Prudish Singapore
To loosen up - just a little
When it comes to sex, things are not going very well. By Seah Chiang Nee.
Dec 5, 2005

Singapore is reaping what it has sown. Forty years of prudish, high-pressure living has produced an unexciting society when it comes to sex.

Whether this is good or bad would depend on whom you ask.

Conservatives, who are generally parents and older citizens, love the control and the censorship, believing they make for a good place to raise children.

Not all changes are for the better, they feel, and any opening of the sexual Pandora’s box could lead to degenerate youths.

But the younger generation, which was raised in a more liberal setting, thinks otherwise. Some want a lifestyle that their peers in the advanced cities enjoy.

These want less censorship of what they can watch and less official intrusion into what people do in their own bedroom.

This is leading some better-educated youths to leave for a more exciting life elsewhere, away from a “this cannot, that cannot” environment.

All these are, of course, part of a liberal-conservative debate familiar in many other cities.

But for Singapore, which suffers from rapidly declining birthrates, the impact is more serious.

It may even retard its long-term plan to become a flourishing global city able to attract world talent and take on London, New York or Tokyo.

In pursuit of this ambition, today’s younger leaders, who have a different mindset from that of Lee Kuan Yew and faced with new demands, are caught between two forces.

One is a large, conservative pro-family population that wants status quo and the other, a strong desire to move Singapore away from its stodgy, controlled image when it comes to sex.

Frontal nudity remains a no-no, anal sex and oral sex are crimes, and Playboy magazine, although it has almost been killed by Internet nakedness, is still forbidden.

Until very recently, TV’s Sex in the City was banned, along with Cosmopolitan magazine, known for its adult content.

Two years ago, the government even refused to register cars with the initials “SEX” when these letters in the alphabet’s turn for use came up. It was a strong message to the public that changes would be at a controlled pace.

For years, Lee had strictly built a prudish society that exceeded even in Confucius China with its concubines and “tea house” brothels. Today, under communism, even Shanghai has 1,000 sex shops.

In Singapore, party members, including ministers, who kept mistresses or who were known for their sexual hanky-panky were prematurely retired.

Observers say what Lee had done has nothing to do with the Asian values as practised in Japan, Korea, and others, where sex is much less restrictive. In many ways, it is uniquely Singapore, neither east nor west.

When he was prime minister, AIDS was a sensitive topic for the media with his officials discouraging editors to write about protective casual sex for fear it would promote promiscuity. It should be “no” casual sex.

Today, many educated adults know little about sex, with some women often asking counsellors if they could get pregnant by kissing their boyfriends. A few women in the 50s still giggle when the word “penis” is mentioned.

In a newspaper interview, a gynaecologist talked of Singapore’s phenomenon.
“Our best-kept secret is the fact that many healthy, married women of reproductive age are celibate by choice.

“For these often unhappy, guilt-ridden young women, sex is painful, difficult and even abhorrent.”

Twenty years ago, prudish qualities were to be admired. Today in a new world and a changing young generation, they are no longer very useful.

Marriage and love have steadily been declining. Teenage pregnancies and abortion are rising.

Worse, they are leading to Singapore having one of the lowest birthrates in the world, which will retard its economic growth.

According to the Durex 2005 survey, the frequency with which Singaporean couples make love – 73 times a year – is the second lowest in the world.

It compares with a global average of 103 times. Only Japan was worse than the republic with an incredibly low 45 times. In comparison, the Greeks topped the league at 138 times a year.

While such statistics are not taken too seriously, they nevertheless serve to give a broad indication that things are not going well in Singaporeans’ sex lives.

Despite recent loosening up, Lee’s highly regulated rules on sexual behaviour have remained largely in place today.

Unreported in the local press is the economic cost. Singapore’s strict prim and proper laws may be costing it large opportunity costs as businessmen avoid going into an area the government frowns on.

They include adult, Broadway-type shows that would appeal to regional tourists, or moving into sex cosmetic surgery now thriving in some Asian cities.

Japanese engineers have just created a vibrating condom, an unlikely industry here.

The government had just allowed, for the first time, the island’s first privately held sex fair, which attracted curious visitors from the region.

There was no nudity and police kept a close watch over what went on.

With the help of the Internet and cheap travel, the new generation is setting its own agenda.

The Durex survey has revealed that its youths are becoming sexually active younger, losing their virginity at the average age of 18.4 years, far lower than many Asian countries.

Women bloggers post their own nude photos while lady teachers say things they don’t do in their classrooms.

Unlike their elders, for example, 18% of Singaporean women initiate sex – a higher proportion than anywhere else in Asia, according to a TIME survey.

(This was published in The Sunday Star)