Men and women who like looking at attractive men in briefs will find Indian cities quite wonderful. These are usually full of hoardings that advertise men’s underwear. In these advertisements, scantily-clad men unabashedly offer themselves up to the public gaze. But the only indication that this gaze is meant to be female is in the desperate lipstick marks on the model in some of the ads. In the rest, the female ogling is only implied. And the State takes all this in its stride — like a touchingly unsuspecting elderly uncle. But the uncle minds — and minds terribly — when women are actually shown getting sexually aroused by men in briefs, or even by the briefs themselves standing in for their absent user. This is what a couple of recent television ads had suggested and shown, making the information and broadcasting ministry most unhappy. Both ads have been banned and the channels warned about sticking to the code that sets down what is, and is not, proper.

Obviously, Mr Priya Ranjan Das Munshi has been at it again — policing channels for the presumed well-being of his compatriots, and thus infantilizing the Indian democracy without any misgivings. The law that has been invoked forbids not only the “indecent, vulgar, repulsive and offensive”, but also the “suggestive”. To ban both the suggestive and the offensive, and to mention them in the same breath, is effectively to veto just about everything, from the explicit to the implicit. This leaves little room for choice (the channel’s as well as the viewer’s), apart from dourly weeding out all salutary naughtiness from the creative process. What is at stake in this case is, of course, the question of representing women as desiring gazers, as active sexual subjects rather than passive objects. The State can take a great deal of suggestiveness when it comes to the reverse scenario — men looking at women — but is worse than stern when the tables are turned. This sternness is at once comic, annoying and worrying.