back

TAIPEI
JOSEPHINE HO


QUESTION: Do you believe that this is a development that is taking place in other cultures besides Taiwan?

ANSWER: Yes, we are living in quite conservative times. But I think Taiwan is much more vulnerable to the sway of conservative politics right now, because Taiwan is dying to achieve world recognition of its nation-state status. In other words, Taiwan is trying to achieve morally what it cannot achieve politically. The desperate need for nation-state status is now pushing this country to reach for a higher moral ground, I would say, probably higher than any other nation. We have very rigid laws regarding sex-related representation, discourse, and behavior and with quite severe punishments. So we are living in a strange atmosphere. Whereas some rights in relation to politics are becoming more accessible, other rights in relation to sex rights have suffered oppressive measures. The government has recently instituted a law for referendums so that one day, if needed, it could hold a referendum about the issue of obtaining nation-state status. We are hoping that while the government is intent on using the referendum for nation-state status issues, we could also use it to open the door to decisions on a whole range of other issues. So we are hoping to include other questions and debates into the referendum, including the question of whether or not we should decriminalize or legalize sex work. If we could have a referendum about that question, it would dilute the strictly nation-oriented nature of the upcoming referendum. After all, politics should include sex politics.

The conservative tendency in regard to sexual matters in Taiwan also involves other larger forces at work. Within the general trend of globalization, the Unites Nations and many international NGO' s have been trying to establish new strategies for global governance on issues such as children' s rights, women's rights, sex work, pornography, and sex trafficking. They are hoping that the whole world would abide by their set of rules and moral values. These international NGOs work with local NGOs to push for legal reforms that would promote their conservative moral-sexual values through instituting new standards into the legal system. For instance, right now in Taiwan it is prohibited by law to say anything positive in the public about the merits of sex work and sex workers. The law says that such statements would mislead children and teenagers into practicing sex work itself, which is a felony punishable with up to five years imprisonment! In that sense, the law practically rules out any positive statements about sex work or sex workers.

A second trend that contributes to a rigidifying sex atmosphere is a new kind of subjectivity that is being created around parental power, as parents try to compensate for whatever power and control they have lost in the process of modernization. There is an abstract notion of omnipotent parental power that says: 'We need to watch whatever is happening in society in order to protect our children.' A purity campaign is now underway to clean up TV programs, getting rid of any liberal sounding talk shows. Another one is cleaning up the internet, getting rid of any licentious graphic representations. And when parents speak on behalf of their children, there seems to be a certain moral righteousness that is hard to resist.

QUESTION: That definitely comes out in recent child porn debates globally, which dictates that any discussion of porn and sex should be framed around the position of children as potential victims or consumers. Do you also feel the influence of 'superpowers' such as the United States whose government is pushing porn markets and conservatives sex politics at the same time?

ANSWER: Yes. I believe that the concepts of 'pornography' and 'children' need to be thoroughly reexamined when people resort to these new conservative values. In the past, nation-state governments have been primarily formulating rules around values in regard to national security. Now that we live in a 'democracy' and are part of international
political debates, a different card is being played by politicians, that of children and generational politics. In Taiwan, generational politics has risen to the very top and become even more important than gender politics. With raging feminist debates over sexuality and sex work, the differences among women have become well-known and gender can no longer be considered a problem-free concept. But what is left mostly unexamined is the concept of children. In Taiwan today, when you talk about the protection of children, nobody will dare to say anything critical about it, perhaps except a handful of us.

QUESTION: Is that also one of the problems in your approaching court case? Could you explain your case to me?

ANSWER: Well, in June of 2003, fourteen (!) so-called NGO organizations in Taiwan jointly filed a legal complaint against me for disseminating obscenities. Half of those groups are christian and catholic religious women' s groups that have been working to 'protect children' and have been debating me on issues in relation to sex work since 1997. The religious women's groups had previously gathered in November 2001 to complain to the Ministry of Education about the 'Enjo-Kosai' (Japanese for compensated companionship) page on our website that posted many articles criticizing and ridiculing their condemnation of such casual and part-time sex work popular among the young. But we believe instead of the police entrapping those who seek sexual contact through the internet, people should be left alone unless they were really caught with
their pants down. Negotiations on the internet themselves, or posting such messages, should not be considered a crime. Yet between 1999 and 2001, over a thousand such cases were convicted. As we criticized such a law and such expanded execution of the law, the groups proclaimed that I was ruining the work they have been doing with teenage girls. That incident made my university require that our website be removed from the university network, forcing us to pay for commercial space in order to put up our academic website.Then in April 2003, the catholic Good Shepherds Sisters were tipped off by a dirt-seeking journalist that she had found some graphic pictures of bestiality on the 'animal love' webpage on the academic website for sexuality studies that I had built for our Center for the Study of Sexualities. The journalist had wanted to hear what the sisters had to say so that she could make a sensational report on it. As expected, the sisters were furious and quickly called together the other religious women's groups and claimed that I was circulating obscenities and pornography through my website, that these can hurt children as anybody can have access to those pictures. In June 2003, the religious women's groups rallied parental groups and censorship groups into filing the formal legal case. The prosecutor held two investigative hearings in September and, despite the evidence and arguments that I presented, decided that there was enough evidence for prosecuting me for the dissemination of obscenities. The first court date has been set to be Jan. 16, 2004. As to the graphic pictures in question, they belong to a US bestiality website for which we had made a hyperlink to one of its posting pages so as to demonstrate the anatomical possibility and variety of bestiality. Our academic website was very well developed and was accumulating information to build webpages for about fifty varieties of sexualities, including sexwork, pornography, surrogate motherhood, fetishism, necrophilia, incest, pedophile and bestiality. We were developing this archive because I think that people in Taiwan are generally quite naive about sexuality, thinking that it is merely the missionary-style of bodily act between a man and a women (his wife mostly). So the pages would present serious articles as well as news stories about each variety of sexuality. Some of the topics were more developed than others, depending on the information that was available to us. The webpage on bestiality, or what we call 'animal love,' contained a dozen or so articles detailing philosophical debates or literary/cultural texts of bestiality. On the bottom of the page, in order to demonstrate the possibility of bestiality, we included a hyperlink to a photo-album on a US bestiality site, when clicked would show the discouraging words alternative pictures of animal love, those who do not favor it need not enter .Only when further clicked would the viewer reach the other end of the hyperlink. Interestingly, at the hearing, the staff of the Good Shepherds Sisters said that she found the pictures by following the journalist's instructions to click on certain choices on the many pages she encountered. In fact, she did not even bother to look at anything other than the instructed choices, not even all the articles on the bestiality page, not even all those website choices that bear titles such as pornography and pedophile. They just one-track-mindedly followed the journalist's instructions. That is why I felt totally absurd when I heard them say that they were worried that since the webpage material is so 'readily available' to all,that kids would come into contact with these graphic pictures and would be misled into bestiality.
  continue