Put Your Clothes Back On!
Himito Na Kyoto
I would like to believe that Thailand’s Ministry of Culture has more important and more worthwhile things to do than banning sex scenes in movies, confiscating films deemed to incite lust, and deciding which magazine cover models are too indecent. But in the public perception, as it is portrayed in the media, the Ministry’s role is limited to trying to remove all traces of sex from Thai culture. Ministry officials seem to think that by doing this, they can make Thai culture clean, pure, immaculate, and beautiful and that this is the only way to revive genuine Thai culture. I have no idea what makes these people think that a world free of sex is a perfect world or that by getting rid of pornographic pictures and magazines, they can bring about an end to rape and teenage intercourse.
The reason that the Ministry, or Khun Rabiebrat, keeps trotting out over and over is that we have to preserve and protect our precious culture and traditions. Our children are slaves to Western customs and an evil media culture (which includes women’s magazines that feature sexy photographs and movies with explicit sex scenes). We have to find a way to stamp out these evil influences that are corrupting Thai culture and destroying the peace and happiness that Thai people enjoyed for centuries.
This claim to be protecting and preserving the beauty of Thai culture not only begs the question, “So what makes you think you’re the only good person in the world?” – it also begs the question of why our precious national culture is in such danger. Why is it so fragile? Doesn’t it have any resistance of its own? Do we need a guardian like the Ministry of Culture to shield us from even the slightest threat? Or are we thinking of our culture as our daughter – beautiful, demure, obedient, and completely innocent of the ways of the world, while Culture Ministry officials, who represent the government, are the doting parents, morally obliged to protect their virtuous daughter in any way they can?
But the Ministry of Culture isn’t our parent, and Thai culture isn’t something pure and innocent. It’s not a young woman in a silk sarong and sash, her hands in a respectful wai, a Siamese smile on her face, like the posters promoting tourism in Thailand. Thai culture includes everything from masked dance drama to likay, lamtad, norah, and lakhon sor (folk theater); it is cock fighting and bull fighting; it is ancestor worship; it is thugs and thieves; it is somtam (papaya salad) and public cell phones that cost two baht a minute to call anywhere in the country; it is pak bung loi fah, kids selling garlands, pantip.com, and so much more. Thailand isn’t just Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Hat Yai, Phuket, and Khonkaen. There are Thai farmers, Thai civil servants, and Thai artists; there are crazy people and homeless people; there are Thais with dark skin; others with fair skin; there are hilltribe people and fisherfolk; there are Thai Muslims, Thai Sikhs, Thai Hindus, and too many other kinds of Thais to count. And it’s not just that they’re all a part of Thai culture; they are also its owners. They contribute to its vitality; they are the driving force behind the culture we see and the culture we are today. And of course, like any culture, whether it is Chinese, Japanese, or Uzbek, Thai culture is constantly changing. But not just changing – things are born, things die, things are lost, things vanish, like everything else in the world. What the Ministry of Culture should never forget is that it doesn’t own Thai culture, and therefore, it has no right to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong, what we should and shouldn’t do, what we must and mustn’t listen to, or must and mustn’t see. The era of nation building has ended, or does the Ministry of Culture want us all to go back to living in wooden houses on the banks of the river, with our indentured servants and slaves, and our women plucking a zither, because that’s the image of old Siam they so desperately yearn for?
More importantly, this longing for simpler, happier times begs another question – back in the good old days, were we really a sex-free culture? What about the erotic scenes in our classic literature, or the pictures of sexual intercourse and sexual jokes in our mural paintings, not to mention the palm-frond how-to manuals that demonstrate a whole host of sexual positions found in our temples, or the countless stories of love and separation, or the cases of rape that appear in historical records from the time of the Three Seals Law, the legal code enacted in the reign of King Rama I? What these records show is that there were cases of rape long before the Ministry of Culture ever set eyes on a pornographic magazine or an X-rated movie.
These are the questions I found myself asking again after the debate over the cover of the February issue of Image magazine, which showed a female model wearing a Krung Thai Bank mini-Visa card like a piece of jewelry. What I found particularly interesting about the whole affair was that most of the people on both sides of the debate focused on the pornographic nature of the picture. It wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t beautiful. It was blatantly erotic. It wasn’t a good example for our young people. Some people even saw the nude photograph as part of the trend to project a more “international” image.
