Chastity Belts Anyone?

Indonesia’s massage parlor setting the trend and raging national debate ensues when masseuses in the hill resort town of Batu in East Java had them wore a “chastity belt” like contraption.

Franky Setiawan, owner of Doghado Massage Parlor who is also a clothing designer came up with the idea because their clienteles "bombarded" his staff with demands for sex after local authorities shut down the town's brothels.

Unlike the chastity belts of Renaissance Europe that are bulky contraptions made of iron plates, Setiawan’s was more of a minimalist “fashionable” black pants that zip up at the side, where a padlock is slipped through two cloth loops and snapped shut each time a masseuse meets a client.

The keys to the padlocks are safely stored in a special box at the cashier’s counter and checked once in a while to make sure no ones lifts the keys to cut copies. To quote UPI quoting an LA Times article:

“We had a hard time rejecting this kind of client because they try over and over and over again, persuading our workers with their dangerously sweet words," Doghado Massage Parlor owner Franky Setiawan said.

Meutia Fardia Hatta Swasono, minister for the empowerment of women, said bringing back the old fashioned chastity belt is offensive to women.

"It is not the right way to prevent promiscuity. It insults women as if they are the ones in the wrong," she said.

Parlor sex crackdowns come as traditional Islamic values gain popularity in Indonesia, influencing people to cut back on morally questionable activities including the sex trade, alcohol consumption and gambling, the Times reported.

This one is very innovative but indeed contentious and I tend to agree that it is indeed insulting and offensive treating women as the main culprit when it takes 2 to tangle errr tango. What is it about looking at the women as the “sinners”? To think that predominantly Muslim Indonesia as having the same mentality on pinning the blame on their women just like in the Christian Philippines is just so bizarre.

Family planning in the Philippines is a big failure because they have relied and place the burden on the women to adhere to their unrealistic “abstention” instead of providing birth control contraceptives provided gratis et amore by US-AID. Now that US-AID has stopped the freebies and with a government that has no resources of their own to provide the free birth control contraceptives hopefully they don’t resort to following the lead of the Indonesian massage parlors.....…… devising a chastity belt with the keys safely locked in the priest pulpit or with the pro-life Taliban barangay captain’s.

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