Dewi Tolol: The Bimbo Goddess

In the ancient tradition of the bimbo-goddess Julia Suryakusuma, Jakarta From The JakartaPost.com - Opinion October 25, 2007 At a recent dance performance I met some old friends who introduced me to a tall, slim, beautiful woman who turned out to be Nadine Chandrawinata, Miss Indonesia 2005 -- no wonder she looked familiar! Later, I remembered a newspaper interview in which she had said "Indonesia is a beautiful city" -- probably just a slip of the tongue -- this led to her the being the butt of many jokes. How unfair, I thought, the poor girl was probably just nervous. The press wouldn't let it rest, saying she didn't speak English well enough to represent Indonesia (as if using Indonesian, one could not be intelligent). An editorial said sarcastically she spoke English like a "typical Indonesian girl": "fractured but confident". Another said she didn't look Indonesian enough, and with a German mother she does indeed look very Western. I felt even more sorry for Nadine: her face was too foreign, but her language wasn't foreign enough. She was good looking, but the media just thought she was another beautiful air-head bimbo. It didn't matter what she was really like, the media seemed determined to force Nadine into our long-standing national obsession with dewi tolol: the moron goddess. It was Sukarno, our first president and founding father, who coined the term dewi tolol, and, notorious pants man that he was, knew what he was talking about. In today's parlance, his term might be translated as a "bimbo", a woman who is dumb, crass, naive, lacking in character and who places an inordinate emphasis on physical appearance. (I know men like this too so I was pleased to find there is a label for them too: "himbos" or "mimbos"!) Sukarno came out with the term dewi tolol in his manifesto on women. Sarinah, published in 1947, is a volume of lectures he gave to women revolutionaries in Yogya, urging their emancipation as part of our national struggle against colonial values. Sukarno observed many husbands valued their wives like pearls, but were in fact preventing their happiness. He cited Havelock Ellis -- who devoted his life to the scientific study of sex -- saying that the majority of men look upon their wives as alternating between goddess and moron and treat them like fragile, childlike creatures incapable of maturity or independence. Sukarno countered this idea with his preferred symbol for Indonesian womanhood: Sarinah, his able, competent and "liberated" nanny. In a the same way Sukarno used Marhaen, a peasant-worker he once met, to represent the proletariat and symbolize Indonesian socialism, so he used Sarinah to symbolize his Indonesian-style feminism. Of course, Sukarno was never much of a feminist in practice. Women for him were predominantly sex objects (as his many lovers would attest) and this was seen when he commodified Sarinah (who he later admitted publicly was his first lover) by using her name for our first department store. Ah well. Putting Sukarno's juicy sex life aside for a moment, Sarinah was published 60 years ago but many of the views on women it contains still seem very progressive -- and in many respects are way ahead of all the governments since. And Sukarno was very clear in his condemnation of our national dewi tolol fixation (even if he did indulge himself in it). This is a fascinating story which I became aware of when Sukmawati, Sukarno's youngest daughter, asked me and team of friends to translate Sarinah into English. She said she felt it countered reactionary constructions of womanhood that conservative religious groups still try to impose on today's Indonesia. I read Sarinah and realized she was dead right. Decades ago I became involved in what academics call "the social construction of womanhood" because under the New Order, gender stereotypes were used to control not just women, but the entire population. In "State Ibusim", my MA thesis in 1988, I showed how this was done -- and got into trouble for it, including even a tangle with state intelligence (now there's a misnomer) which of course only proved my point! Things have changed a little since then. At least, we no longer have a single state-sanctioned model. The traditional military-endorsed "follow-the-husband" model is dying out and the religious model (that wives must unquestioningly obey their husbands to be pious Muslims) is also hotly contested. But the model that is getting a following among young girls these days is the bimbo ala Paris Hilton, who seems proud of being the ultimate dewi tolol. But what do types like Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole Smith, famous for their consumerism and bad behavior, have that is worthy of emulation? When Anna Nicole Smith -- who made no positive contributions to humanity -- died, her story consumed 50 percent of cable news airtime, more than the war in Iraq. The likes of Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson and Lindsay Lohan also get enormous coverage for their errant ways and the media hype about Princess Diana a decade after her death remains astounding. Queen of Hearts? Queen of Tabloids, more like. And yes, the global obsession with vacuous celebrity also exists in Indonesia, with every television channel having its obligatory "infotainment" show featuring mind-numbing gossip on the lives of our local celebrities. One major theme of this obsession is to glorify bimbos and reduce all other women to their level. Of course, this isn't new. Long before Paris and Anna Nicole there was Marilyn Monroe, a (peroxide) blonde but certainly not a dumb one. In fact her frustration was that Hollywood was trying to cast her as the dumb-blonde stereotype which she was not. The difference is, however, today the glorification of the bimbo has become so extreme there seems almost no alternative for any woman who becomes famous -- including poor Miss Indonesia. So, pop culture rules, and with it inane, mindless consumerism that sees women as nothing much more than sex objects and rewards them richly for being beautiful morons. Yep, it's gotten so bad that if Sukarno were to publish Sarinah today, he would probably have to put Paris Hilton on the cover to sell it! The writer is the author of "Sex, Power and Nation". She can be contacted at jsuryakusuma@gmail.com