A Look Back At The Golden Age Of Indonesian Erotic Fiction

Pornography is banned in Indonesia, so people who want to get off need to be creative. For most of the early 2000s, online erotic fiction or stensil was all the rage among Indonesians. Young men were reading them in internet kiosks and sending .txt files to each other in class via Bluetooth.

Internet was nowhere near good enough to hop on a VPN and stream porn, it's easy to see how the rise of text only stensil happened. Now-defunct sites like pondokputri.com and nyamuk.com were the go-to for people looking for smut. But by the time I was old enough to access these stories, stensil sites were already on decline after the government banned many of them. Internet connctions started to improve which allowed for the rise of VPNs to help navigate Indonsia's massive porn firewall. The stensil became another relic of the early Internet.

But like shitty GeoCities websites, their legacy lives on in the dark corners of the internet.

A group of dedicated fans have been re-posting old stensil stories on their own blog. I've read what I could find and here are my favorite stensil clichés:

Most stensil you come across are told through the first-person. The first paragraph usually details the main character's name, age, job, and body type using very descriptive language. This puts the reader in the shoes of the main character, experiencing the fantasies firsthand. The next paragraphs would detail the character's account of the supposedly real experience in chronological order.

This is the most boring part of stensil. I want to read stories that start with ejaculation go back and forth between foreplay, the intercourse, and the introduction of the characters. A plot twist wouldn't hurt either. It would be cool to read one that ends with a murder or a car crash, rather than an abrupt ending where the characters never hear from each other again.

Is there a law that prohibits the authors from being experimental? If that's the case, then I want to talk to the stensil police.

Almost all the characters stensils hate boning on beds. Everyone is always doing it on kitchen counters, at a public restroom, or at a gazebo in the middle of nowhere. When they do have sex in a bedroom, it has to be something taboo, like the bedroom of pesantren or an Islamic boarding school.

What's wrong with having sex on a bed? You can be loud, you're on top of clean sheets and in the vicinity of clean drinking water. You can blast your dirty sex playlist on full volume and basically pass out right after you're done.

Also, why don't these characters ever get a UTI from having sex in dirty places? That's a sequel I want to read.

Considering that the first paragraphs of these stories are trying to convince readers that they're real, these scenarios are pretty damn unrealistic. When you have premarital sex in public places in Indonesia, there's always that risk of being shunned by your neighbors if they catch you doing it. On top of the fact that it's super embarrassing, they would probably report you to the police, or worse—stop giving you free homemade cookies on Ramadan. But nobody ever wrote about the repercussions, because who would want to read them? Me, actually.

To the authors' credit, stensil stories have really diverse characters across the socio-economic spectrum. Housewives, landlords or landladies, widows, in-laws, and a myriad of people in uniforms are all banging each other like the world is ending tomorrow. The only thing they have in common is that they're all middle class. And their names are always either Sinta, Marcella, Vony, Ronny, Bram, or Roy. These are probably the Indonesian equivalent of Nikki, Angel, Amber, and Brock. You know, those generic porn star names.

There are a fair share of stensil that features maids, construction workers, and burglars, but they're usually being partnered with the middle-class characters. I've never found a story that has a maid being fucked by a construction worker, that would actually be refreshing. First of all, it's more likely to happen. Second of all, nobody is being exploited in this scenario, because there's less abuse of power. In the stensil world, it seems like everyone is agreeing to outdoor, unprotected sex just to get a raise.

No matter how it starts out, every woman in stensil ends up going with whatever the man wants to do in the end. It's not that they don't say "No" out loud, it's just that they are very easy to convince.

The idea of women being down for anything that men want is so 5,000 B.C. Most of the women portrayed in the stories are shy, but with a minimal amount of subtle coercion they're suddenly down for all kinds of nasty things. This portrayal of women could give readers the idea that hesitating, or simply not being ready for sex, equals to playing hard to get. That couldn't be further from the truth.

In the real world, "no" probably means "no" and zero amount of convincing will change that.

All the men in stensil have dicks that are so magical that the women reach multiple orgasms just through penetration. These men never ask the women what they like, but they never fail to make them cum like a garden sprinkler, even if it's their first time having sex together.

Most of the time, the men and women in the stories climax at the same time. I'm not saying this never happens in real life, but the chances of it happening are pretty small. Maybe it's the rush of having sex in public that makes them climax faster. Or maybe I just have bad sex all the time.

Where are all these men and where can I meet them? Most of the non-fictional men I've met so far always let me down. The women in stensil are never left disappointed. I wish to have that kind of life.

This trope probably caused a lot of men to think that making a woman orgasm is a walk in the park. The truth is that it's more like a relay race in the park—it takes practice and communication to be able to master it. I'm glad that stensil died, or people are going to think men actually know how to make women orgasm.

I'm not expecting an Anais Nin-grade story. All of the things I mentioned are what make stensil, well, stensil. It really was a man's world, compared to predominantly female-oriented Fueled by Ramen fanfics on Livejournal, or K-Pop fanfics on Tumblr. Stensil marked an important period of Indonesian porn, which doesn't seem so long ago, but we're already nostalgic about it.