinct features of

the queer movement in Lebanon is its concern for the

protection of personal identities. The issue of personal

privacy around one’s sexuality intersected between

the real world and the virtual world. And therefore,

the movement had to respond to this pressing need

voiced by all members of the LGBT community – in

varying degrees, from women more than from men –

by adapting its strategies to guard this anonymity and

request for privacy. In the formative mIRC chat rooms,

chat room moderators were tasked with ensuring that

participants would not be “outed.” The moderators

themselves maintained anonymity as well because of

the public nature of the chat rooms. Anybody could

join and it was often reported that police informants

or users with malicious intentions to bash gays or har-

ass lesbians would log in under false pretences.

Although the chat rooms focused on providing

services for LGBTs to meet and/or hook up, the moder-

ators and users were still conscious of the constructive

role the chat rooms played in building a network

of support among individuals who shared common

forms of oppression. They also served as a source for

community news, sometimes trivial and sometimes

important. An implicit code of conduct was present

among the users and forced outing was seen as de-

structive behaviour that caused many individuals

harm. The mailing lists that were later created main-

tained a rigorous screening process. In ofﬂine spaces,

the same code of conduct continued: “Everybody

knew everybody,” said Shant of the pre-ClubFree pe-

riod of the movement, “except that when I knew you,

I wouldn’t know that you know a certain other person

when in fact you also knew that other person. It’s like

le secret de Polichinelle

in a way…”

60 “Le secret de Polichinelle” or “Polichinelle’s secret” refers to

a secret that everyone knows but is never shared or discussed

publicly.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET126 Lebanon

Founding queer activists cited social, familial ta-

boos and legal repercussions as recurring fears that

conﬁned initial queer interactions to the internet

and engendered a fundamental policy in organisa-

tions that were established in later years. The lessons

learned from previous organising experiences were

translated most pronouncedly by the women who

were part of these early communities. Risks ranged

from family members accessing individuals’ comput-

ers, emails and chat logs to recognising their writings

or online proﬁles.

When Meem was founded in 2007 as a lesbian

support group, founding members decided early

on that privacy guarantees would be of fundamen-

tal importance to bringing queer women into the

support spaces that they aimed to create. Members

were all required to adopt nicknames and to refer

to one another using those nicknames. In all writ-

ten work that emerged out of Meem, most notably

its book Bareed Mista3jil, a collection of stories from

queer women in Lebanon, and Bekhsoos, an online

queer Arab magazine, there is little to no mention

of authors’ names or identities. “We live in a soci-

ety where obviously being gay is not acceptable,

without this privacy our lives would be ruined,” said

Meem member Ran, adding, “Of course there are

times when you would feel like you want people to

know that it’s you who wrote this. I’m sure there are

times when you feel like you want credit for what

you’re doing, but we can’t afford this. This is a com-

promise you have to make.”

Meemers realised that there was a ﬁne line they

must straddle between addressing privacy concerns

and boosting the visibility needed to integrate queer

issues into the public sociopolitical environment.

This is an enduring feature of the development of

Bekhsoos, a publication that promotes visibility as an

engine for connecting and supporting queers while

at the same time protecting the identity of its con-

tributors. In an article entitled “Framing Visibility:

Coming Out and the International LGBT Spectrum of

Progress”, Lynn, a Meem coordinator, recounts:

Total secrecy would have turned Meem into a

static bubble. There had to be a way, an intricate

way, to reach out to the queers that we hadn’t

reached out to. Some of the ways Meem did this

was through writing [...] At the time and even

today, we are often accused of wanting to take

the movement “back into the closet.” [...] Meem

rejects the binary between the closet and com-

ing out – just like we reject gender and sexual

binaries. We operate in the grey areas. We are

obsessed with writing, producing knowledge,

archiving, and we do it all under nicknames or

ﬁrst names. We constantly build up different

public platforms so that progressive and sex-

positive discussions on sexual and bodily rights

are reaching people who are outside of our usu-

al communities. There’s obviously an ambiguous

space that comes with this kind of visibility, and

we take that ambiguity, that space, to our ad-

vantage. We negotiate this ambiguity of spaces

and identities according to our own sense of sur-

roundings and judgment.

The article critically discusses the international no-

tion of “coming out” and its emphasised relevance

to queer movements and presents an account of

Meem’s negotiation around visibility and movement

building. Meem’s work is very visible on the internet

with thousands of articles, videos, websites, e-cam-

paigns and followers on social networks. And yet,

the group maintains an invisibility that they see as

crucial to their work – not only to protect the mem-

bers, but also to remove the spotlight from the queer

subjects and place it on the queer experiences. One

of the founders explains:

When we ﬁrst started Meem, we thought we

would move from underground to public in ﬁve

years. We assumed that was the correct linear

trajectory to follow. But, today, four years into

our work, we have realised that these bounda-

ries are very limiting, and our work on the

internet allows us to negotiate these ideas. We

have been increasing content and reach and it

just so happened that the internet has shifted

from being an alternative medium to become

the primary source of information and interac-

tion for a growing population in Lebanon and

internationally. And so the question becomes: is

our online presence still alternative when the in-

ternet has become so mainstream?

This analysis was also pervasive in the book Bareed

Mista3jil. “At ﬁrst we thought it was most important

to ﬁnd the stories from the people who wanted to

tell them,” says the opening chapter. “But as the

work on the book progressed, we found it necessary

not only to include stories ready to come out, but

also to search for those that weren’t […] because

each story is a representation of an experience com-

mon to hundreds of individuals in Lebanon […] we

opted not to use any single name or person for each

story.”

Because of the crucial role that the internet

plays in queer organising in most contexts around

the world, activists integrated digital security train-

ings into all capacity-building programmes. While

the internet was traditionally a youth sphere, where

61 Lynn “Framing Visibility: Coming Out and the International

LGBT Spectrum of Progress” Bekhsoos 12 December 2010 www.

bekhsoos.com/web/2010/12/framing-visibility-coming-out-and-the-

international-lgbt-spectrum-of-progress-2

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET127 Lebanon

individuals were protected from parental access to

ICTs, more recently, with the growing popularity of

social networks like Facebook, parents and older

family members have increased access to the pro-

ﬁles and networks of their children, now Lebanon’s

LGBT youth. And a re-evaluation of privacy in these

shifting times has become more pressing. Another

Bekhsoos article, “Your Mom Has Added You on Fa-

cebook”, states:

[F]or the ﬁrst time in a long time, my virtual gay-

ness found itself thinking about e-closets again.

Was I revealing too much online? [...] Online pri-

vacy and security has always been a central issue

for queer communities, who are known to use

anonymous log-ins, nicknames, multiple online

identities, and other strategies to protect them-

selves from outing. The need to systematize and

think collectively about these strategies will only

become more crucial as new social media trends

push online users to reveal more and more about

their preferences, purchases, locations, connec-

tions, and everyday activities.

This is yet another example of the ways in which

social surveillance has often mattered as much, if

not more, than state surveillance, necessitating that

Meem’s privacy policies be intricate and constantly

in ﬂux.

Gender politics: Access, privacy and usage

Much has been posited about gender usage of ICTs,

especially across the Arab world, where women’s

freedoms are restricted by strict cultural and legal

codes. There has been recent movement with respect

to this theme on the part of both techie communi-

ties from one side and feminists on the other, and

more recently with the visible role of women within

Arab revolutions – both on the ground and in online

activism.

Arab Techies, a collective of Arab technology

geeks formed in 2008, held an Arab Women Techies

meeting in Zouk, Lebanon in May 2010 following

the poor participation of women in the Arab Techies

meeting. The purpose of the meeting, according to

one of its organisers, Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan, was

to build connections to more women geeks in order

to support their participation in tech collectives.

From the other activist end of the issue, a group

of young feminists founded Take Back the Tech

Arabia in April 2010 to serve four goals: highlight-

ing gender issues in Arab tech collectives, building

the ICT capacity of young women, encouraging girls

in school to pursue tech studies, and developing

62 Nadz “Your Mom Has Added You on Facebook” Bekhsoos 29

November 2010 www.bekhsoos.com/web/2010/11/your-mom-has-

added-you-on-facebook

programs and code that are of use to women’s rights

advocates and feminists ﬁghting discrimination and

violence.

Gradual access to online spaces

As women have less access to public spaces than

men, the same problem was reﬂected online when

the LGBT community ﬁrst went on the internet to

build content and connect to each other. Women

were a very small minority in the chat rooms, mailing

lists and forums and as content producers. While the

very small percentage of women accessing ofﬂine

spaces – such as ClubFree activities, gay nightclubs

and pubs, and Helem – was understandable, because

of curfews and restrictions on mobility, their absence

from online spaces was less clearly explainable.

“#gaylebanon was not a private place to be in,”

says SS, an early member of the queer community in

Lebanon. “It was 99% male, it was difﬁcult to trust

people, but once in a while I would come across some

people I could talk to, and I made friendships that

have lasted to this day.” She continues, “[T]he [Club-

Free] meetings had very few girls, two to three at

most. Once we had a picnic, there were two girls and

55 guys.” Despite common struggles as homosexu-

als, except for small circles, few women were able

to integrate into the male-dominated spaces. The

cover story of the second issue of Barra magazine

addressed lesbian invisibility asking the question:

“Where are the girls?”

Our interviewees expressed that in retrospect it

was a lack of privacy within women’s families, a lack

of courage due to internalised sexism, and difﬁculty

of identifying with the LGBT community that made

online access difﬁcult. Even with the guarantee of

anonymity online, young women were intimidated

by the possibility of a family member discovering

their online activities and by the generally aggressive

atmosphere in chat rooms and forums. Anonymity

was critical but it did not sufﬁce alone to encourage

queer women to speak up and connect with others.

In further sections of our analysis we will see how a

complementary ofﬂine supportive community broke

many barriers of fear among women to express

themselves online as well.

The key strategy of creating women-only spaces

allowed women within the LGBT community to gain

a vocal, strong and lesbian expression that later de-

veloped in a queer feminist discourse. What was

particularly successful about the lesbian organising

that boomed by the beginning of 2008 was not that

it was online – indeed there were many ofﬂine Meem-

facilitated spaces. But communication was always

maintained online in deliberate and personalised ways.

63 Nadine Moawad “Take Back the Tech” Nasawiya 3 April 2010

www.nasawiya.org/web/2010/04/take-back-the-tech

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET128 Lebanon

All public lesbian activism was done online, creating a

clear-cut separation of activities. The ﬁrst were in-per-

son meetings that were extremely conﬁdential, banned

the taking of photos, and prohibited the revealing of

personal information. The second were online expres-

sions of voices that were securely anonymous but that

were promoted to the public in ripple-effect word-of-

mouth strategies. Examples of these were the YouTube

videos

launched in the summer of 2008, the early

Bekhsoos issues,

and the blog.

A safe space online

For young women in particular, the growth of an or-

ganised constituency online allowed much-needed

privacy and security, as well as a nurturing envi-

ronment to talk about taboo sexuality issues. The

signiﬁcance of the ICTs strategy employed by the

queer women’s community is not so much that they

were able to use the technology to advance their is-

sues, but more that this strategy was given priority

over other more traditional ways of organising. The

activists considered the mantra “we must write”

in-

ﬁnitely more signiﬁcant than “we must come out”

for example. And while interviewees expressed that

in the early stages, they thought that they would

be moving from online to ofﬂine spaces, once they

did, they realised that they must move simultane-

ously online as well. Privacy and allowing the young

women to come out or identify themselves at their

own pace was a central component of their work.

