Something seems to be amiss in the current nationwide crackdown on prostitution.
Tangerang municipality is leading the charge by rounding up women walking alone in main streets past newly imposed curfew hours, but Jakarta and other major cities have also been raiding locations allegedly used as brothels. Needless to say, these campaigns get massive coverage by the ever news-hungry media, with female prostitutes the main focus, to send a clear message that the authorities are serious about fighting vice. (Yeah – right)
Waged in the name of stopping society's moral decay and saving the nation's young from moral bankruptcy, one is left to wonder if the campaign is missing the real targets.
Commercial sex workers who sell their bodies for a few hundred thousand to a few million rupiah (a few million, seems a lot for a bonk to me, thought that top price was a million in places like Styx Bar) are certainly a menace, and if they operated in your neighborhood, you'd probably want them removed too, and thus you would wholeheartedly support the campaign.
But let's be honest with ourselves. These streetwalkers are not the only ones who are selling their bodies and souls for financial or material gain in this country. Since they work in hiding to evade the authorities, they are not even the most visible of all prostitutes, either.
No. There are bigger prostitutes -- bigger fish for the authorities to catch if they are serious about wiping out prostitution. And a lot of the time, these prostitutes do their deeds so blatantly that it is really just a matter of political will for the authorities to round them up.
Prostitution is usually defined as the sale of sexual services, but the online encyclopedia Wikipedia says: "In a more general sense of the word, anyone selling his/her services for a cause thought to be unworthy can be described as prostituting him/herself."
Going by this wider definition, we can think of many other people in various forms of employment who are engaging in the world's oldest profession:
* The elected politicians who betray the people's mandate by continually claiming to work for the people when they are really just serving their personal and political interests.
* The appointed officials and bureaucrats who, instead of acting as the servants of the people, make the people their servants while enriching themselves.
* The intellectuals who sell their minds and thoughts to provide scholarly justifications for laws and policies that are clearly detrimental to the interests of the people.
* The Iman’s and priests who willingly give a religious cloak to laws and regulations that suppress people's freedoms and rights.
* The journalists who betray the public trust and fill the media with lies and half-truths to mislead the people.
True to the wider definition of prostitution, they are selling services for causes thought to be unworthy. And there is no cause more unworthy than corruption.
These, and many other people in different professions, are the real hardcore prostitutes and thus the real menace to society. Their corrupt and perverted conduct poses a much more serious threat to the nation's morals than the simple sexual services offered by streetwalkers.
Most streetwalkers enter the profession not by choice but because of economic pressures. 11 million people within Indonesia are out of work (according to unreliable official statistics) and 30 million others are underemployed. For many, prostitution is the only available means of survival.
Such justification cannot be used by the elite members of society who willingly and knowingly sell their soul and services, and sometimes their body too, for profit, material or otherwise. Their only reason for prostituting themselves is greed.
And they are doing it in the open for all to see. Corruption is so rampant that Indonesian children, whose future we are all concerned about, are so exposed to such practices at early age that some grow up to accept them as normal.
Moral decadence is indeed a big problem in this country, but moral hypocrisy is an even bigger problem since we tolerate the bigger and more dangerous type of prostitution.
Currently its cool to condemn prostitution in the name of morality, but it's the bigger and more menacing prostitutes that deserve to be pilloried.
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