WARNING: Explicit

YOU will be forgiven for being confused: Under Indonesia’s Criminal Code adulterers can be jailed for nine months and in Aceh, they get publicly caned. Viewing pornography can get you a four-year prison sentence. But amid the pungent canals of the nation’s 28 million person capital — the world’s largest Muslim-majority city — just about any shopping arcade has a “Massage House” where for $40 you can get a Cat Bath (being licked from head to toe by a sex worker) or a “no-hands” Super Breast Massage — where, yep, the sex worker uses her boobs to massage you — followed by intercourse. And if you are somewhere near a five-star hotel in the North Jakarta or you know a Taipan, a highly connected member of the nation’s rich “untouchable” class, $500 can really get you going: Sex with a sex worker in a Pajero (a driver is included in the fee) or $700 will get you the same in a moving Range Rover. PROSTITUTION CRACKDOWN Early last year, 34 white doves and multiple bunches of coloured balloons were released into the air to the beat of traditional Papuan drums when Indonesia’s Social Affairs Minister Khofifah Indar Parawansa announced an ambitious plan — to eliminate prostitution from the 17,500-island nation by 2019. Parawana, a member of the moderate (and let me clarify that basically means a political Islamic movement that does not believe in total integration between religion and law), though evidently morally conservative Islamic National Awakening Party, has become the face of the Government’s attempted move to bring in a five-year penalty for all sex outside of marriage (not just adultery — the current Indonesian law which covers prostitution offences). She has also said those caught visiting sex workers will have their faces published on social media. And Indonesia’s sex work crackdown has begun — the main tool — the growls, creaks and crashes of the bulldozer. 68 red-light districts across the archipelago nation have been razed so-far. THE CHEAP BROTHELS THAT REMAIN On a warm Jakarta evening, I caught a taxi through clogged traffic, past brightly coloured food carts and under street lights smudged by smog to Kalijodo, a district which had long been a slum/ritzy hotel hybrid. Up until about a year ago, the Kalijodo district had a little shanty town wedged between two rivers featuring 2,000 prostitutes who sold their services to low-end Indonesian workers for as low as $3 a go. That was until 6,000 police raided the 1.6-hectare area in February last year: Shutting down 500 businesses, bringing in the machines and leaving nothing except rubble. I arrived to the area felt a little bit at home — the new Kalijodo had become something you might see in a new Australian outer-suburb. There was an indoor sports centre, a skate park and a children’s playground. People were playing guitar and chess — people looked happy and they told me so. Indeed, the former red-light area was also demolished because of the local Government’s popular and widely respected urban renewal scheme. Only a few men, mainly the park’s food cart operators, said they wished the sex industry had stayed. When I asked where the prostitutes had gone, one of the operators reluctantly pointed to an unlit space across the river under a roaring highway overpass. A minute later I was over-there and heard: “Hi sir like a lady, Good for you, very small”. The invitation came from a small man, silhouetted in the dark new brothel slum, a makeshift collection of little rooms made of mismatched scrap wood and tin with the traffic zooming around us. I could see inside through the gaps and big cracks in these little constructions — rooms with grotty looking beds and ceiling fans clicking above them. But no more than a dozen bordello rooms. It left me wondering where the other 1,994 prostitutes had gone, and after much cajoling — I was told in a whisper: A few Kalijodo venues had moved to a district near the old Dutch town and reopened under new names. At the gritty horseshoe shaped arcade, there were four tacky “Karaoke bars” fronted by neon signs. I matched a venue name to the one I had been told about at the slum and headed inside. The place was, um …. Oriental Twin Peaks style lit entirely by dim-red globes. Towards the back dozens of girls wore high heel shoes in glass a fish tank room, frozen in boredom as they watched TV. Others were on the stage, topless in matching black lace G-strings lip-synching to an Adele remix in a synchronised dance. Then there was the Mammasan (the East and South East Asian term for a woman in charge of prostitutes). She was a modest looking 50-year-old Malay woman with short, un-styled hair: Exuding prison matron as I stood staring into the call girls’ glass chamber. Matron Mammasan flashed her laser light stick over the legs of the call girl I “chose” and took into a muggy upstairs room. I didn’t tell the prostitute I was gay, I played frigid, I said I just wanted to talk. She told me that venue was run by the same owners as several from Kalidjoro — though she didn’t come from there herself. But she did say that “Some of the ‘sex-girl’ in Jakarta places, work for themselves. Others for agents, many have debt”. Sex worker “debt” is often loans given to families in rural areas by pimps. The daughter then spends several years paying it off working as a prostitute for him. Other guys at the club told me some of the girls from the bulldozed area had simply gone to other clubs, some were working on street corners. Local media has reported many others were simply now using the internet — on twitter, Indonesians has a range of code words for prostitution: BO (book out), COD (cash on delivery) and DP (down payment). To date, no sex workers are known to have voluntarily joined the Government’s program to retrain them in poor-paying menial jobs. Eliminating prostitution across the 17,500 islands was always going to be a monumental task. One in thirty people on this planet live in Indonesia, which by some measures, is the fourth most economically unequal country in the world. HIGH CLASS SEX Sitting on a soft-padded lounge on the top level of an expensive hotel, I’m listening to the gentle flows of an artificial stream, dressed in a tartan silk robe. I had paid $20 to get in. I had to pay someone quite a bit more than that to even about find that penthouse place, an entire level of an otherwise nondescript five-star hotel. Toilets that smelt like lemon and mint, bathroom mirrors with spotlights, combs, moisturisers, toothbrushes, shavers, and face wash; smooth pebble floors, a high price restaurant, spa baths, twelve rooms playing lounge music, and five-dozen prostitutes — all retailing at roughly ten times the amount the girls had been charging at Kalijodo. Congregating in a suave red cocktail bar adjoining restaurant, some of the girls were in simple leopard prints, some in pink I Dream of Jeannie outfits, others in cat-woman outfits. They were grouped by country: Russian, Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Vietnamese, Uzbek and local. No police; and not a bulldozer in sight. Such is life in a high-rise, high-class whorehouse — where criminal underworld thugs protect the venue and rich, well-connected “untouchable” Indonesians own the place. Not even Indonesia’s moralistic mobsters: the Islamic Defender’s Front utter a word in protest about these places. Although recently they the Front tipped off Jakarta police about an apparent gay male (legal) “sex party”, that police then raided and broke up. Meanwhile Jakarta police won’t touch the rich heterosexuals participating in three-day sex parties with live music, Karaoke and cheap ecstasy on demand at other venues across the city. Nor will they go near the guys in the middle — the Indonesian men and the western expats who can afford $500 lesbian stage shows followed by a threesome, or the Jakarta specialty — sex with identical twins. “This move by the politicians in Indonesia to ban prostitution is the result of a creeping moral puritanism in Indonesian politics for the last 25 years,” Kevin Evans, a political economist and Indonesia Director of the Australia-Indonesia Centre told news.com.au. “I think they are trying to capture what they think is a block of conservative Islamic voters.” “But I think it’s a miscalculation,” he continued. “People in Indonesia value their history as a permissive open society and think their moral choices are a matter for them and the almighty — not for other people to impose their views and certainly not a matter for Government”. Luke Williams is a journalist and author of the Ice Age: A Journey into Crystal Meth Addiction. Sexwork & Me