According to Osho, pornography is a symptom of religiously imposed sexual repression—a kind of mental masturbation that arises when natural nudity, curiosity, and loving contact are forbidden. Its appeal comes from secrecy and deprivation: the mind, starved of simple, healthy exposure and intimacy, eroticizes the hidden. Normalize appropriate nudity, bodily acceptance, and open, loving relationships, and pornography loses its grip.
When we hide bodies and shame sex, people get curious and lonely, so pictures and fantasies feel exciting; if we lived more naturally and openly, porn would matter less.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
What is pornography, and why does it have so much appeal?
Your alive wife does not give you any thrill. With your alive wife you suddenly go dead. There are people, even while making love to their wife, they are imagining some other woman; they are imagining some PLAYBOY picture. They can make love to their woman only when in their imagination there is some other woman, some fantasy. Then they get thrilled. They are not making love to their woman, and the woman is not making love to them. She may be thinking of some actor or some hero or somebody. There are four people in each bed! Of course, it is too crowded, and you never contact the real person; those imaginary ones are standing in between. You should know that masturbation -- mental or physicalis a perversion. It does not exist in nature. Homosexuality does not exist in nature, but in zoos it comes into existence. In zoos…
Osho, it is astonishing that a porno magazine published from India’s capital, which trades in obscenity, has written that you should be hanged. What is the secret behind this?
Anand Maitreya! There is not the slightest secret. The matter is absolutely straight and clear. Pornographic magazines sell because of your sadhus and renunciates! If things were up to me, porn magazines wouldn’t be able to sell anywhere in the world. If things were up to me, who would buy a porn magazine? For what purpose? Who buys porn magazines? Those very people who have repressed their sexual desire. Those who have not honored their sexuality, not welcomed it. Those who have fallen prey to pundits, priests, sadhus and monks. They are the ones who read porn magazines—though some read them hidden inside the Gita, some inside the Quran, some bound in a Bible cover—but it’s the same people. This whole world is full of “religious” people—so who is reading porn? The very ones who read books saying “celibacy is life” are the ones who read porn. These are not…
Why am I so much fascinated by pornography?
This idea got deep into the unconsciousness of man. There is no reality behind it. There is no reason. Pornography is a by-product. And the priest became aware of one thing -- it was obvious -- that people fall in love and they forget the whole thing, the whole world. Falling in love, or making love, they simply disappear from this world, they move into another dimension. And that dimension is the priest's dimension -- he wants monopoly over it. He does not want any other way for you to approach God; he wants you to come through the right way that he provides: the prayer, the meditation, this and that. And he became aware that people have a natural key with them, a natural door opens into the divine -- that has to be stopped. Otherwise who will be interested in their prayer and in their meditations? Who will…
Osho, there is a great deal of hypocrisy in india about sex. People are not even willing to discuss it openly, yet there is a growing proliferation of, and obsession with, nude pictures. Will this flood of pornography help? Can it finally bring sex out into the open in india?
If you want to see the reality of the politician you will have to see him from his back door. There he is in his nudity, as he is, and so is the priest. These two kinds of cunning people have dominated humanity. And they found out very early on that if you want to dominate humanity, make it weak, make it feel guilty, make it feel unworthy. Destroy its dignity, take all glory away from it, humiliate it. And they have found such subtle ways of humiliation that they don't come in the picture at all. They leave it to you to humiliate yourself, to destroy yourself. They have taught you a kind of slow suicide. You ask me, Silvera: "There is a great deal of hypocrisy in India about sex." It is not only a question about sex. Sex is the most fundamental hypocrisy, but then there are…
You can see something very strange. Priests are against me and pornographers are against me, what does it mean? It means that, if sex repression disappears, who will be interested in pornography? The whole business will flop. So there seems to be an inner conspiracy, perhaps unconscious, between the priest and the pornographer -- that the priest creates the market and the pornographer reaps the crop. And what a beauty! The priest goes on condemning pornography, but the more he condemns it, the more people are looking at ugly, obscene pictures. But they have to hide them behind The Bible, behind the Gita, so if somebody suddenly turns up, they can close The Bible and the Gita and you never know what was hidden in them. When I was arrested in America -- when I entered the cell there was another inmate.