Pornography worsening weird sex practices

The emergence of pornography in Kenya is contributing to sexual perversion as witnessed in the arrest of a paedophile in Nairobi last weekend. The 30 year old man was found with a vast collection of sex video tapes, DVDs, magazines and photographs.

A Kenyan website advertises sex services.

The description given of the man’s lifestyle shows classic symptoms of a porn addict. He couldn’t stop himself from collecting explicit material at every chance. He continually hired prostitutes to satisfy his sexual cravings but when he got bored of it, he turned to his neighbours’ children.

So depraved was this young man that he roamed the streets with a camera photographing women. Later on, from the dingy comfort of his slum abode, he got kicks just looking at the photos. However, this case came to light because the accused basically gave himself up by printing the photos in a city centre studio. The staff, shocked by the images, called police.

There are scores of individuals addicted to pornography and subjecting themselves and their families to untold suffering. Cases of HIV/Aids, STDs, incest, child abuse, homosexuality and bestiality are increasing thanks to images supplied mostly from the internet.

At least 60% of the internet consists of “adult entertainment,” a polite term for pornography.  Unfortunately, Kenyan entrepreneurs are doing roaring business supplying sexually explicit stuff for just a couple of hundred shillings. Today, there is a booming industry in locally produced pornography which has not only enmeshed commercial sex workers but has trapped scores of unemployed youths eager for a quick shilling. Posters advertising the videos are pasted all over the city.

Once you agree to participate in a pornographic video, you can be forced to do anything. As audiences get bored watching “normal sex,” film producers must come up with bizarre sex acts that will stimulate their market and increase sales. This inevitably involves creating videos of group sexual orgies, homosexuality, lesbianism, sex with children and sex with animals.

In the Western world, the pornographic market is so accustomed to weird sex that porn producers are showing real life scenes of rape, torture and death. Some of the stuff coming out of western studios is too sickening to be described in a decent forum such as this one. The question is: Will the Kenyan pornographic industry head the same direction?

The growing number of strip clubs is certainly not helping the situation. As competition among entertainment joints intensifies, club owners feel pressured to have naked women dancing on table tops. In Nairobi city alone, there are at least a dozen strip clubs that advertise openly. It is said that a famous entertainment club in the eastern part of Nairobi offers rooms for Shs600 (US$7.8) for those who want to have sex with its strippers.

Pornography and strip clubs make people want to try out things that are best left in fantasy land. Pornography creates a false idea of sex especially in the minds of impressionable young people.

The liberalized world of today means that 10 year olds are already exposed to sex images through the media. Sex is a gift to humanity meant to strengthen the bonds between an adult couple consisting of man and woman and who are either married or intend to marry. The natural by-product of sex is pregnancy and the rearing of children.

Pornography debases sex, cheapens human life and makes a mockery of our emotions. In pornography, anything is accepted as long as it provides pleasure. Pornography turns sex into a win-lose game where one person gets all the pleasure while the other is subjected to intense pain and humiliation. That is why people addicted to pornography – such as the young man arrested in Nairobi – feel nothing about abusing 8 year old children.

High unemployment among the youth is worsening pornography, prostitution and stripping. Kenya’s economy is not growing fast enough to provide jobs to its youth. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people join the labor market from universities, colleges, high schools and grade school. There are simply not enough jobs for all of them. Its obvious that many of these youth will turn to the sex trade in order to acquire the glitzy lifestyle they so much want to achieve.

A significant number of young women in Kenya earn their living by engaging in relationships with politicians, executives, diplomats, senior state security officials as well as tourists. The relationships involve the lavishing of gifts, housing, cars and cash in exchange for sex. Youthful men are also getting into the game by offering sexual services to upper-class men and women. At Kenya’s coast, there are married men getting involved with female tourists for money with the full knowledge of their own wives.

So brazen has the sex industry become that recruitment is done openly through newspaper classifieds and websites. One notorious website invites job applications complete with a passport photo with promises of, “immediate employment.”

The prolific trade in flesh and pornography is contributing to organized crime in Kenya. Distribution of pornography, emergence of prostitution rackets, human trafficking and sale of narcotics are controlled by vicious mafia-like syndicates that operate outside public view.

It is difficult to tell whether the Kenyan government has the capacity to tackle this brave new form of criminal activity. The so-called “crackdowns” have not succeeded in stemming the vices.

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