S

exy women sell — Hollywood knows it, advertising companies know it, the media knows it — Hell, everyone knows it!

And that includes Sarah White, aka the Naked Therapist (sarahwhitetherapy.com). She conducts online sessions from her New York office, where the 24-year-old therapist sheds her clothes in counseling sessions. She claims that as she slowly peels off garments, the layers of her clients’ subconscious are peeled away, too. She bares her body, they bare their souls.

Yeah, right, Sarah. They’re only coming for the advice, huh?

Indonesia has something better than Sarah White (who’s not even a licensed sex therapist). Zoya Amirin (zoyaamirin.com) is a certified sex psychologist and claims to be our first and only female one. “It’s high time that everyone in Indonesia [became] more open-minded about sex,” Zoya says.

She recently launched a 15-minute weekly podcast called “In bed with Zoya” to “provide some frank, accurate talk about the bedroom”. Zoya’s noble mission is to debunk the misguided myths she says can ruin relationships, and even lives.

The foreign media pounced on her. Why wouldn’t they? Like Sarah White, Zoya is an attractive, sexy young woman “selling” sex (although with her clothes decidedly on) but in an Islamic country. “Muslim nation’s female sex therapist goes online,” reads a typical headline.

Well, maybe, but there’s a few facts that need to be straightened out here.

Fact 1: Zoya may be the first sex therapist in Indonesia to go on the Internet, but she’s hardly the first qualified female sex therapist. Not by a long shot. PKBI (Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association, (hivos.nl/dut/community/partner/50000239) was set up in 1957, long before Zoya was even born!

The University of Indonesia School of Psychology, Zoya’s alma mater, was set up earlier still, in 1952. Some of its female graduates have been working in sexual health since its early years. Ninuk Widyantoro is one of them. She’s been active from 1980 and is currently the director of the Women’s Health Foundation (YKP, ykesehatanperempuan.org, which collaborates with the government and NGOs, including Islamic ones.

People like Ninuk work in a very strategic way, and don’t ... er … overexpose themselves, because that would be counterproductive. They know they are up against a wall of moral conservatism.

Fact 2: The common perception is that Islam views sex negatively, but in fact it celebrates sex (within marriage, of course). According to a close Muslim girlfriend who studied at a pesantren (traditional Islamic boarding school), the discussion of sexuality in Islam is, in reality, very broad and open. In fact, sex is recommended as an enjoyable and healthy aspect of life, while celibacy is frowned upon. Sex has even been described as sadaqah – an act of charity! Time to start giving, folks?

And yes, sex education is taught at pesantrens to children as young as 7, through fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). It’s pretty rudimentary, but progressive ulemas like Kiai Husein Muhammad in Cirebon are building on this tradition, with an integrated approach to sexual health and gender rights.

And as I have often said, Indonesians are a raunchy lot. For the most part, Islam here is “tropical Islam”: much more open than in the Middle East, on which the media usually base their (ethnocentric) stereotype of our religion.

Despite all this, a minority group of Islamist hard-liners in Indonesia want to shout down any public discussion of sex. This is clear from their sharia-based perdas (regional regulations) aimed at controlling women and sexual behavior; the passing of the so-called antipornography law in October 2008; and the persecution of Nazril Ilham aka Ariel (Indonesia’s first celebrity sex tapes!) and Erwin Arnada (the former editor of Playboy Indonesia).

I am sure that these hard-liners will see Zoya’s new service as part of the “decadent West”, which is what they call anything they don’t like.

 They don’t care that this is essentializing and hypocritical, and often just a projection on the dominant West of Indonesia’s basic permissiveness and immorality.

Yes folks, we Indonesians love sex – even the hard-liners (which may explain why they’re always talking about it! Pity they don’t want to hear anybody else’s opinions on the subject).

If the government doesn’t firm up on allowing sex education instead of limply pandering to hard-liners, it will be Indonesian women, teenagers and children who will pay the price — as usual. Just look at the facts. A survey by the Indonesian Commission for the Protection of Children (KPAI, http://www.kpai.go.id/) shows that — like it or not — 30 percent of children between the ages of 14 and 18 have had sex.

The lack of comprehensive sex and reproductive health (SRH) information means these children are left with questionable sources of answers to their SHR queries: the hard-liner’s puritanical monologues, tacky porno DVDs (available in abundance), the media, or their peers. This results in teen pregnancies, STDs, unsafe abortions and various other sex-related problems, because they don’t know what they’re doing.

And what about HIV/AIDS? UNAIDS has said the spread of HIV/AIDS in Indonesia is one of Asia’s fastest growing epidemics (5 million people living with HIV/AIDS in 2010). It’s a looming crisis.

So, I have nothing against what Zoya is doing. In fact, let a thousand Zoyas bloom, because if we continue with our hypocritical, bury-our-heads-in-the-sand-don’t-mention-sex, approach the crisis will hit us, and hit us hard.

And that, even Sarah White would agree, is the naked truth.

The writer (juliasuryakusuma.com) is the author of Julia’s Jihad.