Say Anything Blog

Last year about this time I posted on the development of an Indonesian version of Playboy being published in Jakarta.  At the time I wondered…

...if it isn’t people like this publisher who will end up being instrumental in winning the war on terrorism. It seems to me that spreading western culture to the oppressed middle east is a good way to push back said oppression. People in Jakarta are going to hear their leaders proclaim that this magazine is “worse than terrorism,” and then they’re gonig to look at the actual magazine and think to themselves that maybe their leaders are exaggerating. After all, for someone who lives with terrorism in their lives it is hard to reconcile pictures of scantily-clad babes with being as bad as innocent women and children being blown up. And once this realization begins to dawn on the populace in the middle-east how long will it be until they begin questioning their leader’s other proclamations about the “evils” of the “great Satans” in the west?

If western culture can get a toe-hold in the Muslim world (and I’m not just talking about pornography - not that this watered-down version of Playboy is “porn” by western standards - but also books, movies, music, plays, etc.) I can’t help but feel that it will have a positive impact in that it will expose them to new ideas and perhaps lure them into becoming a modern liberal society.

Today, courtesy of Sadanand Dhume writing in the Wall Street Journal, we learn that the editor of Playboy Indonesia, Erwin Arnada, is now facing a two year jail sentence for violating Indonesia’s indecency laws.

Yes, that’s two years in jail for publishing pictures of scantily clad women.  Not nude pictures, mind you (this version of Playboy doesn’t do nudity), but just women in swimsuits and lingerie.

Dhume comes to the same conclusions I do about the importance of spreading American pop culture to the middle east, and shames American pundits and journalists for not paying more attention to this incident.

  The Playboy affair captures the world’s most populous Muslim country’s steady slide toward intolerance. But the silence with which it has been greeted in the U.S. — no press releases from the Committee to Protect Journalists clog my inbox — also underscores the cringe of bien pensant America toward the export of popular culture, especially to Muslim lands. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an NGO head or professional pundit eager to stand up for Playboy, or for that matter for Baywatch or Desperate Housewives. For the most part, such fare is seen as a provocation. Why give the permanently angry Muslim street another excuse to seethe?

  In reality, the problem is not Playboy’s predilection for the scantily clad, but Islamists’ tendency to fly into a rage over a flash of thigh or a bare midriff. (There’s no nudity in the Indonesian edition.) American popular culture ought to be celebrated rather than derided. In its crass commercialism and blithe disregard for Islamist sensibilities lie the greatest hopes of bringing Muslim societies to terms with modernity.

Quite right.

Playboy may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but free speech is.  Which is exactly why we should be applauding Playboy for moving into the Indonesian market and standing behind them as they struggle with that country’s fundamentalist mind set.  But we won’t.

The left won’t do it because ticking off the Muslim extremists isn’t politically correct, and the right won’t do it because it means supporting a magazine famous for its nudie pictures.