Osho on Pornography, Pornography is as old as the priest

Osho – Pornography is a by-product of your so-called religions. It is a religious phenomenon – excuse me! It is because of your priests that pornography exists. And it is not a new thing, it is as ancient as man. Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri, what are they?

Pornography in sculpture. And you can go to the ancientmost caves and you will always find pornography of some kind or other. You can look into folk literature, folk songs, folk stories, and you will always find them pornographic.

Pornography is as old as the priest. Once the priest comes in, pornography comes as a shadow; it is bound to happen. And when you are taught to be life-negative you become afraid of talking about things frankly, authentically. You do not like to talk about sex, because what will people think about you?

You want to hide it. You try to create a facade – as if sex is nonexistent in your life. But deep down you are boiling. Deep down, you are thinking of sex twenty-four hours a day. Modern psychological surveys say that each man thinks about sex at least once every three minutes. And this is about the irreligious, remember, so what to say about the religious?

They must think about sex every three seconds! Women think about sex once every seven minutes – that is a gap between man and woman. That’s why women can pretend more that they are far higher, that they are not concerned, that this whole ugliness of sex is man’s creation. They are superior beings. But the difference is only of four minutes. The man has to go on persuading them ”Four minutes more,” that’s all.

Hence the man has to go into a kind of foreplay. Before he can persuade a woman to be normal, to be healthy, at least four minutes’ foreplay is needed. And because man is the aggressive sex, because man’s energies are aggressive energies and the woman is the receptive sex, that too makes a great difference.

Man has to take the initiative. The woman can pretend: ”I am not running after you.”
Mulla Nasruddin and his wife were arguing, and Mulla said, ”It must have been the most unfortunate moment in my life when I married you.”

The woman said, ”But I was not running after you.”
Mulla said, ”That is true. No mousetrap ever runs after the mouse. The mousetrap simply waits; the mouse comes itself.”

That is true: mouse or Mulla Nasruddin – it makes no difference. Because women are receptive, they are a little cold. Man is hot. And because women are the receptive sex they are not much interested in pornography – because the most aggressive part in man’s or woman’s body is the eye.

There is a difference between man’s and woman’s eye – not a physiological difference of course but something very deep and psychological. Man’s eye is aggressive, woman’s eye is receptive. Hence the woman is not very interested in pornography.

Moreover, man’s sex has something of extroversion in it and woman’s sex has something of introversion. Whenever you are making love to a woman she will close her eyes, because when you are making love to a woman she is not so interested in you; she is much more interested in what is happening inside her. She closes her eyes. She enjoys the feeling that you trigger in her innermost being.

But man is more interested in looking at what is happening to the woman. He wants to keep the lights on. Not only that: there are a few really religious people who keep automatic cameras in their bedrooms to take pictures so that later on also they can enjoy what was happening. Man is more interested in seeing what is happening to the woman and less interested in his own inner feelings.

Kiss a woman and she closes her eyes, because she wants to taste the kiss in her interiority, she wants to absorb it. And man wants to see what is happening to the woman; his interest is otherdirected. Hence man has always remained interested in pornography. But pornography is not a natural phenomenon – you have to be reminded of that again and again – it is a religious phenomenon.

Because priests have been so much against sex, man has been repressing it. And when you repress anything too much it is bound to assert itself in subtle ways, in hidden ways, in such ways that you will not even be consciously aware of what you are doing. It will start moving in your unconscious mind.

Hence the tremendous interest in the woman’s body. Pictures, statues, movies – basically, they are all either directly or indirectly pornographic. Unless there is something of sex in it you are not interested. Sex and murder are essential for a film to succeed, for a story to be read, for a fiction to be enjoyed. Strange! Sex and murder – why are they connected? They are connected: if you repress too much you become murderous.

In fact, murdering somebody is a perverted act of sex. Man wants to enter the body of the woman. If he is not allowed to, he will start finding any possible way to enter the other’s body. He will become homosexual; if he cannot find a woman then he will find a man. If he cannot find a man, he will find animals.

If that too becomes difficult then he will start creating rubber women, plastic women which you can keep in your bag so that whenever you need the woman, you just pump her up a little. And if there is no possibility at all, he becomes enraged. Sex energy repressed becomes anger, it becomes murderous.

In fact, psychologists say that all our weapons are nothing but symbols, metaphors, for the genital male organ – they are a thrust into the other’s body. Our bayonets, our bullets, our swords – they are nothing but another offshoot of life-negative religions. Now, politicians were also interested in repressing sex for this reason, for this very purpose: if people’s sex is repressed they can easily be made to kill others and be killed by others.