Indonesia's Politics of Porn 

"Tight Kebaya Now Okay in Rehashed Porn Bill” was the headline of an October 13 article in the Jakarta Post.

Wearing the fitted lace blouse, or kebaya, preferred by many Indonesian women would no longer threaten to land them in jail. What, you might be asking yourself, does a lace ceremonial blouse have to do with pornography? That is precisely the question to which many Indonesians have been demanding an answer.

In the language of pornography and “obscene acts,” a battle has been waged against ethnic and religious minorities, calling into moral question religion, culture, custom, tradition, and of course sex.

Originally, the porn bill looked less like an effort to control media and more like a ploy to impose Islamic law on a country that in the past seemed to celebrate the diversity of its hundreds of ethnic groups. The softened version of the bill amounts to political back peddling. Unfortunately, the ethnic hatred that has come to the surface in recent months over previous drafts remains palpable between minority groups like the Hindu Balinese, who comprise roughly 3 percent of the country, and the fundamentalist Muslim Javanese, who represent more than forty percent of the total population. It is the largest population of Muslims in the world.

Old Beliefs Die Hard

Prostitutes, gigolos, and thieves are Javanese according to a Balinese folk theory of criminality. The theory goes that ethnic groups have particular temperaments, in this case a complex of predispositions not shared by Balinese people. When the Balinese commit transgressions, they are explained in terms of personal weakness, fate, and character, and the power of desire. The transgressions of foreign others, however, are explained in terms of ethnicity, and often religion or its lack.

Conversely, the people in Java deploy similar assessments when talking about Balinese. The Balinese are noted for their sensuality and eroticism, which today are often glossed as pornographic. They are criticized for their apparent tolerance of Western hedonism, which is linked to the presence of drugs, prostitution, and AIDS in Bali. All of these social problems are seen as ultimately coming from the West, but Javanese critics assert they are invited in and emulated by the too tolerant and already morally compromised Balinese.

Such ethnic animosities predate national furor over an anti-pornography bill that has been under consideration by the Indonesian parliament. However, debate about the bill’s contents and implications has harnessed the acrimony in this post-Suharto era of politicized Islam and marginalization of ethnic and religious minorities.

The previous Anti-Pornography/Pornographic-Action Draft Bill, referred to as RUU APP, not only would have reinforced an extant ban on pornographic media (pornografi), but would also have punished “pornographic action” (pornoaksi), a term referring to a broad range of modes of dress, movements, sounds, and social behavior deemed immoral or arousing to the (male) public. Sensuous body movements, revealing clothing, nudity, and artistic production, action, and speech that incite sexual feelings or “exploit sexual attraction” in the public were all to be subject to prosecution under the previous version of the proposed law.

Many argued that the law was a thinly veiled attempt to implement Islamic law (Shari’a), part of an effort to turn predominantly Muslim (80 percent of the total population) Indonesia into an Islamic state. Public desire as the lynchpin of the previous legislation opened up the possibility that what can be considered pornographic/action is as unlimited as human longings and imaginings. This focus on public desire encourages the (male) viewer to see women’s bodies and behaviors, in particular, as the ultimate sources of male desire and thus as loci of pornoaksi or “pornographic action.” The previously proposed statutes in effect rendered women’s bodies sites of obscenity.

The vague prohibitions against sensuous movement and revealing “sensitive” body parts—which in Islamic law means all but a woman’s face and hands—potentially designated any clothing but the veil pornographic, and would have rendered many of Indonesia’s hundreds of ethnic groups’ ceremonial dress and practice, including traditional dances, indecent. Though the previous bill stated an exception for religious ceremonies, it was never made clear what would count as ceremonial and who would judge which situations could or could not fall under the exception. Under the previous bill, what had always been treated as cultural and religious difference, celebrated as ethno-linguistic diversity and protected by the Constitution, became not only morally suspect, but a threat to national integrity and ultimately a crime. While critics of the previous versions of the bill hope the new version will have resolved what they saw as the bill’s more egregious problems, it is still unclear to what extent the new bill avoids these political pitfalls. And it is all too obvious that fundamentalist groups efforts to redefine public understanding of what can count as pornography persists even if the wording of the bill has been changed in response to ethnic minorities’ and women’s demands.

