The waitress / daughter in law of the owner, was 31, and still remembers life in Indonesia as a young girl where it was the norm for women to walk around open chested, wearing sarong skirts & a light scarf draped across their shoulders.

A law was imposed from far away Jakarta in the late 1970s requiring women to wear shirts; a law passed to appeal to Muslims. Just like that, hundreds of years of tradition stamped out.

Further into our conversation, according to Gusti, the irony here is that this law was enacted to protect the dignity and humility of women, but the results have been a little different. Since the early 80s, according to her, there has been an increase in violence against women here, including rapes; and increased marital infidelity, which she says was uncommon in Bali before.

It’s hard to judge how systematic a phenomenon is from the observations of one person, but it is interesting conversation.