Intermezzo: What do you look like beneath your clothes?

What do you look like beneath your clothes?
Opinion and Editorial - March 09, 2006
Julia Suryakusuma, Jakarta

Recently I was asked to lecture on my subject of expertise in a city outside Jakarta (I can't tell you what the topic was or where, because it would be really rude, considering what I am about to tell you).

My husband came along, acting as my assistant, making my Power Point presentation and carrying my bags (I support him when he's the one who has an assignment out of town and I tag along, so that's a fair deal, I reckon). He remarked that it was an interesting course, but it was quite a physically unattractive bunch of people involved. Many were overweight, and just not what would be called good-looking.

My husband is a professor at a university in Australia, but he paints and draws as a hobby, and has had years of experience in sketching people. He's so trained at looking at people's bodies, he claims he can actually look at someone clothed, and produce a accurate version of what they would like nude.

I laughed, and suggested maybe we should do a game show where the participants would have to be able to draw, and they would try to make nude sketches of other (clothed) participants. If both groups could draw, then they would have to take turns to be the sketcher and the one being sketched.

The group who got the most accurate "hits" (i.e. in terms of similarity to the individuals in the subject group) would score the most points. Naturally, in order to be able to gauge the degree of accuracy, the participants would have to take their clothes off for the jury to judge and give points, which would be also taken from votes from the audience. We have to be democratic, after all.

Considering the number of tedious, unoriginal quiz game shows on TV these days, I think the TV programmers would jump at our novel idea. Then, of course, I remembered the pornography bill -- the only draft law I know that can make people all hot and bothered, anxious and excited at the same time. And then there's all these new moralistic regional regulations. Taking your clothes off would certainly not be what their drafters had in mind either.

In fact, if the regional regulations are implemented, I couldn't even do my morning walk wearing my standard exercise outfit of shorts and skimpy top, especially if I pass the border between Depok and Banten, which is about 100 meters from my front gate.

Now that would be a nuisance.

Would I run the risk of asserting my right to dress the way I want? The regulation drafters seem to forget that clothes are contextual. I need shorts for exercise but I wouldn't wear them to the House of Representatives or State Palace. (Actually I did once consider wearing a Papuan outfit -- grass skirt and nothing else -- to the State Palace but that would have been a political statement).

I figure that the pornography bill is being pushed by people who are not really interested in political power or in imposing their values on others (even those who are not of the same faith or nationality), but because they are jealous. They are probably physically unattractive people who are jealous of people who can expose their belly buttons and look sexy rather than disgusting, of those who can wiggle their hips without looking like a hippo in heat, or who can flash their thighs without looking like dimpled semi-hard jello on the verge of disintegrating.

If the prize money on the "Beneath Your Clothes" (BYC) quiz were big enough, probably the same people pushing the pornography bill might want to be on the show and suddenly the bill would get canceled. Sadly, I guess we'll never know for sure, because we Indonesians are so imbued with our Asian values of modesty and decency, aren't we, we'd never stoop so low, would we, as to expose ourselves for money?

But if you go even deeper, the body and the whole persona, is in fact also just a set of "clothes" which besides giving a person an "identity" often masks the real person, especially in the case of uniforms (and there are many "uniforms", not just the formal ones like the military or civil service).

We sometimes forget that a person who is physically gorgeous, beautifully attired, coiffed and expensively perfumed, may not be beautiful inside at all -- in fact he or she may be quite mean, vicious and vindictive.

A person who looks powerful, may not be powerful at all. They could be powerful in a worldly sense, propped up by position and money, but could be totally spiritually impoverished (in fact nowadays, being spiritually impoverished seems to be a criteria for being a "powerful leader").

A person who looks physically attractive, intelligent, charismatic and even "exudes" confidence could, in fact, be wracked by internal insecurities. Some of the actors or musicians who committed suicide (whether instantly or slowly through a self-destructive lifestyle) were the most successful and at the peak of their careers.

Think of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison. In other words, what you see is often not what you get and everything that (Gary) glitters is not gold. Even religious leaders, or people who are awarded this-and that-prize, even the Nobel prize, could be totally degenerate and corrupt. It's not even politics, it's just the way things are these days. What can I say? I'm just an old-fashioned girl.

So, if we had a game show where the participants had to guess the correlation between someone's outer and inner beauty -- things my husband can't sketch so easily, such as compassion, the capacity to love, forgive and make sacrifices for the greater good, reliability, responsibility, inner peace and the ability to tolerate -- would it pass the censors?

It wouldn't contravene the pornography bill at all, so it wouldn't be a problem would it, as it doesn't reveal any breasts, belly buttons, thighs or any other body parts which would corrupt us weak souls? But it would expose a lot more, and I would say, it would be a damned sight more pornographic than the revelation of any body part or act deemed as "indecent" in the pornography bill.

The writer is a sociologist and feminist.