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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Untuk kawan-kawan pembaca di Indonesia: di CCF Salemba ada pameran tentang AIDS, dan juga akan putar film “Harapan Lahir Dari Pengetahuan”. Menerutku judul aggak norah, tetapi gaya film belum tentu ikut judulnya, kan?
Well, those folks at DKT in Indonesia have done it again. Not content to rest on their laurels with the official Democrat Party condom, they’ve now got Indonesia abuzz in anticipation of The Earthquake, a vibrating condom which will be launched on February 23 (but which is available to the cognoscenti of Jakarta from today [...]
As the author of a (hideously technical) guide to coding of sexual behaviour data, I was intrigued by a recent excavation of the coded sex diaries of economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was married but enthusiastically pursued men for sex at any opportunity. He was also the consummate data nerd, so of course he kept [...]
Wandering around the villages of East Java on the last day of 2007, I came across a bunch of kids preparing for their New Year’s Eve festivities. No champagne for me, then…
Lee Rudolph suggested storm drains as a source of condoms that can be turned into hairbands. But Jakarta’s storm drains function are the city’s official waste collection system; filtering the condoms out of the assembled detritus would be daunting even to the city’s thousands of diligent garbage pickers. So Indonesia is importing used condoms from [...]
Since I’m on my way to Indonesia, I offer this great poster promoting Sutra condoms. “Sutera” means silk in Indonesia, but the temptation to draw parallels with India’s erotic classic was irresistible. Hence the Kama Sutra campaign. This particular poster only appeared in and around “entertainment” districts across the world’s most populous Moslem-majority nation.
