How Come Our ‘Sister City’ Gets All The Porn?

CasablancaWarning: satire ahead.

By Hicham El Hassoun
Special to YNOT

CASABLANCA – In 1990, my home city of Casablanca, Morocco, signed a “sister city” agreement with Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. As with any sister city collaboration, the goal was to inspire trust and build a deep, lasting friendship between our peoples.

Everything worked just fine for many years, as both cities named streets in honor of each other and warmly welcomed visits from each other’s heads of state and other dignitaries. So close was our relationship, we didn’t even get jealous when Jakarta came to similar arrangements with other cities like Tokyo, Beijing and some place called “Rotterdam,” which sounds like a big infrastructure problem that someday could lead to much flooding, but is actually a city in the Netherlands.

Now, though, I’m starting to lose trust in Jakarta. While the idea was to share and share alike, I’m seeing more and more evidence our sister has been holding back and not coming through on her end of the bargain.

For starters, nowhere in Morocco are there big electronic billboards on which someone projects pornography, which Jakarta clearly does have.

Now, some will say it’s not practical for Jakarta to share its billboard porn technologies with Casablanca, because porn is illegal in Morocco. This excuse ignores the fact porn is also illegal in Indonesia — but this hasn’t stopped our sister city from displaying porno on giant screens next to the highway.

Do our friends in Jakarta think Moroccans do not like pornography? Ridiculous! Everybody likes pornography, even many worshipers of Jesus Christ who say porn is a mortal sin.

This really isn’t about pornography, though; it’s about fairness and respect between sister cities. How would Jakarta like it if we cut off the export of couscous to Indonesia or stopped sending them our premium-quality rugs or refused to share our most excellent hashish through black market channels? What would they eat and sit on while getting high, and on what substance would they get high? Not everybody likes heroin, after all, even in Indonesia.

I want to be clear, so as to not offend anyone in our sister city: I am not angry with Jakarta. I am hurt by her lack of transparency and apparent selfishness when it comes to sharing the tantalizing pleasures of erotic media.

It’s not like Morocco isn’t well-suited for illegal-but-high-profile displays of pornography. We have highways, automobiles and eyeballs. What else is needed?

Does Jakarta think we cannot be trusted with pornography? Do they think we lack the maturity to know when it is OK to stare at a giant penis penetrating an equally gargantuan vagina and when it is more important to keep our eyes on the road?

Perhaps the Indonesians fear sharing their porn with us due to an irrational fear of the influence of Amazigh women on Moroccan society. If so, they should know we have long since tamed their infamous independence and assertiveness, including by exposing as a myth the idea Aisha Qandisha appears in the dreams of men as a half-goat demon who makes them infertile. (The truth is she appears in the dreams of men as a half-goat demon only when they eat too much harira just before bedtime.)

I also believe, based on extensive online research, Jakarta has been sharing its porn billboard technology with other cities and countries, including Pune, India, which isn’t even a cousin city to Jakarta, let alone a sister.

For now, I haven’t lodged a formal complaint about the situation with Jakarta, because I want to give our sister city a chance to do the right thing first. Why start a fight when all that’s needed might be a conversation and an honest exchange of concerns about a lack of porn-sharing transparency?

My patience won’t last forever, though. At some point, our friends in Jakarta must explain why they are happy to supply us with rubber and textiles, but not depictions of sex acts that require rubber and textiles.

Whatever the reason may be, I assure our friends in Jakarta it is completely unnecessary to withhold large-scale pornography displays from their sibling, Casablanca. We already handled the French. We certainly can handle a few French ticklers, too.

 

Hicham El Hassoun is vice president of operations for the Casablanca/Jakarta Sister City Program and the Secretary of Illicit Entertainments for the administration of King Mohammed VI.

 

About the Author

Ben Suroeste

Gene Zorkin has been covering legal and political issues for various adult publications (and under a variety of pen names) since 2002.

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