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.