Indonesia’s Post-Suharto Culture of Porn

Anxiety about moral degradation and national disintegration blamed on the West and expressed through RUU APP can be traced to several transformations underway in 1998 when then Indonesian President Suharto left office after three decades of authoritarian rule. The enforced ethnic tolerance and secularism of the New Order had already began to shift in the 1990s when Suharto put in place a series of policies that initiated and supported a process of Islamization, which some suggest has resulted in the intensification of ethnic tensions and the eruption of communal violence. Suharto’s successor Habibie adopted a model of regional autonomy and loosened restrictions on trade and speech. These deepened rifts between regions and ethnic groups. At the same time, this complex of changes ushered in new forms of expression, media, and commerce, including importation and widespread distribution of pornographic media from America, Asia, Australia, and Europe, the predominant share coming from industry giant the United States. After 1998 Indonesia as a whole experienced an unprecedented influx of pornography that affected markets across the archipelago. The cheap cost and availability of players meant pornographic videos could now be watched in private homes, even bedrooms, a change that shifted the demographics of porn consumption and expanded its range of uses.

Balinese responses to this influx of media are consistent with those of Javanese and other Indonesians. Hindu and Muslim public figures and religious leaders have described pornography consumption as a threat to culture, religion, tradition, and morals to the extent that youth are considered morally vulnerable and, therefore, especially likely to imitate Western models of behavior gleaned from available pornographic sources. In light of the contentious debate that has arisen between Javanese and Balinese, Muslims and Hindus, it is worthwhile to look more closely at the specifics of Balinese interpretations of Western and other foreign pornographic film.

The Race/Ethnicity of Sex

The foreign provenance of the first flood of pornographic videos meant that viewers were always watching “someone else” having sex on screen. Ethnic or racial others performed “new,” “modern,” “foreign” sex styles, meanings that are deemed particularly problematic when unmarried youth use pornographic videos as “sex education”.

In Bali, as in Indonesia generally, videos and film with any sexual content are classifiable using the slightly modified English designations film porno and film blue, which are subdivided based on whether actors’ genitals are visible during sex or not, called “regular blue films” (film blue biasa) and semi respectively. They are further divided into genres that depict sexual gaya, or “styles”, associated with particular racial and ethnic groups. Anal sex is Arab style, gaya Arab. Oral sex, multiple positions with women on top, and orgiastic sex are gaya Barat, Western style. Violent sex, bondage, or sex involving hypnosis is gaya Jepang, Japanese style. In a 2000 edition of the weekly Map, the cover advertised an article entitled Seks Gaya India Kuno, “sex in the style of ancient India.”

Foreign sexual gaya are problematic in Bali for the particular ways sex styles in film are at odds with ideal patterns of local, social, and sexual behavior. People in Bali contrasted a proliferation of sexual positions and partners in American pornographic film to heterosexual sex in which the man is on top, described as the natural (wajar) way to have sex. The man should be on top to preserve an age, gender, and status hierarchy. Inverting this hierarchy subverts the social order. Because a Balinese social order was not evident in American film sex, people in Bali said there simply was no order.

The absence of a legible Balinese normative ideal led people to suggest Western film sex was unnatural (tidak wajar). What was unnatural in Bali, however, could be “normal” in the West. The suggestion that film sex represented an alternative, albeit deviant, norm did not obviate moral judgment. Instead, it served to condemn Americans as licentious, animalistic, not fully human, and without rules for social interaction. These claims are strikingly similar to those lodged against Hindu Balinese by Javanese Muslims. The spectacular quality of deviant alternative practices in film sex was one reason viewers claimed they watched films: to see if it were true that sex with animals or an extraordinary number of men engaged in sex with one woman is possible, or “normal,” for other people.

Since 2000, videos of Indonesian (mostly Muslim) heterosexual couples having sex have also emerged. Some of these videos have been self-recorded then stolen by photo store employees. Other videos show unsuspecting couples taped using hidden cameras. Videos of such “authentic” (asli) Indonesian sex have been copied and sold by the millions and represent a visual record of an emergent culture of porn. It has become sexy to tape one’s self or others having sex, sex that appears self-consciously modeled after foreign sex styles. As in foreign porn, classifications of Indonesian made porn on websites devoted to amateur and captured images are based on ethno-linguistic group or place of origin. And yet, alternative sex styles on these sites are rarely viewed as indigenous. A Balinese video rental store owner stated that no Balinese woman would do such a thing and if she did, she would no longer be Balinese. He suggested that either she was Javanese or she had become like Javanese. The pornographic is always somewhere else, someone else.

