Letter: Obedient Wives Club

You just have to love Indonesia’s lunatic fringe, which never fails to regularly deliver some truly preposterous ideas destined to further highlight just how out of touch with the modern world are certain segments of this country’s population.

On this occasion, it is the establishment of the Obedient Wives Club that was the subject of a page 4 news item in the June 20 edition of The Jakarta Post.

With its requirement that “a wife has to be 100 percent obedient to her husband in all aspects, especially in sexual treatment”, the Obedient Wives Club offers an amusing and timely counterpoint to the President’s recent strutting on the world stage with his assurances about what a democratic, modern, progressive and tolerant country Indonesia has become, ready to take its place on the world stage.

A more nuanced, not to say more truthful, description of contemporary Indonesia would seem to be that Indonesia has, in its major cities, a small but growing number of well-educated people possessed of the democratic, modern, progressive and tolerant values highlighted by the President.

However, the future of these people is in serious danger of being compromised by the extremists and fanatics who, sadly, have gained greater prominence in Indonesian society in recent times. The founders of the Obedient Wives Club are surely one of the more entertaining manifestations of this danger.

No well-educated and modern-thinking Indonesian, whether male or female, could but fail to cringe in embarrassment and humiliation at the establishment of the Obedient Wives Club, with its Middle Eastern and Middle Ages view of marriage and the respective roles of husband and wife. Although it is tempting to just laugh off the Obedient Wives Club as a ridiculous aberration, the Obedient Wives Club is surely symptomatic of a more serious reality.

That reality is that there are groups at work in Indonesian society that are determined to prevent Indonesia from becoming a democratic, modern, progressive and tolerant society and, by implication, to prevent educated and modern-thinking Indonesians from realizing their potential.

In a sense then, the Obedient Wives Club needs to be taken seriously, not because of its numbers or values but because of what it represents in terms of the growth of reactionary forces in this country. The establishment of the Obedient Wives Club should cause all thinking Indonesians to ask themselves what sort of country they want Indonesia to be.

Is it to be a country along the lines of Saudi Arabia or Iran, places where the founders of the Obedient Wives Club would surely feel very much at home?

William A. Sullivan
Jakarta