All stories published in Bekhsoos – including those

of transgender men and women – present a perspec-

tive of gender discrimination, bias, stereotyping,

limitations, as well as a growing recognition of such.

The editorial policy appears to favour stories about

topics that are taboo even in the queer communi-

ty: body ownership, frank expressions of sexuality,

stories of molestation, and other powerful acts of

coming to terms with gender violence. Similarly to

how Meem was founded as a response to the lack of

safe, empowering spaces for women in LGBT spaces,

Bekhsoos was focused on ﬁlling up the empty spaces

where women’s voices in particular could be heard.

And so the coverage of all news related to sexual-

ity in the Arab world is reported through women’s

experiences. Echoed in all these pieces are the words

of Audre Lorde: “It’s a struggle but that’s why we

exist, so that another generation of lesbians of color

will not have to invent themselves, or their history,

all over again.”

64 Meem YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/meemgroup

65 Bekhsoos bekhsoos.com/issue0/issue0.php

66 The earlier blog is no longer available online. The newer version

can be found at meemgroup.blogspot.com but has not been

updated since October 2009.

67 Bekhsoos About www.bekhsoos.com/web/about

Following the lead of women, gay and bisexual

men found voices to discuss the same topics – whose

male faces are often completely blurred out. Among

its ﬁrst issues, Bekhsoos published a story titled “At

the Age of 14”

that described a young man being

forced into oral sex by his brother. The story resonat-

ed with hundreds of young gay men and paved out a

path for more self-expression about sexual violence

towards men. “At the Age of 14” remains the top

most-visited story on Bekhsoos.

Intersections of gender and class

Access to the internet in Lebanon is limited to eco-

nomically able groups because of the high prices of

connections and mobile data plans, as detailed in

the ﬁrst section of our research. Therefore, queers of

lower economic classes have little access to content,

information and networks online. Class divisions sur-

faced as a prominent problem in Lebanon’s queer

community, which is split between supporters of

the ﬂourishing gay nightlife venues and those who

question their beneﬁt to the community. Some ar-

gue that having more “gay-friendly” businesses

attracts more gay tourists and opens up spaces for

queers to meet and hang out. Others have argued

that these venues posit a false sense of freedom and

encourage the consumption of the Lebanese queer

community, while facilitating the further isolation of

the majority who cannot afford the increasingly ex-

pensive restaurants and clubs, which are restricted to

premium locations in Beirut.

A recent article published on the occasion of In-

ternational Women’s Day in Al-Akhbar, a mainstream

leftist newspaper, entitled “Lebanese lesbian and

gay rights: Down with sectarianism”,

stirred contro-

versy among the activists. Written by the president

of the Helem board, Hiba Abbani, the article chal-

lenges the notion that “the situation for queers in

Lebanon has improved drastically with the opening

of many bars, clubs, restaurants, and saunas in addi-

tion to businesses that cater to the gay community,”

a promotional statement issued by organisers of the

International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association

(IGLTA) symposium in Beirut in 2010. Abbani argues

that the reality on the ground is very different from

that posited for commercial gains and that, indeed,

many political and socioeconomic factors prevent a

large segment of the queer community from identi-

fying with those who beneﬁt from the consumerist

services. She called for a deeper understanding of

the effects of sectarian politics on the community at

large and for stronger demands by the movement

68 Fantastic Homosexual “At the Age of 14” Bekhsoos 12 October

2009 www.bekhsoos.com/web/2009/10/at-the-age-of-14

69 H. Abbani “LGBT Rights in Lebanon: Bring Down the Sectarian

System” Al-Akhbar 8 March 2011 www.al-akhbar.com/node/5876

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET129 Lebanon

to address these pressing issues. The article was met

with much criticism,

predominantly from gay male

activists who argued that the movement has catered

to all strata of Lebanese society and that gay-friendly

businesses were a vital part of the local movement

like they were important parts of gay history in dif-

ferent parts of the world (mostly the Western world).

Self-representation and the creation

of e-narratives on Bekhsoos

This section will trace the evolution of the narra-

tive that Meem has consciously sought to create

throughout their growth. It will focus on Meem’s

weekly online publication Bekhsoos, a website that

describes itself as a “queer Arab weekly magazine”

and whose articles have been read over 400,000

times since September 2009. At the time of writing

this article, Bekhsoos had 420 posts and 2,339 com-

ments. Anyone in the Arab region who wishes to

discuss queer Arab issues is invited to contribute, as a

means of representing itself. We seek to examine the

conditions out of which Bekhsoos emerged in rela-

tion to Meem’s development as well as that of the

larger queer movement in Lebanon.

This case study will examine the content of

Bekhsoos articles and its editorial processes, and

attempt to gauge the networks that Bekhsoos’s

readership and its pool of contributors have given

shape to. Finally, the case study will seek to ﬂesh

out the effects that Bekhsoos has had on the queer

movement itself, against the backdrop of growing in-

ternet usage, the emergence of social networks, and

movements for online freedoms. We chose Bekhsoos

in particular because of a number of elements that

make for an interesting case: the combination of

various ICT tools on the magazine platform, the

authors’ navigation of anonymity within wide expo-

sure and reach, and the fact that the website was

launched at a strategic meeting point of both the

LGBT movement and the Lebanese blogosphere. Ad-

ditionally, because the magazine is primarily a space

for women and transgender writers, its content

sheds light on the gendered usage of the internet in

the queer community.

“I think it was just natural that Bekhsoos would

come to be, to be very honest. It was clear since

ever that there was a need for people to write and

to express what they wanted to say,” says Shant.

Bekhsoos was launched in June 2008 as an “Arab les-

bian online magazine published quarterly by Meem

cover[ing] topics related to homosexuality in the

Arab world.” The “About Us” page on 1 July 2011 de-

ﬁnes Bekhsoos as a “queer Arab magazine published

weekly by queer and trans folks at Meem cover[ing]

70 Raynbow “Did Helem Miss!?” (Raynbow Monitor, 9 March 2011)

raynbowmonitor.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/did-helem-miss

topics related to (homo)sexuality in the Arab world.”

The evolution between the two descriptions is re-

ﬂective of the evolution of the magazine’s politics

as well as the personal politics of the collective be-

hind it. It is, in fact, the magazine as an online space

for personal expression and political self-reﬂection

that facilitated this process of “queering” the LGBT

movement itself. Late 2010 saw the emergence of

a dozen gay and lesbian blogs that narrated stories

of being gay in Lebanon.

This is a result both of

Bekhsoos’s inﬂuence and also of the increased power

of the ICT environment as an alternative space for

self-expression.

The newer version of Bekhsoos was launched on

7 September 2009 by a Meem committee initiated by

two key members: an English editor (27) and an Ara-

bic editor (22). The idea to publish weekly had been

proposed by the English editor at a Meem meeting

in August and in the form of a challenge to the col-

lective that had grown to reach over 300 members

over the course of two years. In her opening edito-

rial, she writes:

This is the new Bekhsoos […] we’ve decided to

publish weekly. Yes, that’s a huge commitment.

[…] We’re putting ourselves to the challenge of

publishing at least 5-6 articles weekly because we

want to be on top of information technology to-

day. […] The age of “wow, gay groups in Lebanon,

that alone is impressive” is over. It’s not impres-

sive anymore. Now is the time for us to become

engaged with our own societies, to think ana-

lytically, to advance politically, to understand the

truth about oppression, to create, to research, to

be proactive, to write, to write, to write!

The motivation depicted in this editorial became the

driving spirit of the magazine as the team persisted

in self-publishing week after week. “Every Tuesday,

we hold an editorial meeting to discuss the articles of

the next issue. We brainstorm ideas, we discuss cur-

rent events, and we assign an article topic to every

writer.” All articles are due on Saturdays. According

to the team, on average, half of the articles agreed

upon are actually delivered on time every week. The

weekly target is between ten and ﬁfteen articles.

The team refuses to use any funding money for

the production of Bekhsoos, whether technically or to

pay for articles, graphic design or editing. It does not

even solicit donations on its website. What it does so-

licit is more readership, because it depends primarily

on word of mouth to grow its readership organical-

ly, rather than sporadically. There is a safety in that

71 Some examples include guymeetsworld.wordpress.com and

gayinbeirut.blogspot.com

72 Nadz “The Evolution of Us” Bekhsoos 6 September 2009 www.

bekhsoos.com/web/2009/09/the-evolution-of-us

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET130 Lebanon

strategy. It is very similar to the strategy Meem used to

gain membership. In an article entitled “The Secret to

Publishing Bekhsoos Weekly”,

the editor responded

to the multiple queries from the public wondering

how the team manage to pull off a weekly issue with

an anecdote about an anarchist community who get

their chores done because of collective expectation –

not to claim a reward or avoid punishment.

Whenever we are late in doing the ﬁnal pub-

lishing, and it doesn’t come out on a Monday

morning, we get text messages, wall posts, chats,

and emails (even phone calls) from people asking

us where Bekhsoos is. We’ve gotten to a stage

where our readers expect their issue every week,

and that’s what keeps us motivated. It’s very

powerful – far more powerful than if we were,

say, getting paid or in some sort of competition

to win something. It’s even more powerful than

our “LGBT” cause in abstraction. Knowing peo-

ple are out there – hundreds of them – waiting

for Bekhsoos is all the motivation we need.

The value of personal stories

Interestingly, the new weekly Bekhsoos was launched

only three months after the successful launch of Meem’s

ﬁrst book, Bareed Mista3jil, in a staged performance

and also across Lebanese bookstores. The collection of

41 personal stories from a diversity of Lebanese queer

women and transgenders proved popular in LGBT as

well as mainstream communities. An AFP article said:

“Often silenced and marginalised by society and over-

shadowed by their straight, siliconed counterparts

promoted in the media, the stories of Lebanon’s other

women have resonated with local and international

audiences, and the book has been reprinted after the

ﬁrst batch of hundreds sold out.”

Weeks after the

launch of the book, positive book reviews were coming

out in newspapers, blogs and magazines, much to the

empowerment of the community, bursting with possi-

bility out of being signiﬁcantly heard for the ﬁrst time

in the oppressed group’s history. The need to continue

to tell other stories, more stories, more points of view,

more experiences, more secrets, more celebrations, was

rising and might have paved the way for the launch of

a rigorous Bekhsoos that could carry the volume and

sensitivities of bearing witness to personal narratives.

And so a central part of the weekly magazine were the

“Personal Stories” or “Bareed 3ala Mahlo” category,

featuring ﬁrst-person short narrations in English, Ara-

bic and French.

73 Nadz “One Year of Bekhsoos” Bekhsoos 6 September 2010 www.

bekhsoos.com/web/2010/09/happy-birthday-bekhsoos

74 N. Yazbeck “Lebanon’s ‘other women’ out in force,” AFP 27

November 2009 www.mmail.com.my/content/20342-lebanons-

other-women-out-force

Documentation and archive building

“Our objective is to ﬁll the gap of lesbian and

transgender-produced writing in the Arab world

through articles, reports, investigations, personal

stories, opinion pieces, and creative writing,” reads

the About Us page of Bekhsoos. Several of Meem’s

founders expressed that they viewed Bekhsoos’s ar-

chiving function as serving purposes that were both

practical and ideological. “The documentation of his-

tory bears signiﬁcance not only for posterity but also

serves as a current useful guide for LGBTs continuing

to organise in different ways in other Arab countries.

