Three large wooden penises lie on a colorful batik prayer mat in the house of Mak Erot, Indonesia's legendary lengthener of male members, inviting customers to pick their new look.
Mak Erot, the undisputed national expert in solving the self-image problems of Indonesian men, seems to have disappeared a long time ago but many believe she is still working her magic, perhaps from beyond the grave.
The craggy, betel nut-chewing woman with a distinctive brown birthmark on her cheek has spawned legions of imitators, while her legitimate heirs are keen to keep up the facade that she's alive lest business die with her.
PHOTO :AP
And it is a booming business - as a glance at the classified pages of any Indonesian tabloid newspaper will attest, packed as they are with ads for "penile paranormals" all claiming to have been trained by Mak Erot.
Jakarta, the nation's capital, even has a Mak Erot "clinic."
She has made it into popular culture too, with the film Extra Large: Between Me, You and Mak Erot currently playing in cinemas.
Mak Erot's village of Caringin is at the end of a road that winds along the Indian Ocean coast in southwestern Java. Her white house sits in a region where farmers from Indonesia's Sundanese culture incorporate their ancient animistic beliefs with Islam.
As expected, the disciples at Mak Erot's house say she's still alive.
"Mak Erot went to open an office in Medan (North Sumatra)," says a young man wearing a traditional Muslim beanie. "She's in a good shape. She still can walk."
He introduces himself as Haji Baban, Mak Erot's grandson, an heir of the old woman's esoteric powers and expertise in rare plants.
"People from all over the world come here, from Arab countries, from China, Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan," he says.
"They want solutions to impotence or premature ejaculation, they ask to have a longer penis."
According to the daily Kompas, Mak Erot passed on her "science" to her five children and sixteen grandchildren who account for her 21 true heirs, a select order of masters of male enhancement.
A consultation with Haji Baban is an encounter with the arcane. Sitting cross-legged in semi-darkness, the patient is asked to detail his wishes with the visual aid of a selection of carved wooden phalluses.
Then comes the diagnosis, delivered after a contemplative silence.
Solemnly, Haji Baban intones that the client's appendage is "fairly average," and offers to conjure up a 6cm extension.
The prescription for such whopping growth is a 10-day course of eating and drinking mystery concoctions and secret potions, with the first dose of bitter berries to be taken immediately, washed down with dark brown liquid.
An assistant then brings a phallus shaped bamboo tube containing a roll of sticky coconut rice that has to be swallowed whole to avoid what Haji Baban describes ominously as "terrible genital consequences."
Haji Baban ends the consultation with a vegetable oil that the client must promise to apply daily with a specific hand action from base to tip. And no eating green bananas or citronella, he orders.
The daily cost for treatment is between US$70 and US$100, depending on the options selected.
This is a hefty sum for many in Indonesia but the imposing mansions being built around Caringin seem to indicate that plenty of men are willing to pay.
A local motorcycle taxi driver gestures to the newly built homes and says: "They belong to Mak Erot."
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS