Gender politics: Indonesia rocked by screen kiss
Gender politics: Indonesia rocked by screen kiss
AC Grayling, Guardian News Service, London
Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic country, is currently being stirred by a kiss. It is a kiss between a 16-year-old girl and her 19-year-old boyfriend, and it occurs in an Indonesian- made film set in Jakarta.
Such is its impact, the film has out-grossed two of the most successful Hollywood films ever to be shown in Indonesia, The Lord of the Rings and Titanic.
It is not that Indonesians are unused to screen kisses, but Hollywood films are one thing, Indonesian-made films another. This one, entitled Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (What's up with Cinta?), breaks new ground in its depiction of relationships.
Produced by Mira Lesmana, a young filmmaker, who cut her teeth shooting television advertisements in Jakarta for western products, it tells of a pair of high-school students who fall in love, but have to separate when the boy leaves Indonesia with his political-dissident father who cannot bear the constraints of Indonesian society any longer.
The kiss takes place right at the end of the film when the lovers part at the airport. It is not a Hollywood snog, but it is not a light buss either.
When a conservative, religion-influenced society is set alight by the public depiction of a sexual act -- for that is what a lovers' kiss is -- it marks the presence or imminence of moral change. The crowds who have queued to see this film like it; not just the teenagers, who whistle and cheer when they see the kiss, but adults also.
The question is: does a film like Ada Apa dengan Cinta? change the moral climate, or does it merely reflect a change that has already happened? Is it a catalyst or a symptom?
The answer is, both. The reason? There is a feedback mechanism in social change. A moral climate begins to thaw, after a while making it possible for a daring individual or group to offer a public comment on that change, or - more tellingly still - a representation of it in a popular art form.
The representation, although a consequence of the change because it would not have been thinkable otherwise, in its own turn makes further change possible by putting a seal on the original change, in a significant sense making it official. By attracting interest and approval from its target audience it becomes a token of permission for them, and like Indonesia's kiss comes to be iconic.
One example of the process is Britain in the 1960s. In the memories of today's 50-somethings -- the generation who were there -- the music, drugs, sex and revolution, all wreathed in the smoke of a thousand joints, doubtless now appear a seamless whole if remembered at all.
But there was a series of signal events in that decade which both reflected what had been happening in the 15 years since 1945, and drove those developments further. The 1960s saw the arrival of the contraceptive pill, the Lady Chatterley trial, Oh! Calcutta!, and the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults.
The surrounding atmosphere of liberalization was exhilarating.
Part of the feeling was that a prevailing hegemony of disapproval and restraint had been defeated, and that a new, young, fresh and delightful world of permission had arrived.
Something like this could be in the wind for Indonesia following the kiss. If it is, the relaxation of mood would be like the change that has happened in moral attitudes during the last two decades in another morally and ideologically conservative society: China.
The possible, and perhaps even likely, parallels between China and Muslim societies are many and instructive.
Twenty years ago, young couples strolling along the Bund in Shanghai -- China's fastest, loosest city, always ahead of the game -- might sneak a circumspect kiss under the cloak of night when they thought only other young couples were near.
Now (although the Bund has changed into a motorway, destroying the atmosphere of the world's only river embankment to be lined with Art Deco skyscrapers), there are no such compunctions, and the little Bund garden once famous for its sign "No Chinese or dogs" resembles a corner of London's Hyde Park on a sunny day in respect of the bare flesh and kissing it contains.
These changes are symptomatic of many others. If young couples are kissing on the Bund -- and in the parks of other Chinese cities -- as they would not have dared to do 20 years ago, there have been commensurate changes at the other end of the scale.
Two decades ago, there were officially no prostitutes in China. A Shanghai street once famous for its brothels became a municipal museum of an extraordinary kind, for reclaimed prostitutes continued to live there as an exhibit of what communism had done in the way of saving China from its sinful capitalist past.
The ex-prostitutes, well into advanced old age, could give a plausible recitation of what they had been taught to say in their "re-education" lessons.
Today, the prostitutes are back, not officially but without disguise. They work the karaoke bars, which have sprung up by the thousand in the last decade or so, and the phrase which describes what they do, xia hai, also means "going into business" in the more conventional sense. In between these ends of the scale other changes are commensurate.
