Open up the gates of the prisons and build a few more, for the jails will be flooded once the pornography bill is passed into law. Streets and houses will be home only to the pious, those who do not own pornographic CDs or magazines, and who never take a peek at any porn websites.
We will have no writers or artists "exploring" sexuality for art's sake and exploitation of women will finally come to an end. The world will be a much better place with no girls flaunting their wares and offering services for cash, and us wives will live in bliss. Well, almost.
The perfect logic is that we will stand a better chance of preserving happy families and happy couples if all those bitches (real and virtual: the bill includes animation as porn material) became inaccessible to our spouses, who would risk jail if they tried. This is one reason behind the considerable support of the bill, which has been on and off the legislature's agenda for several years.
Apart from the political need to get the votes of those thirsty for a quiet life on the straight and narrow, this reason is "women's un-solidarity" -- the eternal divide between the millions of women trying to hang onto their men and those perceived to threaten their possession / object of devotion /source of security / love of my life.
Whether it's Lara Croft or Lara on the block.
The same divide is manifest in reports about women ganging up on brothels and threatening to burn, or even actually setting fire to, those dens of iniquity, centers of what locals call perusak rumah tangga orang or family bashers.
It is also immensely satisfying for a woman to nail that long-legged creature who caught her man's attention and bash her over the head, at least in her imagination.
We're not very graceful beings, are we?
So at least a law stating that anyone seen as a potential whore is a criminal, even if there was no way our man could get the phone number of that FHM cover girl, sounds ever so comforting to many women (those who see divides like wives/whores etc.)
Who cares if all those activists assert time and again that any such bill should differentiate between model and publisher, distributor, producer -- or worse, a trafficking syndicate -- because the voluptuous thing herself is a victim.
"How can she be a victim? She gets paid!" a friend said.
To which activists patiently explain that the model or even the prostitute remains a victim of the patriarchy, exacerbated by absolute or relative poverty (meaning she can eat three times a day but can't buy Prada, even if it's fake).
Spreading awareness of patriarchy and what it does to each of us is what activists preaching "women's solidarity" try to do.
That we all get to see the world as men see it, through our upbringing and education, so that eventually all sisters are victims -- the sex worker who finds that selling herself sends her high up the social ladder where domestic drudgery will not; the teenager who picks up after all those who have defined beauty for her; and the wives who fret night and day about staying young, and acquiring God's grace, striving to be lady and tramp without clicking "porn" too much (for hark ye, the gates to paradise are open wide to those who serve their husbands well).
Now, all that victim-ology of patriarchy takes tons of explaining to do. Criminalizing access to bad girls and criminalizing bad girls themselves sounds much better -- few heed church and state!
No one would dispute the benefit of such a law if it did indeed protect our children from the indiscriminate distribution of vulgarity and exploitation.
But I never could quite convince myself whether we could indeed keep our men if brothels were raided daily and closed down, if the tramps disappeared from the glossies and if there were no such thing as porn CDs or websites parading the females that desperate wives try to compete with.
Proponents of the porn bill seek to convince us to give it a try.
Better insurance would perhaps be to brainwash the males, cage 'em 'n' chain 'em, or give them blinkers so all they see are us decent desperate worn-down womenfolk.
Until we can do that, bad girls (assuming I'm a nice old one) can't care less.
Good girls can go to heaven, they say, but bad girls go everywhere.
All this makes it a bit hard to shout, "Women of the world unite!"
But I guess we'll just have to try, for all our little and big girls hovering between heaven and everywhere.
I just wouldn't worry about Lara Croft and Co., would you?
