For the last 10 days, I’ve been watching Indonesia gear up for parliamentary elections, which take place tomorrow. My expectations of politicians are lowest around this time, but even I was cross to see the country’s health minister undermining kids’ well-being in a bid to rack up the votes.
When I was here six months ago, [...]
It is with pride that I post my first link to Indonesia’s new-born English language newspaper, The Jakarta Globe. Not just because its editor appears in The Wisdom of Whores, translated the book into Indonesian and is one of my dearest friends, but also because they are publishing fun stuff. Including this reflection on the [...]
To mark the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, and the 1st anniversary of The Wisdom of Whores, I offer a post stolen wholesale from Michael Buehler. ‘It is actually not HIV that kills us but the hospital administration’, says an Indonesian woman with HIV. Oh, and corruption in the Ministry of Health, complacent self-satisfaction [...]
Two wrongs don’t make a right. And Papua’s “plan” to implant HIV positive people with microchips is definitely wrong.
As the Jakarta Post pointed out yesterday (in a profile that called me a “raging dinosaur” — a compliment, I think) I was wrong to dismiss Indonesia’s “anti-pornography” bill as so silly it would never get passed. [...]
I don’t usually mind being wrong. Really I don’t. But today it hurts. Indonesia has passed a bill that makes it illegal to bathe in rivers or wiggle your hips while dancing. The news reached me at exactly the time I was on air on one of the country highest rated TV shows, talking about [...]
Indonesia’s Minister of Health Siti Fadilah Supari told Reuters this week that a major US navy lab in the country, NAMRU II, had stopped all its work, which she thinks is of “little benefit” to the country.
It’s the latest punch in a dust-up that has been running for months. It’s not actually about what the [...]
When UNAIDS put out their new figures yesterday (in a stonking 357-page report), they accompanied it with a press release that began: “New HIV infections and HIV-related deaths declining — however AIDS epidemic not over in any part of the world”. If you made it to the second page of the press release, you’d find [...]
Still on the subject of the multiple meanings of masculinity: whatever your identity, you’ve got to pee. But if you’re a person with a penis who dresses as a woman, where should that be? There’s a debate about this over at The Lost Boy, continued at by Roger Tatoud at Peripheries whom I thank for [...]
A fashion designer turned massage parlour owner in Indonesia has come up with an inspired solution to the problem of unsafe sex: he’s padlocking his girls in to their trousers.
Paul Watson of the LA Times spoke to Franky Setiawan, owner of Doghado Massage Parlor, who came up with the chastity pants. Setiawan “says he came [...]
Want to know why nice girls sell sex? I’ve trawled through hundreds of academic papers pontificating about the motivation for selling sex, I’ve listened to quite a bit of gender-jargon from self-righteous feminists, and I’ve been sjubjected to too much of the sexploitation rhetoric from right-wing religious relics. But I’ve rarely seen a more straight-forward [...]