The Pornification of Difference

Muslim proponents of the anti-pornography bill (who are predominantly Javanese) claim the bill would redress moral degradation, which they view as originating from the West. In an article in the Asia Times, Syafriansyah, a legislator with the Muslim PPP, said earlier this year that “the country’s morality is in decline and hence the people need to be controlled to make sure that the nation does not go collectively to hell.” RUU APP’s authors suggested the legislation would maintain the moral compass and essential (implicitly Javanese and Islamic) character of the nation by protecting it from the deleterious effects of “the rotten egg of Western civilization they try not to imitate.”

Among the most vocal of the bill’s opponents was the governor of Bali who, with grassroots support, announced that the provincial government and people of Bali (3 percent of Indonesia’s total population) utterly rejected the bill on the basis that it would ruin their tourism dependent economy and criminalize their traditions and Hindu religion. The rejection was so vociferous and passionate that Governor Beratha and others threatened that Bali would leave the nation if the bill were passed.

In response to Beratha’s threat to secede, the Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI) issued a legal summons against the governor, snidely chastising the Balinese for their reliance on tourism. The MMI complained that the majority was being tyrannized by an arrogant minority and promised that if the state did not discipline the rogue province, the MMI and other Islamic groups were prepared to finish the matter themselves. Later in an interview, Fauzan al Anshori, an MMI official, suggested that if the Balinese persisted in their rejection of the bill, perhaps they should simply be named an autonomous region especially for pornography (daerah otonomi khusus untuk pornografi).

A relationship between ethnicity and pornography is underscored by shifts in the debate over porno, from discussion of media to discussion of minority social and religious practices. Balinese intellectuals and political leaders have argued that because religious ideology and practice are sacred, rather than pornographic, the bill must be altered, which finally led to its re-drafting. But Islamic leaders and Muslim individuals in interviews and online postings responded with the conviction that indeed, Hindu Bali is pornographic. One online post listed a range of social ills the writer linked with Bali, including prostitution, AIDS, pedophilia, corruption, and drug trafficking and addiction, ending with the suggestion: “How about if we just blow it all up?” His last remark is a macabre reference to the bombings in Bali in 2002 and 2005 by Islamic extremists. In Bali, ironically, these same social ills are attributed to Western tourists and the arrival of Javanese Muslims eager to take advantage of the economic opportunities presented by tourists.

In one posting the author listed five qualities “one thinks of when remembering the island of Bali”: Bali’s fame as a tourist destination; Bali’s role in the importation of illegal drugs; Bali’s reputation as an “immoral place” (tempat maksiat) for sex tourism second only to Bangkok; Bali’s illicit economy of “dirty money”; and Bali as a haven for the morally decadent. At the end of this list, the writer states that “the Island of Bali is identical (identik) to Hindu religion.” According to this view, Bali becomes synonymous not only with tourism and tourists but with the illicit and immoral. The tourists and tourism, the writer mentions, are implicitly Western. Bali, through its conceptual association with the West, must be rejected in order for Indonesia to maintain its moral focus and cultural and religious integrity, implicitly conceived as Muslim.

Anxieties around the use and impact of watching pornographic film reveal concern about ethnic groups abilities to maintain their integrity. This is expressed as fear that people will “become someone else” (jadi orang lain) by taking on sexual “styles” (gaya) associated with racial or ethnic others deemed immoral, even inhuman. In this context, attempts to regulate not only sex, but also minority cultural and religious expression by expanding what counts as porno, establish ethnic and racial categories of moral difference as the basis for an ethno-nationalist politics and justification for communal violence.

Laura Bellows is an independent scholar and writer whose research focuses on sexuality in Bali, Indonesia. Her work is devoted to ethnic and religious minorities and the impact of Indonesia's increasing Islamization on sexual and reproductive freedom.