It also fosters the habit of writing one’s own history,

rather than leaving it to researchers, historians and

professionals,” says one interviewee.

Meem members expressed a wish to use Bekhsoos

as a testament to the evolution of their development

in sexual rights issues and other ﬁelds of activism and

thought that branch out of that, including feminism

and colonialism. Moreover, Bekhsoos encourages its

members to document as well reﬂect upon events

that Meem participates in and organises. This, Meem

says, provides the queer movement with a richer his-

torical record to refer to than mere log taking.

Building an archive also allows Meem to fulﬁl its

aim of saturating the Arab internet space with queer

issues, so that those interested in getting informa-

tion about queer Arabs through a search engine

or social networking sites, perhaps, will easily ﬁnd

Bekhsoos content. This, says one of Meem’s found-

ers, ensures that indigenous queer voices do not

become drowned out by Orientalist examinations of

queers in the Arab world that a growing number of

scholars, notably Joseph Massad, have spoken about.

Archiving also leads to a form of “queering”. By

publishing a lot of queer content related to issues such

as apartheid, colonialism and feminism – subjects that

yield dozens of matches on Bekhsoos’s search engine

– Bekhsoos is able to inject a queer perspective into

discussions about those issues in this region. This strat-

egy is illustrated in an April 2010 article that offers an

analysis of Meem’s role in feminist regional networks:

If we were to trace our steps over those two years

from the Marrakech conference to the Amman

meeting, we would be able to map out Meem’s

strategy in pushing Arab women’s organizations to

become safe spaces for lesbians, transgenders, and

people of alternative sexualities […] [W]e educated

each other on women’s issues other than sexual-

ity and trained our members on gender equality.

We placed lesbian and trans people’s issues within

a broader framework of sexual and bodily rights.

75 Nadz “Queering the Arab Feminist Movement: Two Years in the

Making” Bekhsoos 19 April 2010 www.bekhsoos.com/web/2010/04/

queering-the-arab-feminist-movement-two-years-in-the-making

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET131 Lebanon

Politics of inclusion

One of the objectives of Bekhsoos, extracted from

its “we must write” slogan, is to promote the act

of writing as a tool of personal healing and power.

Writing allows individuals to think, formalise ideas

in their heads, organise thoughts, challenge them-

selves, and then voice it. The act of writing things out

provides clarity and eases the pain of repression. Re-

pression is a common feeling of the queer women’s

community in Lebanon, with little room for talking,

expressing, letting things out. By publishing weekly,

Bekhsoos allows space for large quantities of articles

(40 to 50 on average every month). That encour-

ages individuals to write and aim to get published.

According to Ran, one of the writers on the team,

a signiﬁcant strength of Bekhsoos is that it places a

team of volunteer editors, in all three languages, at

the service of members of the community who want

to submit their work. “The inability to write well may

impede a lot of women from expressing themselves.

Knowing that you can send your submission to edi-

tors who will ﬁx it up and correct all the mistakes and

make it publishable is very encouraging for those

who are not comfortable or used to writing.”

Bekhsoos’s editors recognise that writing is not

accessible to everyone in the societies that it inter-

acts with and aim to make the writing process easier

by having one-to-one communications with poten-

tial contributors and making the editorial process

a rigorous one. That is one of the primary reasons

why Bareed Mista3ijl was not a submissions-based

project but rather written using the interviews tech-

nique. In addition, the question of who the author

or illustrator is presents an important criterion of

what gets published. While the magazine generally

tries to adhere to certain standards in article quality,

the editorial policy allows for quality compromises

to encourage ﬁrst-time authors and expressions

that may not otherwise pass the publishing stand-

ards. “Sometimes it is more important at the level

of personal empowerment that one person see their

work published and read than for the article to be

fantastically written or politically sharp,” said the

magazine’s Arabic editor, Aphrodite. “It’s a constant

editorial decision that we have to make almost every

issue.” More than half of the Bekhsoos articles are

in English, the rest in Arabic and a small percentage

(less than 5%) in French.

Transcending boundaries and occupation

After Meem, the most active group using Bekhsoos

as a vehicle for queer self-expression is Aswat,

support group for Palestinian queer women liv-

ing under Israeli occupation. Aswat are a group of

76 Aswat website www.aswatgroup.org

self-organised young queer women who work on

support and empowerment of their community. Be-

cause they are Palestinians living in the Israeli state,

communication is restricted between them and

Lebanese activists. Meetings between Lebanese ac-

tivists and Palestinians who hold Israeli passports are

risky and could lead to criminal trials. Through the

internet, activists on both sides of the borders have

found a common space to discuss and share strate-

gies such as community organising, queering the

Arabic language, and lobbying against occupation

and normalisation.

A quick search of the term “Aswat” in English

and Arabic on Bekhsoos yields over 30 links, most

of them submissions by Aswat members to the

magazine. Submissions reﬂect either a Palestinian

experience or a political stand with Palestine. The

statement by Arab queers against the Zionist “Stand

With Us” workshop planned for the US Social Fo-

rum

published on 15 June 2010 catapulted into the

Top 10 most-read articles with 1,167 reads within a

week of its publishing. By publishing a number of ar-

ticles on the topic of Israeli “pinkwashing”, Bekhsoos

situated itself as a strategic portal in the struggle

against Israeli usage of LGBTs as propaganda to hide

its war crimes and apartheid. In early 2011, Aswat

then launched their own magazine in print and on-

line: www.3ashtar.com

This political feature of Bekhsoos is signiﬁcant

on a number of interrelated levels. Meem’s insist-

ence on connecting queer struggles with other forms

of struggle is an important facilitator of discussions

around Israeli apartheid given that the occupation

to the south of the border is a contentious topic in

Lebanon. However, it is this subject in turn which

provides queers in Lebanon with a geopolitical dis-

tinctiveness within the global queer movement.

Bekhsoos’s critiques and refusal of Israeli pinkwash-

ing

have frequently put it at odds with global gay

discourse, causing it to add nuance to the global

gay landscape. By rallying around resistance to Is-

raeli apartheid, writers from Meem and Aswat also

strengthen connections between the two move-

ments that enable queer issues in both countries

to be better integrated into a regional framework.

There is frequently an interweaving of queer and

apartheid issues in articles.

Bypassing censorship restrictions

The technology behind Bekhsoos, not only its

content, also carries political implications for com-

munication rights and freedom of speech. The site

77 Editor “Don’t Stand with Zionism” Bekhsoos 15 June 2010 www.

bekhsoos.com/web/2010/06/dont-stand-with-zionism

78 A search of all Bekhsoos articles related to pinkwashing can be

found at www.bekhsoos.com/web/?s=pinkwashing

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET132 Lebanon

is currently in its third version, having moved from

simple PHP to Drupal and is now run on WordPress,

which has quickly become a popular open-source

software for blogs and dynamic websites in Lebanon.

The signiﬁcance of using open source is that it is po-

litically aligned with the activist movement towards

freer open internet tools.

Subscription to the website is available through a

Facebook page (that has over 2,000 fans), Twitter ac-

count (over 1,000 followers), email subscription (over

100 subscribers), and RSS feeds by page, category, au-

thor and tag. The RSS feeds are an important strategy

utilised to bypass censorship restrictions by different

private and governmental ﬁltering systems that ﬁlter

by keyword or by IP address. Lebanese blogger Jad

Aoun posted about the re-launch of Bekhsoos with

a screenshot

of the warning graphic used by a UAE

ISP that reads: “Surf Safely! This website is not acces-

sible in the UAE. The internet is a powerful medium

for communication, sharing, and serving our daily

learning needs. However, the site you are trying to

access contains content that is prohibited under the

‘Internet Access Management Regulatory Policy’ of

the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of the

United Arab Emirates.” Dozens of Arab internet us-

ers have written to Bekhsoos to complain that the

website is blocked in their city.

The ongoing problem of censorship of material

related to LGBT in speciﬁc and to sexuality in gen-

eral is little addressed in Arab discourse. The new

draft law explained in the section on legal regula-

tion of the internet in Lebanon carried dangerous

implications for queer expressions in private as well

as public online forums. “We have been publishing

queer material online for many years, protected by a

cloak of anonymity and privacy,” a Bekhsoos editor

commented on the new law, “but now, and out of

the blue, this new law threatens to silence, censor,

and implicate us in a random manner.” Members of

the queer tech community joined the coalition work-

ing to reform the law and stressed the important

aspect of defending freedom of expression around

sexuality in the debates held among activists study-

ing the proposed law. One of these queer activists

who attended the strategy meetings stated in a fol-

low-up interview:

When you’re collectively facing a threat to your

freedom of expression, it becomes easier to drive

home the point that queers have a right to that

freedom too. Even if among those meeting there

are people who are homophobic, they will still

defend your right to freedom of speech because

79 Jad Aoun “Bekhsoos is Back” (Lebanon News: Under Rug Swept,

8 September 2009) jadaoun.com/blog/2009/09/08/787/bekhsoos-is-

back

they are facing that threat to their own freedoms

too. I feel that we have built an unlikely alliance

that will protect us from online persecution or

silencing in the future.

Geopolitics and queer resistance

Lebanon’s past and present as the object of neo-

imperialistic designs makes the queer experience

akin to walking a very thin tight rope. Two geo-

political factors over the past ten years have made

the Lebanese queer experience especially complex.

The ﬁrst relates to the second Bush administration’s

aggressive “democracy promotion” policies, of which

Lebanon was a strategic target. This came packaged

with a set of liberal ideals that aimed to lure in many

with promises of new individual freedoms. During

Israel’s war on Lebanon in July 2006, as US Secretary

of State Condoleezza Rice’s pronouncement of the

dawn of “A New Middle East” reverberated across

the region, queers in Lebanon took a stand that

would prove to be monumental to their movement.

In a televised address

to the 2006 Montreal Out-

games, Helem member Rasha Moumneh remarked

that being gay in Lebanon would not prevent Leba-

nese queers from standing in solidarity with Arabs

in Gaza and Lebanon whom Israel had slain. “We

do not accept democracy at the barrel of a gun,”

said Moumneh, “we do not expect to be liberated

through war, if the price of that liberty is our lives

meted out in collateral terms.”

The second very pertinent factor that has inﬂu-

enced the way the queer movement views geopolitics

relates to the position of prominence that Israel has

strategically assumed in the international queer

arena. Jasbir Puar of The Guardian reports: “Israel is

invested in a large-scale, massively funded Brand Israel

campaign, produced by the Israeli foreign ministry, to

counter its growing reputation as an imperial aggres-

sor. […] One of the most remarkable features of the

Brand Israel campaign is the marketing of a modern

Israel as a gay-friendly Israel.”

