There is a peculiar thrill to hearing your city described in terms less than conventional, more so when the talk is salacious, bordering on risqué. For all the respect you wish accorded to the weight of its history, the joy of its music, the singularity of its people and character – you also want it to speak for itself, ie to reveal itself with all its grey zones, its convolutions, the breadth of its unadvertised parts. Deep down there is a will for it to have a few tricks up its sleeves, to possess of certain quirks. You will it, for want of a better term, to have a secret subterranean world of sweet and shady dealings, just as the human psyche craves, seeks out, even needs its hidden life.



This was how I reacted when a friend declared, out of the blue, that Jakarta – capital city of the world’s largest Muslim majority country – is “the capital city of sex”. He is a businessman, notably reserved, sparing with words. Yet that evening, a little past midnight, sitting at the bar of one of the city’s most stylish establishments, all around was giddy, shaking, unfiltered lust. I could see how even he couldn’t look away. Through an accident of history, he became the reluctant observer par excellence of the city’s collective sexual behaviour.

“Just look at these people,” he said, when I asked him to elaborate on his earlier statement. “Where do you think they go as the night wears on? This is not their last stop.”

It’s not just sexual innuendo, it’s pure sex talk.

The next morning I am in Pilates class. We are a group of eight, ranging in age between 22 and 55; and even if I can’t see myself socialising with any of them, there is a natural camaraderie between women in groups. By the end of the first session, you’ll know what sexual positions A’s husband prefers; the way B loves to stretch her toes beyond her husband’s toes when they make love; which specialist, after almost 45 years of marriage, C’s near-senile father gets dragged to by his wife in order to “get it up” again.

Outside the class are modest, soft-spoken mothers, wives, daughters, homemakers, breadwinners. Inside the class, it’s not just sexual innuendo, it’s pure sex talk. And a lot of pelvic workouts. Everybody loves these because they strengthen the pelvic floor, help “tighten the grip” on your partner’s member. The women talk about this too, often in sweltering detail.

Today, one woman badly wants to talk to me. She’s approaching 50, but her body – lithe, toned to the hilt – is the envy of the group. She’s had work done on her face, but ever so subtly: some Botox on the lips, a little smoothening in the areas around the eyes, brow and eyelash extensions. And suddenly she comes out with it: “You know, the whole scene my husband puts me through? It’s really degrading,” she says. “What scene?” I ask her. She looks at me incredulously. “Why, the swinging scene, of course.” As if I should know.

We are impervious to information until we are ready for it.

It is surprisingly easy to be inducted into the swinging scene: the procedures are pretty straightforward. The key is knowing someone on the inside. I type “Jakarta swinging scene” into Google and in two seconds I am staring at links to several websites with physical addresses and email addresses of who to contact. There are several swinging clubs around town, with varying degrees of discretion, my Pilates friend informs me. But “the safest way”, she adds, is to join an official group online.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘In some cases, women like my friend, for instance, prefer to be pleasured by two or three men including her husband, but refuse to have their husbands pleasured by other women.’ Photograph: Marvi Lacar/Getty Images

The other avenue is word of mouth. A swinger like my Pilates friend, for instance, can ask a married friend, or a married colleague, who looks like they may be open to such arrangements, and find out whether they are interested. When interest is confirmed, she can show the couple’s photos to her husband and ask him if he is interested. The next stage is known as “getting to know you”. This can be anything from a coffee hookup to dinner for four, and once mutual trust is established, the couples can go straight to the main event – in a private house, apartment, or hotel room.

The rules of engagement will be spelled out: how many couples, how many men, how many women. In some cases, women like my friend, for instance, prefer to be pleasured by two or three men including her husband, but refuse to have their husbands pleasured by other women.

Whichever configuration you go for, two governing principles remain. One is the partner’s consent. If a husband or a wife seeks the company of one of their swinging partners behind the other’s back, then the deal is off. He or she has committed adultery. The other principle is absolute discretion. Identities are kept in the strictest confidence.

