Asia: Beyond the Blue Horizon

The West may be pushing the boundaries of sexual permissiveness ever outward, but Asia seems to be moving in the opposite direction. In India last week Topic A was a lip-smacking debate on the issue of on-screen kissing. South Viet Nam’s government has closed down three publications this year for overly explicit descriptions of sex, and Taiwan police have arrested 763 long-haired boys and miniskirted girls since January for offending public decency. Thai officials have damned the miniskirt, and Malaysia’s minister of education has ordered students “not to become slaves to Western fashion.”

Most Asian societies take a love-and-let-love attitude toward sex, as long as it is kept private. The trouble is that younger Asians, anxious to keep up with the latest fads flowing from Manhattan and London, have gone public. India’s debate, for example, was set off when a government censorship commission recommended that “if in telling a story it is relevant to depict a passionate kiss or a nude figure,” moviemakers should do so. After all, the commission noted, Indian directors never hesitate to feature bump-and-grind girly dances so provocative that they “may almost be called the performance of a unilateral act of coitus.” The argument impressed few Indians; in a recent poll, 75% opposed kissing and nudity in films—this in the land of the Kama Sutra and the world’s most erotic temple carvings. Buddha himself helps explain such contradictory attitudes toward sex. Like St. Augustine, he spent his youth exulting in the pleasures of the flesh and his later years exalting the spirit. More immediate was the puritanical impact of the Moslems, whose Mogul empire controlled the subcontinent from 1526 until the early 1700s. The confusion in attitudes persists; while most Indian women haughtily reject the ubiquitous miniskirt, the partygoing younger ones have adopted the “hipster sari.” The bottom portion is tied low enough to expose a generous expanse of the upper derrière, while the top, or choli, has been reduced to startlingly provocative dimensions.

The Long and Short. The miniskirt has caught on all-embracingly in Saigon and Bangkok, despite official censure. To avoid police harassment, Saigon prostitutes trip along downtown streets wearing ankle-length raincoats over their minis. In Bangkok, short skirts are criticized primarily as a symbol of the increasingly resented U.S. presence. Teachers, for example, have been told to stop wearing miniskirts because they are “an example of poor Western culture.” Nonetheless, Princess Ubol Ra-tana, the King’s oldest daughter, sports a mini while shopping in Bangkok’s boutiques. Thailand, for all its resentment of Western variations of permissiveness, has long been one of Asia’s more lubricious societies. In addition to more than 2,400 brothels staffed by 151,000 prostitutes, there are hundreds of “massage parlors”—where, it is rumored, even massages are sometimes available.

In Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew last spring shuttered the Fireplace Club, a membership-only discothèque whose president bragged about its pickup potential. The club was closed, however, because it was a suspected haven for drug users. In Indonesia, President Suharto is so intent on setting a better example than hard-wenching Predecessor Sukarno that he and his wife see no love scenes in their screening room. When something saucy comes up, the projectionist puts his hand over the lens. Film censorship in Taiwan is somewhat more professional: censors last year found themselves forced to snip sexy bits out of 65% of the 237 foreign films screened in island theaters. Even scenes showing girls in Bikinis are taboo. The Communist Chinese are still more puritanical. Girls and boys alike wear near-identical jackets, trousers and caps, producing—unconsciously, of course—the unisex look. Peking’s view of the latest in Western pop dancing: “vulgar and revolting actions” performed simply and solely by “class enemies.”

Cultured Intrusion. Many Asian critics of what they consider Western sexual excesses are not at all worried about such abstract notions as morality. What does concern them is fidelity to their own cultural traditions. The Thai or Vietnamese businessman who openly keeps several “minor wives” or mistresses and regularly visits the local massage parlor frowns on miniskirts, not because they are morally objectionable but because they represent a cultural intrusion.

For that very reason the Japanese, almost alone among the Asians, seem unconcerned by the debate over public permissiveness. As the U.S. occupation showed, the Japanese have a way of transforming what looks like a cultural intrusion into something all their own. Thus, of the 487 movies produced in Japan last year, 267 were so-called “eroductions”—a Japanese neologism combining “erotic” and “production” and referring to adults-only features with a strong tinge of blue. The leading “ero-ducer,” Koji Wakamatsu, has great plans in store: “What I must have,” he says, “is a helicopter shot of the ground covered with nothing but naked women —all the way to the horizon.” He might find the perfect location in central Tokyo. Palace Plaza, observers report, nightly turns into what can only be described as a sex park.