Despite strong intolerance of gays, Pakistan leads in world for gay porn searches
Despite being strongly intolerant of gay and lesbian people, Pakistan leads in the world for the most Google searches for gay porn, according to a recent analysis of search terms.
The analysis, posted by Mother Jones, found that Pakistan was the world leader in searches for the terms “teen anal sex”, “man fucking man”, and “shemale sex”, and came in second only to Kenya for searches for “gay sex pics”.
The analysis went on to find that searches for the term “shemale sex”, were of a majority in the city of Peshwar, which is a conservative Islamic stronghold.
In a recent Pew Research Centre survey of 39 countries, which asked the question of whether society should “accept homosexuality”, in which the UK, the US and Western Europe answered mainly “yes”, only 2% of those in Pakistan said they thought the same.
Gay sex is currently illegal in Pakistan, and is punishable by lengthy jail terms. For “gross indecency between persons of the same sex”, someone in Pakistan could be sentenced to between 2 and 10 years in prison, and for “buggery”, life imprisonment can be applied.
“Religious extremism is at a height today,” said Farahnaz Ispahan, an expert in Pakistani minorities at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former member of Pakistan’s parliament.
Speaking to Mother Jones, he continued “Hindus are being forced to convert, Christians are being burned alive—there’s very little personal safety for those seen as ‘the other.'”
“So what do [gay Pakistanis] do? They turn to pornography because they can’t live their lives openly.”
A survey of porn search habits published in March revealed similar results, and that, in some of the countries with the most adamantly homophobic laws, the word gay comes up more often than countries without them.