Queers in Lebanon

have consciously sought to detach themselves from

the gay discourse that Israel began to co-opt and have

regularly voiced their opposition to Israeli colonisa-

tion. The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

movement has served as a potent medium in this re-

gard and it has served as a cohesive component in its

relationship with other queers in the region, notably

those in occupied Palestine. The global and regional

dynamics of queers against Israeli apartheid are dem-

onstrated and reinforced by Bekhsoos. Moumneh’s

80 Helem at Montreal Outgames 2006 www.youtube.com/

watch?v=mg8i0C4hwBk

81 Jasbir Puar “Israel’s Gay Propaganda War” guardian.co.uk 1 July

2010 www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/01/israels-gay-

propaganda-war

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET133 Lebanon

keynote speech at the Copenhagen Outgames in

2009 elaborates on this political stand:

There is an unfortunate tendency within the

[global LGBT] movement towards a reduction

of people’s multiple selves into a single aspect

employed falsely in place of the whole: in this

context, sexuality and gender identity. By doing

this, by positing a “global gay citizen” stripped

of context, of environment, of relationships,

of community, of a politics, in order to sustain

the myth of a “happy global gay family”, we

are doing harm. [...] It is incumbent upon us, as

LGBT activists, to know, to seek out information

about the world we build our activism around,

to understand its complexities and intersections

and to create a progressive and inclusive politics

of justice, because the lies we are fed come in

so thick and so heavy that it takes energy and

commitment to sift through them to get to our

truths.

The above quotation encapsulates the many issues

that queers in the region have had to grapple with

and demonstrates that the gay experience in the re-

gion is often at odds with international gay discourse

in ways that cannot be ignored. From the beginnings

of the queer movement, the impulse to localise the

struggle was potent and can be seen to have led

to the genesis of the movement in the form of the

mIRC chat room #gaylebanon. Sentiments like that

of #gaylebanon founder TouchE, that reﬂect a dis-

connect between the realities of local queer spaces

and international queer spaces, as well as within

local queer spaces, would become a mainstay of a

movement that continues to try to “understand its

complexities and intersections and to create a pro-

gressive and inclusive politics of justice.”

It is important to note that while resistance to

imperialism and the dominance of Western-created

LGBT identities is a prominent feature of the queer

movement in Lebanon, the relationship to LGBT

hegemony is complex and varies among different

communities. One such complexity is embodied in

the relationship between queer organising and

funding agencies. The recent few years have wit-

nessed a rush to fund and support LGBT organising

in the Middle East and North Africa by international

associations such as Open Society Institute, Hivos and

Heartland Alliance, who founded with local activists

the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equalities.

In trying to reconcile the realities of occupation

and imperialism with queerness, the queer move-

ment, and particularly Meem, has come to position

itself as a platform that connects a variety of strug-

gles, globally, regionally and locally. Imperialism in

other parts of the world is often discussed, repression

of Arabs in other countries is brought to light, and

there is a consciousness of issues related to class, ref-

ugees, migrant workers that undergirds nearly every

piece in Bekhsoos. This political awareness, Meem

members insist, did not come about from textbooks

or outside interference, but grew organically from

within the group and was informed by personal ex-

periences. As one member stated in an interview:

When we started out, our collective political un-

derstanding was very limited and all we really

wanted to do was be gay together in a positive,

healthy environment. But with time, new mem-

bers who joined brought their own perspectives,

experiences, and oppressions in a way, and the

interconnectedness of just causes became visible

in front of us. Our queer feminism then expand-

ed and continued to expand with our exposure

to different causes carried by diverse individu-

als who come to Meem. But it is still that one

common thread that brings people to and keeps

people in Meem: a common experience of injus-

tice based on sexuality.

Conclusion

Throughout our research, we have sought to map

out the contours of the Arab ICT environment as they

relate to the queer ICT movement in Lebanon. We

aimed to show that the majority of the Arab region

is hostile to free expression on the internet and that

while Lebanon enjoys a unique terrain of freedom

within this region, its social, political and economic

boundaries are porous and volatile and therefore

vulnerable to change. Our ﬁndings demonstrate the

degree to which queer women in Lebanon have ben-

eﬁtted from the space that a free ICT environment

offered. We hoped to show the nuances of this envi-

ronment as an engine for both political and personal

growth.

We attempted to highlight that ICTs provided

a portal for queer women to not only consume in-

formation about queer issues – something that was

greatly lacking in Lebanon’s traditional media – but

also to produce and disseminate information about

themselves for others to read and experience. From

the beginning of the movement there was an im-

pulse to create local queer spaces in the virtual world

because the disconnect between local experiences

and the Western-dominated global online spaces

was clear to most queers. As the movement evolved

in shape and in its global standing, the urge to ar-

ticulate that disconnect became strong and resulted

in the creation of such publications as Barra, Sou7aq,

Bekhsoos and Bareed Mista3jil. The more successful

of these publications functioned through a con-

sciously decided upon set of editorial principles that

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET134 Lebanon

ensured accessibility of both readership and writer-

ship to all queer women. They ensured also that the

publications would act as a platform for all struggles

so that the speciﬁcities of Lebanon’s queer women’s

situation could be incorporated into the discourses

the movement aimed to create.

Towards the ﬁnal stages of our research, a re-

markable scandal erupted online with the revelation

that Syrian blogger activist “Gay Girl in Damascus”

was actually a “Heterosexual American Man in Scot-

land”, Tom MacMaster.

It was quickly followed by

other similar exposures and catapulted the issue of

representation and the authenticity of voices into the

public sphere. Bloggers and journalists debated the

harmful actions of MacMaster and the questions they

raised on anonymity versus trustworthiness online. In

the light of the global attention to these questions,

we believe the research and in particular its ﬁndings

on self-representation are crucial to promoting great-

er understanding of the complexities of negotiations

between privacy concerns and speaking up.

As the queer women’s movement evolved it

became increasingly clear that geopolitical re-

alities could not be detached from the discourses

that queers in the region were trying to create.

Geopolitics, speciﬁcally that which relates to Israeli

occupation and Arab authoritarianism, had to be

incorporated into the queer Arab reality with preci-

sion. The politics of inclusion that Bekhsoos adopted

allowed struggles to organically intersect; it also

brought Arab queers who would otherwise be inac-

cessible due to occupation’s looming barriers into the

fold. This sheds signiﬁcant light on the ongoing on-

line debates between Arab queers and Israeli queers

who are in battle over entitlement to the “authen-

tic” voice of LGBTs in the Middle East. Most recently,

activists have been working on exposing

the Zionist

politics of GayMiddleEast.com, a large news portal.

82 APC “APC: ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ Needs to Man Up” 16 June 2011

www.apc.org/en/node/12544

83 Pinkwatching Israel “GayMiddleEast.com’s Zionism” (Pinkwatching

Israel, 22 March 2011) www.pinkwatchingisrael.com/

gaymiddleeast-com-and-zionism

The pervasiveness and institutionalisation of

homophobia and transphobia across the Arab world

make it counterproductive to use the argument that

the internet should remain free so that sexual mi-

norities may ﬁnd room to express themselves. That

is why our analysis focused on methods the activ-

ists used to manoeuvre between censorship and

advocacy. It is most likely that the movement for

communication rights and that of queer rights will

continue to progress in parallel as techies ﬁght for

an open internet and queers ﬁght for recognition

and human rights. What is clear from the ﬁndings,

however, is that the intersection of the two move-

ments, embodied in the queer techies, allows for

spaces to join forces and present the argument that

expressions of sexuality should always be on the ta-

ble when it comes to advocating for online freedom

of speech. It is crucial that all social justice move-

ments are aware of and engaged in the work for a

freer, more open internet. Online trends suggest that

the internet will continue to be a space that mirrors

ofﬂine interactions and public opinion and many

of the interviewees expressed feelings that the two

spheres will eventually merge into one and the same.

And so the investment in online presence, content,

and the mastering of technologies becomes a crucial

component of any queer strategising.

The demand for a free internet is not only in sync

with the larger demand for freedom of expression

and speech, but it is also signiﬁcant to maintain the

internet as a space for all self-expressions and as an

alternative room for activists to organise, advocate,

mobilise and raise awareness. Perhaps nothing in

our modern history has made a stronger case for this

than the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the

ongoing rise of the Arab Spring.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET135 South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA

The internet and sexual identities: Exploring transgender

and lesbian use of the internet in South Africa

JEANNE PRINSLOO and NICOLENE C. MCLEAN (Rhodes University)

and

RELEBOHILE MOLETSANE (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

Introduction

This report forms one part of

the cross-country exploratory

research project EROTICS,

which posed the following re-

search question:

How may the emerging debates and the growing

practice of regulation of online content either

impede or facilitate different ways women use

the internet and the impact on their sexual ex-

pression, sexualities and sexual health practices,

and assertion of their sexual rights?

Consistent with the spirit of this question, this report

focuses on the internet usage of transgender and

lesbian people. From the outset, it thus posed three

interlinked questions:

s What is the nature and form of regulatory policy

and censorship currently in South Africa and how

does this impact or potentially impact on the

freedom of sexual expression?

s What are the ways in which transgender and

lesbian people use the internet to negotiate and

perform their sexuality?

s How do such subjects understand the spaces of-

fered in this way?

The three research questions call for different meth-

ods. As the ﬁrst question is concerned with the

impact of regulatory policy and censorship on sexu-

alities and sexual rights it necessitates a literature

survey to establish the regulatory environment and

subsequently an analysis of the relevant policies. This

includes examining, among other documents, the

Film and Publication Act and the subsequent amend-

ments, the Broadcast Act (in South Africa), etc. This

study is informed by the argument that internet reg-

ulation policy must be based on empirical evidence in

terms of what people’s actual and not assumed inter-

net usage is. In this regard, the second question ﬁrst

develops an overview of the South African sites that

pertain to transgender and lesbian internet usage,

so constructing their “web spheres”.

This is followed

by an analysis of the activities that occur on those

sites. The form of analysis consists of critical reading

of either the sites or the texts produced. Similarly,

the third question involves ethnographic strategies

including questionnaires and purposive interviews to

establish the subjects’ views relating to the internet

and their sexuality, and also to possible “harm” as a

result of participating in such networks.

The research as originally designed made particu-

lar assumptions that were premised on international

literature and on personal understandings and expe-

riences. In the research process, we discovered that

some of these were ﬂawed or unrealistic and adjust-

ed the methods in relation to these realisations. This

process thus also produced new knowledge in rela-

tion to internet research generally and speciﬁcally in

relation to non-heteronormative spaces in the South

African context. The report consists of six sections.

The Context section provides an overview of internet

access followed by a description of the Constitution

and the rights enshrined therein. The section on the

Research approach introduces the debates around

the role of the internet in society as well as pre-

senting the theoretical framework that informs this

research, speciﬁcally in terms of gender. This is fol-

lowed by the three stages of the research, namely

Policy and regulation of the internet in South Africa,

Transgender usage of the internet in South Africa,

and Lesbian usage of the internet in South Africa.

Finally the Conclusions and limitations are presented.

Context

Internet usage for lesbian and transgender people in

South Africa needs to be understood in relation to

both issues of access in terms of infrastructural acces-

sibility and cultural politics. What follows is a brief

overview relating to internet access and the Consti-

tution and the rights it enables.

1 Kirsten Foot “Web Sphere Analysis and Cybeculture Studies”,

in Critical Cyberculture Studies eds. David Silver and Adrienne

Massanari, 88-96 (New York: New York University Press, 2006)

* We wish to thank Christine Kruger (University of Kassel) and

Crystal Munthree (HSRC PhD Intern) for the initial review of

literature and policies for this report.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET136 South Africa

Internet access

The potential of the internet is frequently hailed in

terms of its role in globalisation and its ability to en-

able communication of many kinds. Alongside this,

scholarly literature also recognises its inequalities.

