Swati Ganesh figured something was amiss when her husband got himself a second smartphone. When she confronted him, he confessed that a WhatsApp group he was on was exchanging a lot of pornographic videos and he was worried that their kid might accidentally stumble upon it. The second phone was so that he could view these privately. Ganesh, 36, and the mother of a seven-year-old, had watched some pornography when she was in college, at a friend’s home, on the VCR, when the parents were out. And later, she had accessed some sites on the computer at home, but found it to be too risky, the screen too large and the possibility of someone walking in on her not worth the risk. When she discovered her husband’s second phone, she demanded that he share it with her. “He wasn’t shocked or surprised, he was quite happy about it,” she says.

Now Ganesh watches porn semi-frequently. While she mostly watches it at home, when no one is around, or sometimes in the bathroom, where she can be certain her son will not accidentally walk in, she does occasionally watch it in public places too. “The advantage of a mobile is that it really is your small, personal screen. Sometimes, my husband forwards me some clips and I watch them for a minute or two before deleting them. The strangest thing was, once I was waiting to meet a client, at her office, and with some 20 minutes to kill, I found myself streaming a video, with the phone muted. It was fun. But when the client’s secretary came over to say her boss was ready to see me, I remember feeling disoriented for a few seconds,” she says with a laugh.

Pornography accounts for over 50 per cent of data traffic. And while the easy narrative is that it is “dangerous to women and children”, what isn’t often accounted for is the fact that increasingly women are also consumers of porn. In India, with its thousands of taboos around sex and wider cultural compulsions around women and their carnal desires, porn on the mobile provides a safe, private outlet. Ganesh, and thousands of others like her, view pornography as a healthy sexual stimulus. And the mobile allows them the access and privacy to enjoy it. With the news that the government was planning a ban on pornographic sites, Ganesh was happy her husband had the foresight to buy another phone. “We are saving some clips on it, just in case it becomes impossible to stream it in the future,” she says. The phone is kept under lock and key and only the two of them have access to it.

Neha Seth (name changed), 32, has been watching porn since she was 20. And now, she watches it almost entirely on her mobile. “If I do watch it on my laptop, then I scrub the history. But I mostly stream it on my phone. And I don’t bother with deleting the links because no one else touches my phone. If they do, I murder them,” she says.

When Seth finds something interesting, she shares the link with her friends either on email or WhatsApp. She herself receives a couple of links a week from her set of friends. Seth is a vociferous endorser of high-definition porn. She either Torrents them or streams them directly from her phone. “Once you HD, there is no going back,” she says, “it is the real deal. The quality of the video, the sharpness of the images, porn on HD is a fantastic visual experience.”

Even as late as a decade ago, internet porn was the preserve of men. Many women have stories about finding groups of snickering male colleagues huddled around a computer in office. Socially and culturally conditioned to be coy about sex, women firmly looked the other way. Until the smartphone came along.

Nandita Singh, 43, an activist and NGO worker, views the prevalence of porn as a sign of women finally beginning to own their sexuality. “It has always been okay for men to be sexual. Even the proposed ban on porn is garbed as protection of women. What they really are trying to do is protect men from sexually awakened women, who are knowledgeable about sex and empowered to ask for better,” she says. As long as pornography was the preserve of men, it was safe. Now that women are accessing it, it has become a problem. Even the upper middle-class school she went to, Singh says, has a class WhatsApp group. All content on it is healthy and wholesome. “But I realised the men have a separate group, which is pretty much entirely devoted to porn and dirty jokes. So, even the so-called progressive elite in this country is obsessed with the notion of ‘protecting’ the women from pornography. It’s absurd,” she says. So Singh started a porn group for the girls. “And the links are coming thick and fast,” she winks, “pun fully intended.”

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