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This week, instead of crucifying myself on another masochistic quest to scale a near-vertical, mud-caked mountain peak, I decided to take on Jakarta’s toxic boulevards, which sport their own natural and not-so-natural hazards. And so it was that I found myself heading out to enjoy a Saturday night of Anker-fueled debauchery and, hopefully, the kind of behavior that, were it to be filmed and downloaded onto a legislator’s iPad, should only be viewed in the privacy of a House of Representatives restroom.

Well, that was my intention at any rate. Indonesia is a nation of contradictions, of course, not least of which is the often yawning chasm that exists between professed morality and actual behavior, not least where sex is concerned. Research was called for, and a friend of dubious morals and I soon found ourselves at a new club on Jalan Gajah Mada in the Kota sleaze zone (I won’t say which one, but it shares a name with Yogyakarta’s best known tourist street).

We had heard about the club via word of mouth and, when we eventually got inside, it became immediately clear that this was hot cha-cha central. The joint was filled with ethnic Chinese gentlemen and Indonesian damsels in various states of distress, who were walking around wearing nothing but their underwear.

It seemed rather unsportsmanlike that the chaps weren’t also in their underwear, and I considered stripping down to my boxer shorts as an act of good faith and cross-gender solidarity with the brave sisters. But then I had second thoughts and conjectured that perhaps such a selfless act of empathy might be misconstrued by the club’s Cro-Magnon security detail, who all looked capable of pulling one of my legs off and beating me with the wet end without breaking a sweat.

Now we all know it’s wrong to turn a person into a sex object. Feminists over the last half-century have complained bitterly about pornography and the male gaze, but there is a sense in which sexuality fundamentally reduces the other into an object. Sex involves, as the great Sartre once wrote, joy being found in the least human and most fleshy parts of the body, such as breasts, buttocks, thighs and so on. Moreover, it has been said that sexual desire itself is the desire to be objectified and used by the other. Strip such fantasy away and sexuality itself disappears.

In any case, we retired to an upper floor to observe the proceedings in greater detail. We soon found ourselves sitting on the couch next to some Middle Eastern gentlemen and their frilly knickered companions.

“I have just arrived in Jakarta, but my friend said I must go to this disco,” one said. “Amazing, yes?”

“Yes, indeed,” I replied.

“Where do you come from?”

“The UK.”

“Really? I am from Abu Dhabi and I was a student in Leeds for four years!”

It’s a cosmopolitan world all right. Here I was in a club full of salivating ethnic Chinese chaps, half-naked Javanese nymphs and a Middle Eastern thrill-seeker who’d spent some of his formative years in Leeds (the Monte Carlo of the Midlands, as it’s called by nobody at all). It was all too much for our fragile sensibilities and we soon found ourselves leaving the club without so much as a D-cup as a souvenir.

Perhaps I should really be settling down at my old age, especially since I could get my Indonesian citizenship if I find a nice local girl to settle down with. I resolved to begin searching immediately, and soon found myself perusing an Asian Internet dating site in my desperate quest for Jakarta-based babes.

One has to be a little careful on these sites before steaming off on an excruciatingly painful semi-blind date. A thorough Facebook photo album check is required.

As I scrolled down the seemingly endless list of young ladies, it quickly became clear that there is an awful lot of available skirt out there. Alas, many of the Internet lonely hearts club brigade had ticked the “very attractive” box in their profiles, despite clear photographic evidence to the contrary. Presumably the good-looking femme fatales have little need for Internet dating.

It’s all about “inner beauty” in these profile descriptions, though, and the greeting card platitudes seemed to help as I continued to sift my way through the various character summaries, keenly feeling the alienating dislocation of our increasingly Internet mediated social reality.

Hopefully the romance will come later, although the dating site has left me feeling a little cold. I mean, modern discotheques of a certain shade are often described as meat markets, but online, the free market in flesh becomes disembodied into a human entree menu. Click, “No.” Click, “Arrrgh!” Click, “Hmm.” Click, “There isn’t enough beer in the world.” I guess, I’m assured of endless depressing dates with girls able to eat their pizzas through a tennis racket in the near future. Wish me luck, I’m going in.

Simon Pitchforth is the copy editor of Jakarta Java Kini magazine.