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. |