The “digital divide” is generally associated with

uneven access to ICT infrastructure and is generally

understood as the differences between countries, in

particular the developed versus the underdeveloped.

However, it also refers to discrepancies within a

country and manifests itself along the lines of demo-

graphic differences, whether sex, race, class (income

levels) and geography (rural/township/urban).

South

Africa, which has the largest economy in Africa, is

ranked 87th (ten places down from 2002) of the 154

countries reviewed in 2007 and is the top among

sub-Saharan economies according to the ICT Devel-

opment Index.

In developing the ICT Development Index, access

to technology was one of the aspects considered and

this included measuring infrastructure and access, in-

cluding ﬁxed telephone lines and mobile telephones

per hundred inhabitants, international internet

bandwidth per user, proportion of households with a

computer and proportion of households with inter-

net access at home.

Bearing these aspects in mind,

according to this report South Africa had relatively

low access and little progress had been made from

2002 to 2007 in relation to ICT usage, as access to

bandwidth was low.

However, the number of people

accessing the internet on mobile phones was increas-

ing substantially, with South Africa ranking sixth on

the global list of mobile internet users, and mobile

social networking is estimated to consume more

than 60% of mobile web trafﬁc in the country.

How-

ever, only 4.8% of actual households had access to

the internet in 2007. This is an important indicator as

it is considered to provide “the most complete infor-

mation about access to the internet by individuals.”

In contrast, public internet places are seen as target-

ing speciﬁc groups and limiting the kind of use that

can be made of the internet. (This has signiﬁcance

for the internet usage reported on later.)

2 Maria Fernandez “Cyberfeminism, Racism, Embodiment”, in

Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices eds. Maria Fernandez,

Faith Wilding, and Michelle M. Wright, 29-44 (New York:

Autonomedia, 2002)

3 International Telecommunication Union Measuring the Information

Society: The ICT Development Index (Geneva: ITU, 2009) www.itu.

int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2009/material/IDI2009_w5.pdf

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid. For example, international internet bandwidth at the time

was only 852 bits/s/user (which was similar to Ethiopia, compared

to, for example, Tunisia with 1800 bits/s/user).

6 Arguably mobile access enables particular forms of usage more

than others, messages more than lengthy texts, etc.

7 ITU Measuring the Information Society, 16

However, there has been a subsequent increase

in access. In 2009 the number of internet users in-

creased to 5,366,000 of a total population of 47.85

million, or in other words, more than 10% of the

population for the ﬁrst time. Comparatively rapid

growth of 15% occurred in 2009 and is attributed

in part to increased broadband access as a result of

the Seacom major undersea cable, which was com-

pleted mid-2009 and has allowed greater access to

broadband.

Another factor suggested in explanation of the

rapid internet uptake

relates to user patterns rather

than only questions of access. This increase is related

to the growing number of people who have been

internet users for more than ﬁve years. This is de-

scribed as the “Experience Curve” which shows that

advanced internet applications including social me-

dia and online retail are embraced generally only

after ﬁve years of using the internet. In this research

it is argued that there exists:

[…] a powerful relationship between length of

time an individual has been on the internet, and

that individual’s willingness to bank online, shop

online, engage in social media and specialised

social networks, and generally strive for online

self-actualisation.

In spite of the increase and anticipated growing lev-

els of access and usage, a digital divide is manifest

within the country. A discrepancy has been identiﬁed

between male and female users with 58% male and

42% female.

In addition one has to be mindful that

access to the internet is premised to a very large ex-

tent on being middle class. Consistent with this, the

users tend to have a high level of education and/or

income: 22% have a degree and 15% a postgradu-

ate degree, while 17% have a household income

of over ZAR 400,000. In terms of affordability, ﬁxed

broadband internet is still out of reach for most of

the country’s inhabitants, although accessibility has

increased in certain spheres, for example tertiary

education institutions, and for these young people

access is enabled. Consequently, when one analyses

usage among a group of South Africans, whether

transgender or lesbian as is the case here, one has

to be mindful that the users will tend to be middle

class. At the same time, while many access the inter-

net from work or tertiary institutions, they will not

have the freedom of access that comes with internet

in the home. One has to be mindful also that race

is implicated with class as a consequence of South

8 Arthur Goldstuck Access in South Africa 2010 (Johannesburg:

World Wide Worx, 2010), 136

9 Ibid. 6

10 Ibid. 141

11 Ibid.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET137 South Africa

Africa’s history of white rule during colonial and

apartheid times.

However, if we are looking to the future, it is

anticipated that internet access will continue to

increase rapidly with the improved technological

infrastructure of both the deep sea cable and ﬁbre

optics. The prediction is that “South Africa will enjoy

around 20% penetration by 2014. Should the current

rate of growth of around 15% a year continue for

the next decade, it is possible penetration could ap-

proach the 50% mark.”

Following a mini-boom in 2006-2008, the experi-

ence curve suggests that the next boom in internet

application usage will occur in 2012-2013.

This sug-

gests that many South Africans who do not use the

internet at all presently will increasingly have access,

and that those who do not use many of the social

and retail aspects currently will do so increasingly.

This has implications for thinking about the future

use and possibilities of the internet among trans-

gender and lesbian groups of people who are the

speciﬁc focus of this research.

The Constitution, freedom of expression

and equality

The possibilities of the internet are enabled and con-

strained by international treaties and agreements,

as well as national regulations. In terms of the inter-

national context, South Africa is signatory to several

regional and global treaties and policy frameworks

particularly targeting gender inequality in all spheres

of life, as well as social injustices more generally. Glo-

bally, these frameworks include, among others, the

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Dis-

crimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the

United Nations General Assembly in 1979, the Beijing

Platform for Action, and the Millennium Development

Goals (MDGs). The country is also signatory to such

African agreements as the Southern African Devel-

opment Community (SADC) Protocol on Gender and

Development and the Solemn Declaration on Gender

Equality in Africa (SDGEA) adopted by the African

Union (AU) Heads of State in 2004. In South Africa,

the regulatory framework and the laws and policies

regulating the internet and pertaining to sexuality are

informed by the Constitution of South Africa, which

is widely acknowledged to be a progressive one. It

presents a Bill of Rights and particular sections are

pertinent to this research. Those that impact on inter-

net usage and gender politics would include sections

that refer to freedom of expression, access to infor-

mation, equality and lack of discrimination on lines of

gender and sexual orientation, and privacy.

12 Ibid. 8

13 Ibid.

Freedom of expression, including freedom of the

media, is contained in Section 16:

16(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of ex-

pression, which includes

s freedom of the press and other media;

s freedom to receive or impart information

or ideas;

s freedom of artistic creativity; and

s academic freedom and freedom of scien-

tiﬁc research.

This is a limited or qualiﬁed right which does not ex-

tend to incitement to violence or war and, pertinent

to this study, disallows “advocacy of hatred that is

based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that

constitutes incitement to cause harm.”

Section 32 identiﬁes the right of access to “any

information held by the state” or “by another person

and that is required for the exercise or protection of

any rights.” This would include information relating

to sexual reproduction and health.

The equality clause in Section 9 establishes that

“Everyone is equal before the law and has the right

to equal protection and beneﬁt of the law.” This

“includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights

and freedoms” and neither the state nor any per-

son may “unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly

against anyone on one or more grounds, including

race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or

social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disabil-

ity, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and

birth.” A signiﬁcant consequence of this right related

to sexual orientation is the (controversial) recogni-

tion of same-sex unions and marriages. South Africa

was the ﬁrst African country to recognise such un-

ions, and not without tremendous opposition from

religious, cultural and other groupings in the coun-

try. In particular, in terms of gender inequality, the

Commission of Gender Equity (CGE) is one of six insti-

tutions created in Chapter Nine of the Constitution

to support and promote the democratic (and equal-

ity) ideals the country espouses. In addition, Section

14 enshrines the right to privacy, which includes the

right not to have “the privacy of their communica-

tions infringed.”

The rights framework provides a generally lib-

ertarian approach to the media. Certain rights are

limited or qualiﬁed rights, but to the extent that a

limitation be “reasonable and justiﬁable in an open

and democratic society based on human dignity,

equality and freedom” (Section 36). This prohibits

the state from making use of arguments based on

a particular conception of the “good”. Conceptions

of the “good” encompass a range of views about

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET138 South Africa

what makes life valuable or meaningful. Therefore

the state ought not to limit rights by resorting to a

particular view about the “good life”.

The deﬁned rights enable and accept a degree

of censorship on the grounds of protection of indi-

vidual rights, privacy, moral development and the

security and dignity of the state. One of the purposes

of the policies and regulations that ﬂow from them

is to restrain and control censorship.

As this is the Constitution, laws and policies have

to be consistent with these rights and recourse to

the law is possible to ensure them. At the same time,

the discrepancies between the legislated rights and

social practices need to be recognised as historically,

economically and culturally contingent.

Research approach

The internet as public sphere?

The phenomenon of the internet has been met

with contrasting responses. While it is often hailed

in celebratory terms for its inclusiveness and demo-

cratic potential, alternatively it is analysed critically

as consolidating existing power and social relations.

The optimistic view draws on the Habermasian idea

of the media’s role in creating a public sphere.

The idea of a public sphere assumes that citizens

will use the media as a site to engage in a rational

and deliberative way that enhances democracy and

democratic processes. The public sphere is viewed

as playing an important role in holding government

and public ﬁgures accountable. It is also premised on

respect for diversity. With the advent of the internet,

it was anticipated that the use of the internet would

generate an increase not merely in engagement but

in a political culture, respect and concern.

The more pessimistic view has argued that

while the internet has the potential for political en-

gagement, this is not matched by performance. It

continues to be accessed by the already privileged

side of the digital divide in the ﬁrst instance. Then,

while it enables multiple voices, these are mere opin-

ions and participants are more ready to talk than to

listen and deliberate.

The initial celebratory response that hailed the

internet as some kind of utopia, both liberatory and

democratic, has been tempered, and gender scholars

and activists increasingly interrogate the internet in

relation to gender (in)justice and power imbalances.

Much of their work has focused on the gendered

14 Jürgen Habermas The Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989)

15 Andrej Pinter and Tanya Oblak “Is There a Public Sphere in this

Discussion Forum?”, in Ideologies of the Internet eds. Katharine

Sarikakis and Daya K. Thussu, 99-113 (Cresskill: Hampton Press Inc.,

2006)

consumption of information and communications

technologies (ICTs) or, in other words, what males

and females do with ICTs, and in doing this they con-

ﬂate gender and sexuality and assume all people are

heterosexual. Karl makes the crucial point that “the

production and intersections of gender and sexual

identity need to be addressed more overtly across

the ﬁeld of ICT consumption research to avoid repro-

duction of assumptions about continuities between

anatomical sex and gendered practices when discuss-

ing gendered uses of ICTs.”

He also points out that

there is a scarcity of work that engages with non-

normative identities, in spite of the numerous gay,

lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (GLBTI)

websites.

Critiques of the position that the media can

serve as a public sphere are also useful to our in-

ternet discussions. The idea of the media as public

sphere has been critiqued in terms of class, race and

gender.

