“Sex sells, or does it?”

From street banners advertising upcoming club events like “blow-job Friday” and “Hardcore: be ready for extreme fantasy,” complete with “sexy dancers,” “naughty girls” and “condom fiesta”; venders selling the Indonesian version of Playboy at stoplights; cell-phone pornography scandals starring high school and university students; the booming popularity of sex comedies; to commercials for herbal medicines to spice up your sex life, signs of sex and sexuality are seemingly everywhere in contemporary urban Indonesian popular culture. ¹ These open discourses seem contradictory against the backdrop of an increasingly conservative Islamic and political culture, where a dynamic battle is taking place about how closely public morality and conduct should follow the teachings of Islam, and where pornography laws are debated and sex education in schools is protested because of fears that such discourse would promote sexual lasciviousness.