India’s first porn star

How an online comic about a hypersexual wife-next-door is inflaming India

It looks like “India has its first porn star,” said Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon. The only catch? She’s a cartoon. The online comic strip featuring the sexual exploits of virtual “horny housewife” Savita Bhabhi—literally, sister-in-law Savita—draws 60 million viewers every month. And neither Savita’s “buxom breasts nor her raging libido” fully explain why she’s hit such a “cultural hot spot” in India.

It’s an Indian thing, said Jason Overdorf in GlobalPost. Pornography is illegal in India, but 70 percent of Savita’s readers reside there, and many of the scripts are based on fantasies readers send in. Savita exploits the tensions between modernity and conservative traditionalism, between India’s sexual “repression and the temptation to escape it.”

The appeal also lies in “breaking a common taboo,” said Akela Talamasca in Manolith, and it’s pretty controversial in India to sleep with your brother’s wife. In fact, it’s a good bet that “the servers for this enterprise are not located on Indian soil.” Still, all the fuss seems a little hard to understand coming from “the same country that gave the world the Kama Sutra.”