Subsequently the idea of “publics” and

public spheres has been put forward to argue that

rather than a single sphere there are multiple sites

of engagement. In terms of this the internet has

been understood to potentially enable “publics” to

emerge and strengthen or, in Dahlberg’s words, it is

[…] a site and means of political struggle and

conﬂict: a contested terrain where exclusion and

domination as well as solidarity and resistance

are reproduced.

This notion of publics is relevant to this research as

GLBTI groupings can be considered as a “public” or

“counter-public”.

Internet discussion forums argu-

ably provide users with opportunities to express their

ideas and opinions on issues and engage in discus-

sions in ways they would not do as readily either

in public meetings or in the press, for example. In

addition, frequent reference is made to virtual com-

munities and the internet is proposed as a space

where like-minded people meet and forge bonds

whether political, social or cultural. In line with

the focus of this research, this would include com-

munities deﬁned by sexual orientations and sexual

politics.

16 Irmi Karl “On-/ofﬂine: Gender, Sexuality and the Techno-Politics of

Everyday Life”, in Queer online. Media technology & sexuality eds.

Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips, 45-64 (New York: Peter Lang,

2007), 46

17 Nancy Fraser “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to

the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, in Postmodernism

and the Rereading of Modernity eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme

and Margaret Iversen, 197-231 (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1992)

18 Lincoln Dahlberg “The Internet, Deliberative Democracy, and

Power: Radicalizing the Public Sphere” International Journal of

Media and Cultural Politics 3, 1 (2007): 56

19 Ibid.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET139 South Africa

The internet as community?

Ross suggests that the internet becomes an arena for

social experience and has the potential to also “ac-

tually shape social communities.”

Referring to gay

communities, Ross argues that it offers an opportu-

nity for coming out sexually that was not previously

available. In addition, it makes possible an additional

stage to coming out with more assurance, namely

that offered by online lurking which provides the

chance for people to observe others’ interactions and

to reﬂect on their sexual orientation or desires. In

this way it allows them the chance to immerse them-

selves in aspects of the virtual culture, the language

and practices, attitudes and beliefs, and to try them

out, so to speak, in the relatively safe environment

of the internet before coming out. It also makes it

possible to come out online and thus have a space

of sociability and support when it is difﬁcult to do

so ofﬂine. An online survey of gay, lesbian, bisexual

and transgender youth conducted by Outproud and

Oasis magazine did consider non-normative identi-

ties. Two thirds of the respondents stated that going

online had helped them accept their sexual orienta-

tion and many said they came out online ﬁrst.

further point is made about the internet’s particular

relevance for rural people or people living in remote

areas.

This links to the internet’s global reach and

its consequent ability to enable virtual communities.

Taking this idea that computer technologies

enable the exploration of alternative gender iden-

tity construction and focussing on the impact of role

games on the internet as one example of creating

virtual identities, Turkle argued that individuals

and groups can use the internet to remake or re-

create themselves, or to create several characters

of themselves playing out different aspects of their

personality.

In this regard, the internet provides a

relatively safe space in which those struggling with

their (sexual) identities can explore and try out cop-

ing mechanisms in different situations they create/

recreate.

However, it is necessary to be cautious when re-

ferring to a “community”. It is a term that connotes

belonging and is used very loosely for a range of

political and commercial ends. It signals inclusion

and thus results in exclusion too. It is also constantly

co-opted by marketing and PR to promote consum-

erism, speciﬁcally on internet lifestyle sites where

20 Michael W. Ross “Typing, Doing, and Being: Sexuality and the

Internet” The Journal of Sex Research 42, 4 (2005): 349

21 Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips, eds. Introduction to Queer

online. Media Technology & Sexuality (New York: Peter Lang,

2007), 1-12

22 Ross “Typing, Doing, and Being”

23 Sherry Turkle “Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual

Reality: Playing in the MUDs” Mind, Culture and Activity 1, 3

(1994)

it might be used to invoke the sense of community

(of gay people, for example) while selling space on

the site on account of the “pink pound” (or rand,

in the South African case). Three aspects have been

identiﬁed as fundamental to a community, namely

emotional investment, social interaction and open

channels of communication.

Thus, when consider-

ing internet use by South African transgender and

lesbian users, it is possible to do so with reference to

these three aspects and our analysis of transgender

and lesbian internet usage takes these points into

consideration. Fernandez cautions us to be mindful

of how “new media” are “embedded in a framework

of pan-capitalist social relations and economic, po-

litical and cultural environments that are still deeply

sexist and racist.”

Certainly her caution is important

to the research undertaken in South Africa, which is

also a deeply homophobic space.

While mindful of the critiques of the internet,

it is still possible to view the internet as operating

in ways that can enable marginalised groups to

ﬁnd spaces to engage in meaningfully across time

and space. The idea of a virtual community or vir-

tual forms of sociability is a powerful possibility and

provides an argument for creating and maintaining

such spaces to develop relationships and groupings

in ways that enable people to shape their sexual cul-

ture and impact on and challenge societal attitudes

and practices too.

While there is growing visibility of gay sexuality

in the scholarly literature, this tends to foreground

male homosexual practices to the exclusion of les-

bian ones. Other non-heteronormative identities

seldom feature, and certainly transgender is low

on that agenda. With these lacunae in mind, this

research focuses on the South African usage of the

internet by transgender and lesbian users.

The gender order

As the research into internet usage is concerned with

issues of sexuality, we draw on gender theory which

critiques patriarchy as the dominant frame for gen-

dered identity construction. Within the gendered

order

a particular form of strong masculinity is nor-

malised and naturalised and complementary forms

of femininities that enable such masculinity are too.

Thus at birth, people are inserted into a society where

this dominant masculinity is privileged and where

female and male, and femininity and masculinity,

are viewed as oppositions. Dominant masculinity

24 John E. Campbell “Virtual Citizens or Dream Consumers: Looking

for Civic Community on Gay.com”, in Queer online. Media

technology & sexuality eds. Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips,

197-216 (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 199

25 Fernandez “Cyberfeminism, Racism, Embodiment”

26 R.W. Connell Gender and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987)

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET140 South Africa

is ﬂagged constantly: muscular, hirsute, strong, ra-

tional, less communicative, active and in control. The

emphasised femininities (in the plural) that comple-

ment this position are similarly validated: light with

hairless bodies, physically weak, emotional, commu-

nicative and nurturing, passive and supportive.

An important distinction is made by gender

theorists between “sex” and “gender”, where sex

refers to biological characteristics of male and fe-

male, and gender to those social and cultural ways of

performing one’s gender that most people acquire

unconsciously and through practice.

The assump-

tion is of a binary opposition, of sex and gender as

opposed and not part of a continuum and also ﬂuid.

The heteronormative discourse of the dominant gen-

der order thus assumes heterosexuality as the norm

and is intolerant of any sense of gender ﬂuidity. All

forms of contesting gender identities whether lesbi-

an, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBTI) are

constituted as other. This gender order is normalised

and naturalised through recourse to discourses of sci-

ence, religion and culture. In South Africa, in spite of

the liberal Constitution, homosexuality is met with

intolerance and violence in many instances. A 2010

Pew report indicated that 86% of South Africans

viewed homosexuality as morally wrong.

For black lesbians the challenges can be par-

ticularly dire as homosexuality is constructed as a

Western import, and this belief is reinforced by the

lack of visibility of women in same-sex relationships.

The policing of lesbian women has included “cor-

rective rape” and murder (as in the case of Eudy

Simelane).

Matebeni argues:

Fear and “forced” silence among many black les-

bians has led to many remaining voiceless about

their sexuality. Efforts to encourage them to

claim their space are minimal and, when efforts

are made, these women require […] constant en-

couragement to talk.

Life for transgender people is similarly very chal-

lenging. Muholi, a lesbian activist, co-founder of

Federation for the Empowerment of Women (FEW)

and photographer, notes that, “As black women,

27 Judith Butler and Sara Salih, eds. The Judith Butler Reader (Oxford:

Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004)

28 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Tolerance and Tension:

Islam and Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa (Washington, DC: Pew

Research Centre, 2010), 331

29 Eudy Simelane was a football player for the South African national

women’s team who also lived openly as a lesbian in the KwaThema

township of Springs. For more information: www.facebook.com/

pages/Eudy-Simelane/112042322140501

30 Zethu Matebeni “Young Black Lesbians’ Reﬂections on Sex and

Responses to Safe(r) Sex”, in From Social Silence to Social Science:

Same-Sex Sexuality, HIV & AIDS and Gender in South Africa eds.

Vasu Reddy, Theo Sandfort and Laetitia Rispel, 100-116 (Pretoria:

HSRC Press, 2009), 102-3

lesbians and transmen, we continue to live on the

margins of society, still struggling to claim our sexual

citizenship, visibility and safety in the public sphere.”

In the face of these challenges, this report recog-

nises the potential for the internet to provide a safe

space for lesbians and transgender or other gender

diverse groups to come out and to deliberate, to ﬁnd

a network or even a virtual community, and to en-

gage with the personal as this too is political. It has

been the purpose of this research to investigate how

the internet functions in the present in this complex

context that is South Africa in 2010.

The policy terrain and regulation

of the internet in South Africa

This section addresses the ﬁrst question posed in this

project:

What is the nature and form of regulatory policy

and censorship currently in South Africa and how

does this impact or potentially impact on the

freedom of sexual expression?

As the question is concerned with the impact of reg-

ulatory policy and censorship on sexualities, sexual

health and sexual rights, the section presents a sur-

vey of literature and relevant policies to establish the

regulatory environment. The survey addresses the

question: What laws, policies and regulatory bodies

exist in South Africa in the areas of the internet and

communications technology? In this regard the sec-

tion does not aim to present an exhaustive review of

available policies and laws governing ICTs in South

Africa. Rather, it presents an overview of selected

policies and structures to illustrate the nature of the

regulatory policy terrain and the often prohibitive

and punitive principles that inform it, and in particu-

lar, the ways in which these might impact on access

and use by various groups seeking to deﬁne and per-

form their sexualities and other identities through

the internet.

ICT policy and regulatory framework

in South Africa

Available research suggests that various groups are

increasingly using the internet as a means of ex-

ploring their sexual (and other) identities. Among

these are marginalised groups such as lesbians and

transgender people. However, the availability of

“pornography” on the internet has caused fear and

moral panic among government, law enforcement

bodies (such as the police, prosecutors and judges)

31 Zanele Muholi “Mapping our Histories: A Visual History of

Black Lesbians in Post-Apartheid South Africa” (n.d.), 7. www.

zanelemuholi.com/ZM%20moh_ﬁnal_230609.pdf

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET141 South Africa

and society as a whole,

resulting in policies and a

regulatory framework aimed at protecting the public,

but which often end up regulating and prohibiting

the use of and access to the internet and informa-

tion contained therein. As scholars have argued,

what is arguably a multinational and multicultural

environment like the internet, different groups in

different contexts tend to deﬁne acceptable con-

tent differently. What is regarded as harmful for one

group or person may be totally acceptable/desirable

for another. Thus, any regulatory action intended to

protect a certain group of people (such as children),

should not result in prohibiting the use of the inter-

net.

An appropriate balance between freedom of

speech and public interest considerations needs to be

identiﬁed. This section describes the existing policy

and regulatory framework in South Africa, and how

it relates to the needs of lesbian and transgender

people for exploring and performing their sexuali-

ties through the internet.

