headliners of hardliners

Apart from the disturbing event that occurred in Pakistan, where a Christian leader was shot dead for raising his voice against the Blasphemy Law, another headline caught my attention, in which a lecture at the Northwestern University ended in a graphic manner in which a couple demonstrated the use of a sex toy. About the former all I have to say is that although it is bad to slander about any religion, unless the some practice in it brazenly questions the very essence of humanity, such laws can also be used as weapon to wrongly indict people of other faith. Well what can I say, the victim, a minister of minority community in Pakistan, Shahbaz Bhatti is dead so it doesn't matter anymore. Maybe there'll be more who'll raise their voice and more who'll die. I wouldn't call them martyrs. I wonder if Bhatti has met Jesus already, something he firmly believed he believed he will after dying. If not, what a waste.

Let's talk about the latter, the event faces investigations by the University authorities as they say there have to be guidelines for pedagogy and not everything is demonstrable in public.
In someway it brings memories of the time when one of my close friends Nipun Kalia was to present the subject of his PhD research in front of a Dissertation-Commission at the Punjab University a few years ago. I cannot recall accurately but Nipun was studying some aspect of Catherine Breillat's movies. The big deal about the whole thing was that Breillat's movies were about sexuality and were misinterpreted by a some members of the commission as pornography. In vain Nipun tried to explain to the clamouring members that there indeed was a difference between the two. There were people on his side but there were also many many against him. He stood their being judged as a pervert because he wished to investigate something that was related to sex. Media dogs sniffed the controversy and soon there were articles about the incidence and Nipun was portrayed as a nymphomaniac. Happily married, he's anything but that. Moral fingers poked him from everywhere but that did led him to have a celebrity status within our circles and even more so at his wife's workplace.

I don't know what to say of such a contentious issue at the Northwestern University, I really don't think having a live demo of a sex toy in a university is acceptable but then again that's not what the lecture was about, it was about "Bondage, swinging and other fetishes". Well if they're investigating that at the University, then it's probably no big deal to have a demo of a sex toy. After all it's something that people do engage in and it doesn't hurt or kill anyone and is for pleasure. Anyone that says that he/she doesn't have any interest in pleasure of those kinds would have to be totally asexual and most people aren't like that. The couple that performed were exhibitionists and were more than happy to oblige. This act was performed after the lecture was dismissed and the audience was cautioned a dozen times that what followed would be extremely graphic. For me what stood out was the way in which Channel24 titled their article as opposed to the others. Following are the titles of the articles by different news agencies.

Channel24: Live sex show spices up college class

The BBC: Northwestern University sex toy show 'disturbing'

The Times of India: US university to investigate sex toy demonstration by professor

NEWS24: US university to probe sex toy demo

The New York Times: Extracurricular Sex Toy Lesson Draws Rebuke at Northwestern