But the uproar over the photograph is even more worrying than the magazine cover itself, because this tendency to see every nude photograph or nude painting as obscene and an incitement to sexual depravity shows that a lot of people just don’t have any understanding whatsoever of eroticism. It’s also a shameful sign that these same people have a lot filthier imaginations than the picture, because the photo on the magazine cover had been so retouched that, from a distance, the couple looked more like marble statues than living, breathing, flesh and blood people. There was absolutely no hint of passion on the faces of the man or woman. They were completely calm and composed, like two clothed people hugging would be. There was nothing extraordinary about it. When two people hug without any trace of passion, it doesn’t matter whether they’re clothed or unclothed. In fact, if you wanted to shoot a sexy photo, you could have the models in clothes buttoned up to the neck, hugging or not hugging, standing near or far from each other, standing alone or in a group, and still the passion would show in their faces. Something about the way the models were posed would arouse you as soon as you saw the picture. Some advertisements featuring fully-clothed models are a whole lot sexier than the picture on the cover of Image magazine, but nobody seems to worry about that. And the reason is that people make the automatic assumption that nudity equals obscenity. In fact, what’s considered erotic isn’t entirely natural. For example, a picture of a woman with her face pointing upward, lips slightly parted, and eyes half closed – a pose that would seem to us the epitome of “sexiness” – to someone from Papua New Guinea, this might not seem sexy at all. They might be turned on by the sight of a native woman’s body glistening with coconut oil. (This is just an example to show that what’s considered “sexy” differs from one culture to another.)
As for the notion that sexual desire has to be suppressed, locked up, hidden away – that it’s some dark, dirty little secret and nothing must happen to fan the flames, it has to do with the nature of capitalism. If people in a capitalist society were only interested in having sex, the whole economy would go to hell because nobody would work. In a system where humans are viewed as resources, as units of production, sexual freedom would make them less productive. That’s why the meaning of sex and desire is restricted to reproduction – in other words, creating the next generation of producers.
But things don’t appear to be quite that simple. The tighter a society clamps down on sex, the harder people try to talk about it; and the more society paints sexual desire as obscene, the more people want to experience it for themselves. After all, it’s our nature to want what we can’t have. Back in the old days, when Siamese and Lanna women went around with their breasts hanging out, breasts weren’t seen as anything particularly erotic because they were right out there in plain sight every day. It wasn’t until women began to cover them up and all you could get was an occasional glimpse that breasts came to be thought of as something erotic. Then women had to learn when to expose their breasts and when to keep them covered.
Modern Thai society seems to be a sexually repressed culture – repressed to the point that we have to shut our eyes and ears to any mention of sex, and our intellect is so stunted that the only thought that pops into our heads when we see a naked body is “Man I’m horny!” When we saw a snazzy new credit card dangling from a naked model’s body, why didn’t anybody stop to wonder why the advertisers decided to place their ad somewhere that consumers aren’t used to seeing them – namely, on the cover of a magazine? Someone who was critical of treating women as sex objects was even concerned that the ad had damaged the bank’s image, claiming that the credit card had been “fouled” by its proximity to the model’s pussy. So we can’t really be sure if the speaker was praising women or damning them because it doesn’t sound so different from the old idea that men shouldn’t duck under a clothesline with a woman’s sarong on it because it demeans them or something.
Then again, on a more positive note, maybe the speaker actually was praising women because in a sense, it’s a nod to the “power” of the female genitals, and any “thing” important or valuable, like a credit card, that gets close to that part of a woman’s body ends up dead or “devalued.”
Himito na Kyoto is a pen name of Lakkana Punwichai, a Thai columnist who writes for magazines and weekly newspapers about food, sex, and politics. Her lastest book is a cookbook for people who live alone. This essay first appeared in Siamrath Weekly in 2005. It was translated from the Thai by Michael Crabtree.
Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia Issue 8/9 (March/October 2007)
©Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University
Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia Issue 8/9 (March/October 2007)