What policies and regulatory framework

exist in South Africa?

Shortly after South Africa achieved its liberation from

the apartheid regime, the Films and Publications

Act of 1996 was introduced. It repealed a number

of pieces of rigorous legislation that had been cir-

culated under the apartheid regime. Essentially, the

Act established a Films and Publications Board and

Review Board. The Board’s function would be to re-

ceive complaints or applications to evaluate a ﬁlm or

publication, and to classify it according to its suitabil-

ity for different audiences. The classiﬁcation of a ﬁlm

or publication would trigger various prohibitions on

possessing, exhibiting, distributing or advertising

the ﬁlm or publication. The focus was on deﬁning

and enforcing various prohibitions on ﬁlms or pub-

lications that advocated war, violence and hatred,

especially if based on race, ethnicity, sexual orienta-

tion, gender and religion.

In 1999, the Films and Publications Act was amend-

ed and became known as the Films and Publications

Amendment Act (No. 34 of 1999). It was amended

to include in its deﬁnition of publication any mes-

sages and communications distributed on networks,

including the internet.

The Act speciﬁcally deﬁnes

32 Yaman Akdeniz “The Regulation of Pornography and Child

Pornography on the Internet” The Journal of Information, Law

and Technology (1997) elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/internet/97_1akdz

33 See, for example, Judit Bayer The Legal Regulation of Illegal and

Harmful Content on the Internet (CPS International Policy Fellowship

Program, 2003) pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00001828/01/Bayer.pdf

34 Akdeniz “The Regulation of Pornography”

35 Tracy Cohen “Advisory 3: The Film and Publications Act, No. 65

of 1996 and the Film and Publications Amendment Act, No. 34 of

1999” (Noordwyk: ISPA, 2000) old.ispa.org.za/regcom/advisories/

advisory3.shtml

36 Ibid.

“child pornography” as including “any image, how-

ever created, or any description of a person, real or

simulated, who is, or who is depicted or described

as being, under the age of eighteen years, engaged

in sexual conduct; or participating in, or assisting

another person to participate in sexual conduct; or

showing or describing the body, or parts of the body,

of such a person in a manner or in circumstances

which, within context, amounts to sexual exploita-

tion, or in such a manner that it is capable of being

used for the purpose of sexual exploitation” – and

banned it on the internet.

In addition, it also pro-

hibits pornography that portrays girls under eighteen

years of age or depicts them as being less than eight-

een years of age.

In practice, this is often applied to

include a total prohibition of depictions of teenage

sexuality more broadly, with negative consequences

for constructions of sexuality more generally, and

that of adolescents in particular.

In 2004, the Act was amended once again. Sec-

tion 27(1)(a), as amended by Act No. 18 of 2004,

provides that:

Any person shall be guilty of an offence if he or

she (i) is in possession of; (ii) creates or produces

or in any way contributes to, or assists in, the

creation or production of; (iii) imports or in any

way takes steps to procure, obtain or access; or

(iv) knowingly exports, broadcasts or in any way

distributes or causes to be exported, broadcast or

distributed a ﬁlm or publication which contains

child pornography or which advocates, advertises

or promotes child pornography or the sexual ex-

ploitation of children.

The amendments in the Act compel South Africans to

report anyone involved in the production, distribu-

tion or possession of child pornography, making it

an offence for computer technicians, internet cafés

and service providers to overlook cases of child por-

nography.

The amendments effectively increased

the minimum sentence for production, distribution

or possession of child pornography from ﬁve to ten

years. Also included in the amendments is a clause

stipulating the arrest of South Africans who com-

mit or trade in child pornography elsewhere in the

world.

However, as with pornography generally, it

is very difﬁcult to come up with a broadly accept-

able deﬁnition of child pornography. For example,

37 Republic of South Africa Films and Publications Amendment Act

No. 34 of 1999 (Government Gazette, 1999)

38 Cohen “Advisory 3”

39 Republic of South Africa Films and Publications Amendment Act

No. 18 of 2004 (Government Gazette, 2004), 7

40 Matome Sebelebele “SA Cracks Down on Child Porn” SouthAfrica.

info 13 October 2004 www.southafrica.info/services/rights/

childporn.htm

41 Ibid.

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET142 South Africa

would parents who take photographs of their own

children when naked and post them on Facebook

for family and friends be guilty of distributing child

pornography?

The Films and Publications Amendment Act (No.

18 of 2004) was passed to “amend the Films and

Publications Act, 1996, so as to make further provi-

sion for the prohibition of child pornography; […]

to make further provision regarding the classiﬁca-

tion of ﬁlms and publications; to provide for the

registration of internet service providers; to provide

for an obligation to report offences involving child

pornography; and to increase penalties for offences

involving child pornography.”

The Act was met with

strong reactions as it was deemed to restrict freedom

of expression and freedom of the media. While it

foregrounds ﬁlm, it also applies to the internet. The

Amendment Act was originally formulated to address

the pervasiveness of child pornography. It designates

the possession of child pornography in all media for-

mats, including the internet, a criminal offence

In terms of the Act, any person (other than

newspaper publishers) who intends “to distribute

a publication that contains visual presentations,

descriptions or representations of sexual con-

duct, propaganda for war, incitement to imminent

violence or hate speech, will have to submit the pub-

lication for classiﬁcation.”

The Act treats media products and publications

containing descriptions of sexual conduct as suspect,

requiring them to be submitted for classiﬁcation.

Clearly, concern has to be around who decides on

what constitutes normal or transgressive sexual-

ity. The Freedom of Expression Institute described

this classiﬁcation requirement as “smack[ing] of the

morality police” and argued that “the government

should not be in the business of controlling the sexu-

al expression of its citizens.”

The classiﬁcatory system facilitates censorship

and certain ﬁlms are thus disallowed. For example,

the concern with child pornography resulted in the

ﬁlm XXY being disallowed at the Gay and Lesbian

Film Festival of 2008. The ﬁlm explores the sexual

awakening of an Uruguayan intersex youth, and the

psychological fallout of family anxieties about the

youth’s gender.

While most citizens acknowledge the need to

protect children from various forms of violence, crime

and abuse, censorship tends to impact negatively on

the construction and performance of sexuality, par-

ticularly when it is non-heterosexual, as it tends to or

42 Republic of South Africa, 2004, 1

43 Ibid. 6

44 Freedom of Expression Institute “Statement by Sanef/ FXI/ Misa-SA

on media censorship planned by government” (FXI 2006) www.fxi.

org.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=173

at least has the potential to treat “normal” sexuality

as taboo. Furthermore, such censorship is informed

by the notion of children as asexual beings and as

innocent. The opposition political party, the Demo-

cratic Alliance, similarly argued against the increased

censorship enabled by the Amendment Act, argu-

ing that the Film Board could potentially become

the nation’s morality police or conscience as it func-

tions to police sexuality. It also impacts on internet

communication.

In 2009, the Act was further amended. The Films

and Publications Amendment Act (No. 3 of 2009) was

enacted to:

[…] insert, amend and delete certain deﬁnitions;

to establish and provide for the powers and du-

ties of a Council; to provide for the appointment

and functions of compliance ofﬁcers; to provide

for the composition, functions and management

of the Board; and to repeal the Schedules to

the Act; and to provide for matters connected

therewith.

The Films and Publications Act (No. 65 of 1996) and

Films and Publications Amendment Act (No. 18 of

2009) were drafted in such a way as to negotiate two

opposing positions, the protection of the free ﬂow

of information and the shielding of the public from

material deemed offensive. However, it is not clear

how this contradiction is to be addressed or catered

for. The Act provides for the appointment of the Film

and Publication Board and gives it powers to rate

and regulate content using a classiﬁcatory system

which imposes age restrictions on access and advises

in terms of material potentially offensive along the

lines of violence, nudity, etc. As such, the Act also im-

pacts on internet content.

Regulatory bodies have also been established

to regulate telecommunications and broadcasting

industries. Among these is the Independent Com-

munications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) which

was established under the ICASA Act (No. 13 of 2000).

ICASA is empowered to license broadcasters and tel-

ecommunications operators, to formulate and apply

policies that govern the two sectors, receive and hear

complaints, and generally regulate these two sectors

as a whole. Its work in telecommunications and ICTs

also includes monitoring role players, protecting

consumers, and improving telecommunications and

ICT services.

The regulatory body is also tasked with

empowering disadvantaged groups to overcome the

challenges of accessibility and affordability of ICTs

45 Republic of South Africa Films and Publications Amendment Act

No. 3 of 2009 (Government Gazette, 2009), 1

46 Independent Communications Authority of South Africa

“Legislation and Regulations” (Sandton: ICASA, 2010) www.icasa.

org.za

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET143 South Africa

which, as described in the section above, have result-

ed in relatively low numbers of internet users.

Linked to the above is the Telecommunications

Act (No. 103 of 1996), which empowers ICASA to

issue telecommunication licences. The primary pur-

pose of the Act is to provide for the regulation and

control of telecommunication matters in the public

interest. As such, among other things, it aims to:

s Promote the universal and affordable provision

of telecommunication services

s Promote the provision of a wide range of tel-

ecommunication services in the interest of the

economic growth and development of the

Republic

s Make progress towards the universal provision of

telecommunication services

s Promote the empowerment and advancement of

women in the telecommunications industry.

It is evident from the above that the wide range of

services is framed within terms of facilitating eco-

nomic growth and development. The Act is, however,

silent around facilitating social and personal devel-

opment and communication, and the challenging of

patriarchal power for the advancement of women in

society.

To cater for emerging issues in the telecommuni-

cations industry, the Act was amended several times.

The Telecommunications Amendment Act (No. 64 of

2001) addressed the liberalisation of the telecom-

munications sector and provided for operators in

under-serviced areas. Its role was particularly to pro-

mote the involvement of black people and women

in the sector. Again, the focus was on economic ad-

vancement and growth rather than on personal and

social development desirable for effectively chal-

lenging the gender order and for the advancement

of women in families and communities.

In addition to developing regulations and poli-

cies, ICASA enforces compliance with rules and

regulations, protects consumers from unfair busi-

ness practices and poor quality services, hears and

decides on disputes and complaints brought against

licensees, and controls and manages the frequency

spectrum.

As such, the intention is to censor and

punish those who commit infringements rather

than to foster social justice for the marginalised,

such as those who have non-heteronormative sexual

identities.

47 Republic of South Africa Telecommunications Act No. 103 of 1996

(Government Gazette, 1996)

48 Independent Communications Authority of South Africa

Annual Report 2008/9 (Sandton: ICASA, 2009)

www.supportpublicbroadcasting.co.za/library/entry/icasa_2009_

annual_report_2009

Of particular relevance to this report is the fact

that ICASA is responsible for issuing licences to in-

ternet service providers (ISPs). In accordance with

the Film and Publication Board, ISPs are responsible

for regulating the content viewed over the internet.

The role of ISPs is to promote the free and open ﬂow

of information, but also to keep that access as safe

as possible for all subscribers. In so doing, however,

the ISP assumes the role of a private censor and

overlooks the socio-cultural aspects around the con-

struction and performance of sexual identities. This is

undesirable from a number of angles – commercially,

politically, and in regard to public policy. According

to Cohen, the South African Film and Publication

Board Act fails to distinguish the role ISPs play in

censoring the internet.

