Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J.G. Ballard

SBY and his lackey, the Simpering Twitterfool, rabbit on about the 'dangers' of pornography, yet fail to define it. I've done some research and fail as well. Read this page and notice how varied the interpretations are.

What SBY and ST ought to consider before spouting off is that "although the most extreme antipornography activists [assert] that men learn to rape by watching and reading pornography, no study has proven a direct link." (This is not to deny that there are those who translate their sexual fantasies into an excuse to abuse women and children.)

There are certain times in history, such as victory celebrations following a military victory, when a nation's birthrate soars. That is natural, an exuberent exchange of body fluids.

At other times, when what comes naturally doesn't, help is sought, and if a picture tells a thousand words, then so be it.

Consider the Cerne Abbas Giant, a highly visible 55-metre long figure c.320 years old, carved into the chalk of a Dorset (UK) hillside. Does it turn you on? Well, apparently it does the job for local women as they have an above-average birthrate of three children.

Here in Jakarta, in the Fatahillah Museum in 'Old Town', there is the Si Jagur cannon.

For many people, this canon has a sacred reputation. Its reputation comes from the 41 cm long and 60 cm circle fist shape on the rear of it. The thumb appears from the fist, penetrated between the index finger and the middle finger. This kind of fist is believed as a vulgar position, and then become a fertility symbol. The size and muscular look of this canon makes people believe that this is a ‘male’ canon. There are many people, especially women, who visit Fatahillah Museum with only one purpose which is to touch the canon and hoping to have a baby very soon.

(It used to be in front of the museum, but it has been moved inside "to avoid mutilation". Go figure.)

In case you're wondering how this fits in with my title, I refer you back to SBY and ST who got over-excited and whose ejaculations were related to the leaking online of some private tapes of minor celebrities cavorting as nature intended.

And this picture shows one of the 100 statues in the Austrian Alps, part of Antony Gormley's Horizon Field.

Gormley said the work addressed a simple question: where does the human project fit inside the bigger question of the planet's future?

"The art work is in a way less important than the work people will do with these objects. The looking, the finding, the not finding, the relationship between something you can touch, you can see, you can imagine."

If only the powers-that-be came up with questions rather than blinkered answers.