Older women walk streets as prostitutes
By Gin Kurniawan
YOGYAKARTA (JP): With their traditional dress and the extra kilograms that come with aging and bearing children, they do not fit the "pretty woman" stereotype of sexy young prostitutes with hearts of gold. But the 20 middle-aged and elderly women -- ages ranging from 45 to 60 -- sell sex under the guise of massage services when night falls at Jl. Pasar Kembang in the city's tourist belt.
On one night, Suharti sat as if deep in contemplation, puffing intently on a cigarette. Restlessly, the plump 45-year-old looked right and left. A pedicab driver eventually approached her and, after a brief exchange, the woman gingerly stepped into the pedicab. Her customer was a man staying at a cheap hotel nearby.
Suharti and the other older women have different tales to tell than the young sex workers roaming the tourist kampong. Yayuk, 51, has nine children and 25 grandchildren. They may not be able to wear sleek dresses and heavy makeup, but they say they do not lack regular customers.
"Don't think that I have no customers. In fact I have many," said Parni, 60, who hails from Boyoyali, Central Java. She said her much younger lover is a train engineer.
The women, who often stay up until 3 a.m. waiting for clients, take good care of their health. "We regularly drink traditional herbal medicine," said Parni, a divorcee with a child.
Their choice of fashion -- what Suharti joking called their "on duty" wear -- is demure. They wear the kebaya, the long- sleeved blouse pinned at the front. Tight jarik sarong covers the lower part of the body and is kept in place by the stagen cummerbund worn by Javanese women. A selendang shawl drapes from one shoulder across the body, and the konde hairbun crowns the appearance of respectable traditional women.
This is precisely the look -- old-fashioned and almost matronly -- which attracts many of their customers. These include men who seem to suffer from an Oedipal complex or others with a sexual fetish for seeing the women in the kebaya. Their johns are a broad cross section of society, ranging from young men and men of their age, and locals staying in cheap motels to foreign tourists in star-rated hotels in the Malioboro area.
Why have these women taken to the streets, especially when prostitution is severely condemned in this conformist society? Their almost universal reply is the need for money. Most of them work during the day but their earnings are not enough to support their families. Several decided to become sex workers after their husbands left them.
Salbiyah became a prostitute after her husband married another woman. The mother of four works during the day at a pawnshop in Prambanan, Yogyakarta, and her family has no inkling of her double life.
She leaves the house in everyday clothes -- "I would feel self-conscious if I left home in my kebaya" -- but changes into traditional attire near Jl. Pasar Kembang. She looks for customers among men eating at the foodstalls lining Jl. Malioboro.
Suharti is married and the mother of three. Her husband's income was not enough to make ends meet. She opened a stall at Beringharjo market but it went bankrupt.
"I then decided to earn additional income this way without my husband or my children knowing," she said.
Parni has a similar story to tell. She began earning her living as a street vendor more than 20 years ago at Tugu station, Yogyakarta. She could not compete with other street vendors and quit the job after her husband died that year. She then worked as a freelance masseur at hotels on Jl. Pasar Kembang. One day, a customer asked her for sex.
The women sell themselves for between Rp 20,000 and Rp 75,000 per customer, with about a quarter of this going to the pedicab drivers or hotel workers who find the johns. They try to limit the number of customers each night to maintain their health. "It is enough for us to get three customers a night," Parni said.
Despite the social condemnation and the risk of their families finding out, some of the women claimed to have made a profitable living from their work. Parni said she had bought a large tract of land in East Java for her family from her moonlighting on the streets.
Koentjoro, a teaching staff member at the School of Psychology, Gadjah Mada University who has researched the sex industry in several cities, said the presence of older prostitutes was not new to Yogyakarta. He said many customers -- ranging from rickshaw drivers to high-ranking officials -- were sexually stimulated by a fetish for the women's dress, not their bodies.
"The jarik cloth could stir fantasies in the men, especially those who like traditional items, which they could not get from regular sex workers," he said. They may be turned on watching the women taking off the setagen, a cummerbund which can be as long as two or three meters.
Some of the johns mistakenly believe the older prostitutes in traditional garb were free of sexually transmitted diseases, according to Koentjoro. He said this was a dangerous misperception as many of the women neglected to have check-ups for STDs or take proper care of their health.