Other countries have used

ISPs as a way of censoring the internet. For example,

Cohen notes, the Dutch government has taken the

approach that existing legal rules apply insofar as

possible to online communications. Basically, what-

ever applies ofﬂine also applies online. This principle

controls the legal situation as regards the liability of

what they call intermediaries on the internet. Inter-

mediaries are taken to refer to both access providers

and service providers. The approach of the Dutch

government is that these terms are not deﬁnitive,

and the decisive factor is what the actual intermedi-

ary has done, or omitted to do in a particular case.

In South Africa an Internet Service Providers As-

sociation (ISPA) has been established. The ISPA has

inﬂuenced and shaped telecommunications policy in

South Africa since its formation in 1996. The associa-

tion has provided submissions and feedback to such

key pieces of legislation as the Telecommunications

Amendment Act, the Electronic Communications

and Transactions Act, the Electronic Communications

Act, the ICASA Amendment Act, the Regulation of

Interception of Communications and Provision of

Communication-related Information Act, as well

as various other associated regulations. All ISPA

members are bound by the Association’s Code of

Conduct,

which requires all members to meet certain

standards in terms of privacy, consumer protection,

spam and protection of minors. Their strategies of

control include ﬁltering, blocking and taking down

notice possibilities. Their position around content

regulation is generally to leave it to the Film and

Publication Board and the police, as other strategies

would be expensive and there are market implica-

tions for them in censoring their clients.

Again, the

focus is on limiting freedoms through punitive meas-

ures. However, a key problem faced by those who are

49 Cohen “Advisory 3”

50 ispa.org.za/code-of-conduct

51 ispa.org.za/code-of-conduct/undesirable-content

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET144 South Africa

trying to enforce censorship regulations, such as ISPs,

is the lack of a regulating authority and the lack of

clear deﬁnitions of infringements (such as pornog-

raphy) and who is responsible for these decisions.

The Electronic Communications and Transactions

Act (No. 25 of 2002) was enacted to:

[…] provide for the facilitation and regulation

of electronic communications and transactions;

to provide for the development of a national e-

strategy for the Republic; to promote universal

access to electronic communications and trans-

actions and the use of electronic transactions by

SMMEs; to provide for human resource develop-

ment in electronic transactions; to prevent abuse

of information systems; to encourage the use of

e-government services; and to provide for mat-

ters connected therewith.

In particular, the objectives of the Act included

enabling and facilitating electronic communications

and transactions in the public interest, and for that

purpose, it aimed to, among others:

s Promote universal access primarily in underserv-

iced areas

s Remove and prevent barriers to electronic com-

munications and transactions in the Republic

s Promote legal certainty and conﬁdence in respect

of electronic communications and transactions

s Develop a safe, secure and effective environment

for the consumer, business and the government

to conduct and use electronic transactions

s Ensure that, in relation to the provision of elec-

tronic transactions services, the special needs of

particular communities and areas and the disa-

bled are duly taken into account.

While the focus here foregrounds “universal access”

by emphasising small, medium and micro enterprises

(SMMEs), it retains an economic/commercial slant. In

addition, its recognition of the digital divide means

that it sees the solution as lying in economic redress

rather than in challenging and changing the status

quo: men’s dominance in various spheres of life. This

is consistent with reductive notions of development

that obscure personal engagements.

The Regulation of Interception of

Communications and Provision of Communication-

related Information Act (No. 70 of 2002) deals with

52 Chris McCosker “Internet Censorship – Regulation and

Responsibility” media/culture.org.au 26 October 2004 wiki.media-

culture.org.au/index.php/internet_Censorship

53 Republic of South Africa Electronic Communications and

Transactions Act No. 25 of 2002 (Government Gazette, 2002)

54 Ibid.

the interception and monitoring of communications

made through telecommunications service provid-

ers and the obtaining of communication-related

information. It regulates against the interception

and procurement of any communication during its

transmission except under particular circumstances,

for example if the communication is for the purpose

of committing an offence or when a life-threatening

emergency might exist.

In particular, the Act aimed:

[…] to regulate the making of applications for,

and the issuing of, directions authorising the in-

terception of communications and the provision

of communication-related information under

certain circumstances; to regulate the execution

of directions and entry warrants by law enforce-

ment ofﬁcers and the assistance to be given by

postal service providers, telecommunication serv-

ice providers and decryption key holders in the

execution of such directions and entry warrants;

to prohibit the provision of telecommunication

services which do not have the capability to be

intercepted; […] to provide for the establishment

of interception centres, the Ofﬁce for Intercep-

tion Centres and the Internet Service Providers

Assistance Fund; to prohibit the manufacturing,

assembling, possessing, selling, purchasing or ad-

vertising of certain equipment; to create offences

and to prescribe penalties for such offences.

To streamline and supersede all prior acts and regula-

tions, the Electronic Communications Act (No. 36 of

2005) was passed:

[…] to promote convergence in the broad-

casting, broadcasting signal distribution and

telecommunications sectors and to provide the

legal framework for convergence of these sec-

tors; to make new provision for the regulation

of electronic communications services, electronic

communications network services and broadcast-

ing services; to provide for the granting of new

licences and new social obligations; to provide

for the control of the radio frequency spectrum;

to provide for the continued existence of the

Universal Service Agency and the Universal Serv-

ice Fund; and to provide for matters incidental

thereto.

To empower the Minister to issue additional policy

direction and to provide for associated matters, the

Electronic Communications Act of 2005 was amended

55 Republic of South Africa Regulation of Interception of

Communications and Provision of Communication-related

Information Act No. 70 of 2002 (Government Gazette, 2003), 1

56 Republic of South Africa Electronic Communications Act No. 36 of

2005 (Government Gazette, 2006), 1

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET145 South Africa

and the Electronic Communications Amendment Act

(No. 37 of 2007) passed. The Amendment Act sought

to explicitly provide for the facilitation of strategic

interventions by government in the electronic com-

munications sector in order to:

s Reduce the cost of access to information, com-

munication and technology

s Expand the availability of access to information,

communications and technology infrastructure

on a wholesale basis at cost-orientated rates and

services to operators in the Republic

s To facilitate the efﬁcient licensing of public

entities.

As argued throughout this section, the policy frame-

work, while based on the enabling principles of the

Constitution, has tended to be punitive and to focus

on economic development and growth, neglecting

the personal and social development of individuals

and groups and failing to challenge and change the

gender order in society, particularly in the media, in-

cluding internet spaces. The section below addresses

the (potential) impacts of the existing policy frame-

work on transgender people’s and lesbians’ access to

and use of the internet.

Who beneﬁts from these policies?

Discussion

As illustrated in the above overview of policies and

regulations, the South African policy framework

seems, on paper, to be enabling, as it is informed by

principles of social justice espoused in the Constitu-

tion. However, our analysis suggests that the policies

have tended to focus mainly on regulating what is/

is not acceptable for public consumption (through

censorship) in the electronic (and other) media, in-

cluding the internet, and on punishing those who

commit infringements. For example, in 2008 one

of the regulatory bodies, the Film and Publication

Board, established a website (www.fpbprochild.org.

za) which aims to alert internet service providers of

criminal activities relating to child pornography, or

images of sexual abuse hosted on their services or

through their infrastructure. Members of the public

are also able to report incidences of pornography.

In a related move, in 2009, the Department of

Home Affairs announced that it was working with

other government departments, the South African

Police Service and the National Prosecuting Au-

thority to develop a protocol on the protection of

57 Republic of South Africa Electronic Communications Amendment

Act No. 37 of 2007 (Government Gazette, 2008), 1

58 Lyse Comins “Offenders Beware, MXit Warns” IOLnews 30 March

2010 www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/offenders-beware-mxit-

warns-1.477967

children against child pornography, with a focus on

advocacy and law enforcement.

More recently, the

popular social networking website MXit announced

a zero-tolerance policy against offenders who abuse

its online community. Anyone posting explicit or of-

fensive material in public areas within MXit will be

banned from its systems without warning.

The

chief executive ofﬁcer of the Film and Publication

Board, Yoliswa Makhasi, commended MXit, stating

that “the move came at a crucial time since children

would be most likely drawn into social networking

platforms during and after the 2010 World Cup.”

Thus, while they speak of improving access, the poli-

cies do so only in relation to improving economic

growth rather than improving access to knowledge

for creating spaces for democratic debate around im-

portant issues in communities and society.

Second, while the policy framework speaks of

women in the telecommunications industry and ap-

pears to be sensitive to their needs/plight in society,

our analysis suggests that that it does not actually

challenge power relations in any signiﬁcant way.

Rather, as we have argued, it is punitive and tends to

focus on censoring what is regarded as “objection-

able” or harmful content. The difﬁculty involved in

deﬁning and agreeing on what is harmful and for/

to whom, means that the focus on the “moral good”

functions to curtail any expressions of sexuality,

particularly those whom society deems un-African,

ungodly, unnatural, etc., such as transgender and les-

bian sexualities. In addition, the various policies tend

to construct women as objects of men’s pleasure,

rather than as agents of their sexuality. Such as-

sumed heteronormativity normalises heterosexuality

and marginalises and silences other sexual identities

(such as the LGBTI).

In this study we have asked: In what ways are

existing policies and the regulatory framework

beneﬁciary to various groups, and in particular to

marginalised groups such as the LGBTI community?

Many in civil society and industries resist the regula-

tion of content over the internet. While the negative

effects of harmful content (such as child pornogra-

phy and pornography depicting women) is widely

acknowledged, many argue that regulating the in-

ternet goes against its very founding philosophy: free

and open ﬂow of information. In this regard, decid-

ing what content is harmful or objectionable is a

value judgement based on subjective views and deci-

sion making for and on behalf of society at large, a

process which is inherently undemocratic.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Cohen “Advisory 3”

EROTICS: SEX, RIGHTS AND THE INTERNET146 South Africa

In addition to being undesirable, regulating the

internet and its content is also bound to be difﬁcult.

As argued earlier, because the internet is a multina-

tional environment with cultural, moral and legal

variations all around the world, it is difﬁcult to de-

ﬁne and agree on what is harmful or objectionable

content.

Each country has its deﬁnition of what is

and is not permissible regarding the internet, and

each implements different levels of censorship and

legislation. Moreover, as McCosker argues, because

regulating the internet tends to rely on old concepts

of regulation, including tangibility in time and space,

enforcing the policies may be difﬁcult.

The Film and Publication Appeal Board of South

Africa was faced with this challenge in February 2009.

An international award-winning ﬁlm was banned

outright by the Film and Publication Board on the

grounds that it constituted child pornography. The

Board argued that certain scenes in the ﬁlm depicted

teenagers under eighteen years of age engaged in

simulated sexual intercourse. This formed the basis

of the Board’s objections and subsequent banning of

the ﬁlm. However, this argument did not hold as the

actors in the ﬁlm were over the age of eighteen. As

such, those who opposed the ban argued that the

Board needed to strike a balance between the pro-

tection of children’s rights and the right to freedom

of expression.

According to the Freedom of Expression Insti-

tute, consistency on the part of the Board in its

interpretation and decision making on matters con-

cerning child pornography is also proving to be a

serious problem.

Cohen argues that before a regu-

lation is passed, it is essential to take into account

the difference between “harmful” material, such as

sexually explicit nudity, and illegal material, such

Internet Regulation and Sexual Politics in Brazil

Abstract