"The police need to go after the producers and distributors, but they don't because they are also a source of funds for them so nothing happens." (Read about Bali's male gigolos.) "It is impossible to patrol a country as big as Indonesia," he says. Usman suggests that the issue of pornography has long been ignored by the police and has become more of a political commodity for politicians to get voters' support. "The problem is far from being solved and won't be solved by an antipornography law or by censoring the Internet," says Usman Hamid, head of the Kontras organization and a leading human-rights campaigner in Jakarta. Law enforcers, then and now, hold shows of force for the press, destroying pornographic materials en masse after the raids, yet pirated materials quickly surface again in various shopping centers. Indeed, the authoritarian President Suharto kept a tight lid on press freedom until his fall in 1998, which ushered in the period known as Reformasi, but pirated videotapes and magazines could be found even then in small towns and villages. "Because there has been a lack of control since the press and society found new freedom in the 10 years since Reformasi." "Why are there so many fans of pornography in Indonesia?" asks Juniwati Masjchun Sofwan, head of the Indonesian Commission to Eradicate Pornography. In 2008, lawmakers passed a special law banning pornography instead of regulating it, driving porn underground and into the hands of the most vulnerable consumers. True, more and more Indonesians are gaining access to the Web via cell phones and Internet cafés, but young kids around the country have long been able to get their hands on magazines, often crudely drawn or poor-quality reproductions of dodgy magazines from the West. But blame does not lie solely with the Internet.
That sex scandals like the current videos of the heartthrob singer Nazril "Ariel" Irham from the multiplatinum band Peterpan (who is being detained by police) and his actress girlfriend Luna Maya, captivate Indonesians from time to time is not surprising. (See a TIME cover story on the global sex trade.) Reliable data about the usage and reach of pornography in Indonesia is hard to come by, but the sensation caused by each new clandestine sex film brought to light reveals a deep-seated fascination perhaps obsession with the seamier sides of life. "My other friends had already accessed pornography when they were in elementary school, when they were around 12 years old."Īs Indonesian police scramble to figure out who disseminated the graphic videos of two of the country's top celebrities that surfaced on June 4, and whether or not to prosecute the stars under the country's antipornography laws, the rest of society might want to do some investigating of their own into why there are so many fans of porn in this country with the world's largest Muslim population. "I can confidently say around 99% of the kids in my school had seen some kind of porn," recalls Iskandar, now 19. That was middle school and he was 14 at the time. One of their favorite pastimes was trading porn DVDs or swapping files downloaded from the Internet. Follow in school, Jason Iskandar and his friends did more together than cram for exams.
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