It's impossible to regulate the world of illusion

It was a regularly scheduled late-night adult talk show on a private TV station, and the topic was sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

As the conversation moved onto how people could avoid contracting an STD, the camera panned to AIDS activist Baby Jim Aditya putting a condom on an artificial penis.

Would you call this porn? Or, instead, some much needed information?

Now let's switch channels to state-run TVRI, where mostly gray-haired men and women take a trip down memory lane to the pleasures of the past with ballroom dancing, once a mainstay of family gatherings, albeit thanks to Western influence.

It was kind of amusing to learn that the government viewed the grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts as "sexually suggestive", because of their outfits and all that dancing cheek to cheek.

Who is really sexually perverted here? Has the government ever seen the gyrations of dangdut singers when they perform before thousands of people, mostly young men?

Other programs have also been put on the "indecency" list, for either "explicit" or "implicit" pornographic images.

I find the accusation absurd. It must be that the government believes that pornography is any material, in the form of images, which could arouse sexual desire and encourage illicit sex. That's all, nothing more to be said.

I'm not against the government's campaign to curb the spread of pornography, especially that which could twist a young person's mind about sex and their view of women.

But I think that the government has totally overlooked the existence of illusion and fantasy, that which makes us uniquely human, and how there is no way to keep that in check.

A colleague of mine has a habit of ribbing a friend of his. Once, he told a gathering of friends at a street-side noodle stall in Central Jakarta that his pal was a sex maniac.

"We were walking beside a small pond where we saw two geese mating. When he got home, he told me later, he coaxed his wife to make love. It's unbelievable, he got in the mood by just seeing the two geese!" he said, getting a laugh from all the rest.

Unfortunately, he didn't have any scientific explanation about why it happened to back up his theory. For me, however, it said a lot about the way we are.

Sure, we can try to ban people from seeing "sexually suggestive" material, but can we forbid ourselves from fantasizing? The capacity for imagination is inborn and divine, as well as sexual desire itself, and it varies in each of us.

And experts say that fantasy can manifest in behavior, although the bad news is that misleading images can lead to even greater illusions and delusions.

It's clear to me that the government is not ready when what it considers the private world of sexual behavior is suddenly brought into public discussion.

At the same time, pornography keeps on becoming a much sought- after commodity here. It's big business, and is marketed through magazines, VCDs and the Internet.

When I was in elementary school back in the early 1980s, there were regular checks at school to find any students who took porn books to class. But, of course, even such threats could never stop people from looking for porn.

While some argue that porn creates addicts and leads to dehumanization of women, I believe that we would cease to be human if we didn't have our imaginations.

But, then, what does the government see as pornography? What's the best way to handle it? Perhaps they will clamp down on Discovery programs about wildlife and anything from the Animal Planet to try to regulate our world of illusion. Fortunately for us, it can't be done.

-- Ivy Susanti