Porn bill threatens democratic freedoms

Ignas Kleden ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 10/08/2008 10:30 AM  |  Opinion

The division of social life into public and private domains aims to maintain an ideal balance between individual freedom and social order. The private domain becomes a place where aspirations for a good life can materialize with freedom for every individual.

It becomes a fortress in which to defend freedom from the unnecessary intervention of both the state and society into individual and personal life.

On the other hand, public domain is required to secure justice for every citizen of the state. The private domain is often manipulated into a safe hiding place for various kinds of injustices to the extent that these cannot be monitored and reduced because they are beyond the reach of public control.

Committing violence toward children or women, either in families or in factories, cannot be prevented if this practice is treated as merely a private affair. Turning the matter into a public issue, thereby putting it under public monitoring and public control, is an effective way to struggle against such injustices.

In contrast, the state and its public institutions are not allowed to interfere with matters pertaining to personal life such as taste, sense of beauty, culinary habit, love, religious preference or the use of leisure time. These matters have something to do with maintaining a good life and nothing to do with justice.

All kinds of liberal politics share the same tendency to narrow the public domain's scope and jurisdiction, leaving as many things as possible to individual choice and personal decisions. On the other side, all sorts of authoritarian or totalitarian politics have a common denominator: reducing the scope of the private domain and putting as many things as possible under the public control of the state.

It is fairly clear that the public domain is there to ensure the enforcement of justice, whereas the private domain functions to conserve individual freedom. A fundamental question that the draft bill on pornography has given rise to is: Which domain does the draft bill aim to secure?

If it wants to secure the private domain, it faces an impossible mission because the draft bill aims to regulate all opportunities in which sexual desire can be called forth. In that sense it does not ensure private domain, but interferes instead with the very personal and intimate feelings that belong to the private sphere proper. If, on the other hand, it wants to secure the public domain, it faces the question of justice and injustice.

Such a regulation will be very difficult to implement because individual responses pertaining to sex depend more on personal dispositions rather than on cultural artifacts that are produced to call forth sexual desires. It has to do more with personal experience, imagination and memories rather than with stimuli from the outside per se.

One might feel cool having a look at various items in a sex shop without becoming sexually stimulated. On the other hand, listening to a normal song can bring someone erotic feelings and sexual desire if the song happens to remind him/her of a love affair he/she ever had in the past.

This means, you can regulate the production and distribution of certain cultural artifacts, but you can never regulate the opportunities or occasions in which one becomes sexually titillated or not.

Such a regulation must not be based on the reasons for pornography (which is hard to define), but can be done on the basis of an educational considerations, for example, the protection of children who have not yet come of age from early exposure to the sexual behavior of adults.

At this particular point we can see that certain human behavior (especially that which relates to intimate feelings and subtle impressions) cannot be regulated by means of legislation, but rather by means of education and culture. You simply cannot substitute the function of law for the role of education and culture on certain matters.

In Middle Eastern countries men kiss each other by touching cheek to cheek, something that might appear strange in Western countries where kisses are given between men and women. In the big cities of Indonesia both Western and Middle Eastern customs of kissing have taken over, with high-ranking politicians exchanging kisses at formal occasions.

To regulate cultural behavior in general and sexual behavior in particular by means of law is futile because legislation cannot replace the role of education and culture in the private domain as much as the legislators cannot make a political decision by means of playing football. On top of it there are still so many public issues awaiting legislation --- from flood prevention to the use of electricity for ornamental purposes.

It is really difficult to understand why our legislators are troubling themselves with the pornography bill, which is hard to define. If they, however, insist on its legislation they might eventually transgress against the sacredness of personal privacy, thereby sinning against democratic freedoms that the private domain intends to maintain and defend.

The writer is a sociologist and the chairman of Indonesian Community for Democracy (KID).

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