Divorce and cohabitation were highly unusual, and certainly unmentionable, when Deng Xiao Ping first came to power. Now they are becoming normal, if not quite yet the norm.
Morals under the first 50 years of Communist party rule in China were every bit as prim as those typical of the most conservative Islamic societies.
Immorality of the conventional kinds -- mainly (as usual) sexual immorality -- was regarded as uncommunist and in some obscure way a threat to party control. (This was not how the Communist party in Britain thought before 1939; not a few of those who joined it did so because of the permissiveness at its summer schools.)
But the old Chinese dispensation of concubinage and relaxed attitudes to "vice" of all kinds was swept away by the new masters, and a fierce intolerance of western attitudes to private life supervened.
Under the direction of China's own Mrs Grundy, one Deng Li Xun (known as "Little Deng" to differentiate him from the tiny Deng Xiao Ping, who was half as tall), campaigns against "spiritual pollution" were conducted during the 1980s in an attempt to prevent the Chinese, and especially young Chinese, from imitating western styles in dress, coiffeur, dancing, attitudes and sex.
The effort failed.
To say that exactly the same attitudes and practices are typical of Islamic societies is to register the fact that the morality required by adherence to a faith -- by whatever name the latter goes -- is seen by the orthodox upholders of the faith as important to its survival.
But as in Indonesia, other Islamic societies are showing signs of shift towards more liberal attitudes.
The prime example is Iran. A third of the Iranian population is under 30, and has therefore grown up under the post-Shah dispensation. In the past 10 years, the ban on pop music and strict dress codes for women have collapsed in the face of youthful pressure.
There are public pop concerts now, and women wear multicolored headscarves which reveal their hair. The young of Iran do not want to exclude the world, they want to join it.
Morality and ideology always stand in an interesting relationship. The contemporary west leaves morality largely to the private sphere, and tolerates a wide diversity of outlooks and behavior there, in accordance with its liberal ideology.
Strongly hegemonic ideologies, as until recently in communist China and still in theocratic or quasi- theocratic dispensations such as Muslim countries, do not leave morality to the private sphere, and are actively interventive.
The Saudis have, as the Taliban had, special police to enforce morality. So, when the moral and ideological begin to change their relationship, the latter leaving the former increasingly alone, interesting possibilities and new problems appear.
The reason that moral conservatives oppose seemingly innocuous practices such as teenage kisses is that they think there is an inevitable connection between them and the larger permissiveness which the west exemplifies, and which is returning to China. What they fail to recognize is that social phenomena such as prostitution and marital breakdown exist in any society, but very much underground in the repressive ones.
The cost of driving them out of sight is paid by the rest of society in the form of repression and limitation. When the latter is lifted, the other phenomena merely come into view. And it is healthier for a society that they should be in view, for then they are less harmful.
More importantly, the public discussion of human relationships, especially in such a potent public medium as film, is essential to the good of individual lives themselves. If relationships are ever stilted, unimaginative, unsatisfying, exploitative, furtive, sleazy or violent, it will have a great deal to do with the meddling hand of moralism.
If there is a troubling level of relationship breakdown, family unhappiness, failed marriages, unwanted pregnancies, especially among single girls and young women, and a high rate of abortions, it will again often be because of conservative moral attitudes - specifically, the counterproductive effect of the endeavor to control natural human sentiments and desires by means of denial, by limiting knowledge and opportunity in order to direct the affective side of human nature into as anodyne and routine a channel as possible.
Moralists think that if they expose people -- and especially the young, those volcanoes of hormones -- to as little stimulation as possible by censoring romantic images and sexual references, and by keeping people as much in the dark and as much under a sense of prohibition as they can, they will thereby squeeze "immorality" out of daily life, or at any rate keep it bottled.
But there exactly lies their mistake. Imprisoning such feelings is an invariable recipe for empowering them. Ignorance about how to deal with them means that when they express themselves, they might do so negatively, even harmfully, and with serious consequences - which is almost always the result when secrecy, ignorance and shame combine.
Indonesia's kiss might well mark a change towards greater openness and acceptance of the place of love and sex in human experience, not least of its importance to the young. If it is, it will symbolize much more than just this: for when the stays are loosened on the sphere of private morality, much else begins to breathe more freely in the society at large.