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One wonders where all the Balinese officials complaining about the movie “Cowboys in Paradise” have been for the last 30 years. It does not appear that they have been on the island. Maybe they just have not ventured out in a good long while.

Otherwise, they would not be saying that a new documentary focusing on Kuta Cowboys, as Bali’s beach and bar gigolos are known, has “nothing to do” with Bali’s reputation as a world-class tourist destination.

That’s a bit like saying that Bali’s reputation has nothing to do with white-water rafting, bungee jumping, elephant and banana boat rides, beach raves, scuba diving and adventure tours.

None of those activities have anything to do with “what Balinese beauty and … culture is about” either — the same charge laid against the movie by Bali’s chief of public relations — but it’s hard to imagine tourism here without them, as pleasing as the vision might be.

Despite the plentiful bars and nightspots in the southern resort towns that might cater to the, um, “needs” of the single male tourist on his own or hunting in packs, Bali is also for the women.

Certainly, it’s been the experience of every single female tourist of my acquaintance not using a walker or a wheelchair that sooner or later, some smooth-talking tour guide, surfing instructor or bar friend — whether it be in Kuta, Legian, Seminyak, Canggu, Ubud or the lesser visited Padangbai, Lovina and Amed — hints somehow that he has feelings for her, or that even if he doesn’t, he is still available to her in whatever way she might desire.

And as many a proud, Harley-owning man about town will tell you, Japanese “tourist ladies” are considered the best because they are the most generous — something not lost on the pre-teen boy who inspired the film with his claim that he was anxious to grow up and “sex-service” female tourists from the Asian nation with a per capita gross domestic product about eight times that of Indonesia’s.

I am sure many people are scratching their heads as to what this flap is really all about. No official has publicly tried to link the Kuta Cowboy phenomenon to the murder of two female Japanese tourists in the last three months of 2009. The director of the film, Amit Virmani, said: “None of the people involved in making the film, or the people interviewed for it, think the beach boys pose any danger to tourists or hurt their holiday experience.”

Virmani also pointed out that the holiday beach boy fling is hardly anything that Bali invented, and adventurers — as they used to be called — out to charm money out of wealthy women of a certain age, are no strangers to fact or fiction. Most Bali visitors or potential Bali visitors will shrug their shoulders, give a little chuckle and not give it a second thought.

Indifference is not what is imagined, though, by Balinese officials and others offended by the film’s trailer on YouTube. They seem to fear that the movie will damage Bali’s image and tourists will recoil in horror.

This seems a strange concern, that consenting adults having fun, even immoral-but-not-quite-illegal fun, could do more harm to the island’s image than the other things visitors perennially complain about in the letters sections of the island’s English-language press: two-hour queues at Ngurah Rai immigration counters; cash grabs by customs and other airport officials; cops that seem to keep a special eye out for any foreigner at the wheel of a car; willy-nilly villa and hotel development that is spreading out in waves from the south; trash dumps along river ravines in otherwise idyllic settings; and, of course, the high price of a few drinks, the result of the Jakarta-set excise tax that prices wines and hard liquor among the highest in the region.

If Bali has any real sex-related image problem, then it has less to do with the big-bike-riding cowboys along the beach strips and more to do with the women who work in the semi-sanctioned prostitution areas such as the one along Jl. Padang Galak, a couple of kilometers from Sanur, where construction workers and truck drivers pay women mostly from East Java between Rp 10,000 and Rp 50,000 ($1.11 to $5.55) for sex.

But no one has made a movie about them, not one with a trailer that has gone viral on the Internet anyway, and until then, you can be sure there won’t be any sort of official acknowledgement of that “phenomenon” either, which, after all, doesn’t have anything to do with Balinese culture and beauty.

Thomas Hogue is a former Jakarta Globe editor.