Friday, July 30, 2010

tilting at windmills

I can't think of a better metaphor to describe the current Minister Of Communication's fetish with cleansing the Indonesian web sphere of porn just in time for Ramadan this August. He certainly has his windmills lined up. But who is he kidding really? By his own lieutenant's admission his ministry is incapable of blocking more than 3000 porn sites per day. The Internet porn business creates some 4 million sites per day - created by some of the most Internet-savy people on the web. So, according to  my math. the government may at best be able to block some 40,000 sites before Ramadan. That leaves only a mere 39, 960,000 porn sites for the porn crazed, sex staved, uberhorny, morally challenged rakyat to nibble on before their annual month long abstinence.  This solution will be as much use as issuing spoons to Jakarta residents to prevent flooding during rainy season. I'm not even going to bother with the sms text porn,sms picture porn and cell phone porn movies flying around the country for years now. You don't even need the Internet for that shit.

Here is some free advice for the good minister. You wanna limit the effects of porn? Start with your kids. Watch a porn video with them or at least sit them down for a nice chat. Trust me, they will probably be so creeped out from watching/discussing porn with their parents that any possible mystique will be totally  and irretrievably lost. Failing that you could foist off your kids sex education on the public school system or leave it to the dvd merchants in glodok. Implementing blanket bans may garner the morality vote but really its a fig leaf covering your own inability to deal  sensibly with the problem.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi PJ,
Porn stuffs are like Prostitution and Illegal drugs everywhere around the world. They exist even during cold war era in the USSR and its satellite countries, communist China, Cuba.
Maybe some can be blocked, but I have great doubt they'll be able to block them totally.
I

pj said...

That was kind of my point. Might as well pass laws regulating the tides or the weather.

Carla Chanliau said...

very well put.

pj said...

carla: thanks! It seems to be a case of porn-on-the brain going on.

Tikno said...

At one sides the Minister's doing the right things based on his position to promote what is called "moral act", like in many countries also banning pornography sites, right?

But... sexual desires naturally existed in human neural impulse since born. It's impossible to be cleaned.

What is best to be done is like you said above that is educate our children about sex wisely, with the hope their curiosity will be reduced, knew what's right or wrong, after they learned it. That's better than if they are looking for the answers out there.

Unfortunately, for many people here, your way is something considered as taboo to be talks to children even after sweet-seventeen.

pj said...

Hi Tikno

I think you are right about the taboo thing. I think its difficult for adults to talk frankly to their kids about sex.

I don't think menkom should be menmorals as well. The man has all kinds of plans for censoring the internet.