It is on those two key principles that the entire viability of the practice rests, both as a form of collective “rush” – a wild, euphoric, almost irrational sensation accessible only through furtive, backstairs channels – and as a means of escape from the stultifying conventions of formal life. For in my home city, there is much to escape from: so much more than just the nauseating tedium of urban and suburban middle-class marriages – so often empty, hopeless, like something out of Conrad. There is also the mounting ugliness of Indonesian politics, the unfathomable speed at which religious intolerance is on the rise and moderate voices undermined, the steady mainstreaming of the fascist right and how it has redefined conservatism, the maddening routine of Jakarta traffic jams.

As long as they err together, consensually, with eyes wide open so to speak, it is not errant behaviour.

The average married person is, to varying degrees, both an escapist and a conventional pragmatist. He or she may not care to join anti-LGBT rallies; he or she may not overtly show anti-Chinese and anti-Christian sentiments by baying for the blood of Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama who is currently standing trial for “blasphemy law”; he or she may be appalled by paedophiles but doesn’t support President Joko Widodo’s advocacy of chemical castration; he or she may find the conservative Islamic group Family Love Alliance (AILA)’s motto of “strengthening family values” quite appealing but won’t rule out the occasional fun nights at orgies. But what men and women alike are doing is to lay claim to twin rights that are jarringly mismatched – wanting both escape and stability.

While some have adulterous Emma Bovary-style affairs, others more sexually liberated, such as my Pilates friend and her insatiable husband, sign a pact. It is the fiendishly clever thing to do, the genius being that it gives the other party at once the right to err and keep their honour: as long as they err together, consensually, with eyes wide open so to speak, it is not errant behaviour. Opting for this choice is arguably more honourable than polygyny, the right still exercised by Indonesian men, permitted under Islamic marital jurisprudence, to have four wives at the same time.

The true feat of this “whole scene” is not its conforming to a larger class-based historical tradition – of libertinism among France’s bourgeois society, for instance, the roots of which have existed much longer but the practice of which, since the dawn of Aids, has only enjoyed a revival since the beginning of the new millennium, with the publication of such books as The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and Atomised, and the proliferation of heterosexual échangiste (swinging) clubs around France.

It is, rather, that the “whole scene” is both mainstream and progressive. Even if the Islam that is supposed to make up the 90% of Indonesia’s majority is mostly of the moderate and syncretic kind, Indonesian society on the whole is still pretty conservative. Morality is almost always linked to sexual behaviour, not corruption, say, or mendacity in public office. So what the “whole scene” offers is a way to buck the system: to deviate from the norm, to create an island for yourself, but to do so in a way that is also legitimate. The marriage pact is indeed a powerful thing: as long as it stays intact.

In all this, the most tactile and transforming part of the triumph, is, of course, the experience of the rush itself. At 48, my friend’s desire for sex, which has seen a steady increase since she hit the big Four Oh, is at an all time high. Meanwhile, her husband, who first introduced the swinging idea to her five years ago, is, in her own words, “hypersexed.” “He can never get enough,” she tells me.

As time progressed, he was experiencing a decline in professional and social confidence. He grew sullen and bitter; she suspected him of having an affair. With two teenage children they both love deeply, divorce is not an option. So she said yes to their first foray into sexual adventurism.

“Doesn’t it upset you a bit, the idea of being offered to other men as though you’re like some possession?” I ask her as we go to the reformer machine for some butt exercise.

“In the beginning, yes,” my friend says, as she prepares herself for a “spider” – an intricate movement that requires the widest plié – “Also the idea that my husband desired me only when he saw me being desired by other men. It was humiliating.”

“It got better after two years. I began to love the riskiness of it all; the constant flirting with danger.” She says as she seizes the belts for a little arm exercise, “And the variations! Nothing like entering a room, not knowing how it will be – my own ravishment in the hands of sometimes strangers. I became addicted to these … these myriad levels of bliss.”

There is a buoyant, almost touching quality to her expression as she looks for the right words. “It really turns me on, being desired by many men,” she tells me. “And nowadays I love it that my husband desires me more because of it.” In some perverse way, she feels liberated, more in control of her body. She also finds herself fantasising about some of the men she’s encountered, wondering what it would be like to see them on the sly, having them savour her in her own terms, not her husband’s.

“What if you fall in love with one of them?” I ask.

“I just don’t,” she says, haltingly. “The minute I feel it, it’s goodbye. If you can’t separate sex and emotions, forget it.”

I’m not convinced.

When I ask her what has changed, she replies, “Time.” The rush changes, the body changes, the pleasure changes. It is not anymore merely about the ecstasy of engaging in something mysteriously forbidden, testing the nebulous line between power and powerlessness, about feeling richly fulfilled and groaningly hollow, about seizing control and being humiliated. It is, rather, about the “joy of being surprised.” A quasi-religious experience, then: Saint Teresa by way of Bernini?

“But isn’t that what being high does?” My friend says. “To me sex often feels like the highest truth, a gift from heaven. Because the body doesn’t lie. And good sex is like this limitless thing, you know. You discover new things every time.”

Does it change your feeling sexually towards your husband? I ask her. On this she was less than categorical: in some ways, she feels she has come to understand his needs better, and consequently their lovemaking is more inventive than ever. At other times, it is the secret fantasies she harbours while making love to her husband that give her the real rush to the head, and are the real flames of her intoxication. “Monogamy is so passé,” she says with a somewhat studied conviction, “Surely we’re not designed for it.”

What about the “degrading” aspects she mentioned earlier? “Oh,” she says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “I didn’t mean it. I was in a bad mood.” But when the group has dispersed, she half-whispers, “Actually, nowadays my husband is insisting that I watch him being serviced by other women. I hate it. But he may leave me if I don’t allow him what he needs.” For a fleeting moment she looks genuinely pained, and no amount of poise and valour can mask it.

Indonesian women are as irreducible to stereotypes as Indonesia

But are such contradictions so surprising, wonders this Indonesian of Javanese and West Sumatranese extraction, schooled both in grace, modesty, and low-keyness and in a take-charge, matrilineal kinship assertiveness? We Indonesians have long lived with stories of emancipation. The Javanese have lived with the Book of Centhini, an encyclopaedia of life that tells of frenzied orgies, sex with animals, all kinds of sexual escapades and illicit pleasure – for more than 200 years. They have lived even longer with old village rituals such as Tayub parade, where provocatively dressed women dancers playfully seduce men. This is understood, uncontested, even celebrated by women as part of folk culture. And yet, there are so many stories of repression, injustice, and misogyny – just a few weeks ago, two prominent women rights activists were sexually harassed on the streets of Jakarta – and of the art of dealing with them with dignity.

Indonesian women are as irreducible to stereotypes as Indonesia, with its fabled 17,000 islands, is reducible to a single country. For every sequestered and powerless victim, there is the sexually autonomous and powerful agent.

The next time I see my friend, she is going away with her husband to Singapore. They are planning to hook up with two couples they know intimately. The airport is teeming with people going on the mini-pilgrimage to Mecca; she pulls me aside and tells me that some of her friends are among them. “Everyone I know is going on some kind of religious pilgrimage,” she says. “I mean, should I?”

I point out to her that a rush is a rush; everyone has his or her own kick. Not everybody has the money, or the lack of inhibition to do what she does. Not that they won’t find a way. It is certainly odd, the want of your own wicked story.

“I just love sex,” she sighs, even if her eyes tell a more complicated story. “If only more people were like me.”

Changes have been made to this article to protect identities.

This is an edited version of an article published in the January 2017 issue of the quarterly literary magazine Kulturaustausch.