So why are Singaporean men struggling with the concept of consent?

Hi guys. I had talked about the case of Monica Baey recently as part of my recent article on the Samuel Seow assault case, but obviously, it is a big story and I didn't want to just add my angry voice to the people demanding justice for Monica on social media - I wanted to find an angle to talk about that was different and I have found it. The encountered two Singaporean guys - one of them a reader who left a string of comments on my last article and the other (who is definitely not the same guy) who left some very similar comments on an article posted by my friend Abel on Facebook. Both of them struggled with the concept of consent and instead focused on the fact that young men will have a higher sex drive and somehow that justifies or explains why they would become sexual predators. The guy on Facebook (let's just refer to him as 'KD') wasn't at all concerned about the effects of such behaviour on the victims - he came across as totally autistic with Asperger's Syndrome. He was only able to see the issue from his own point of view, it didn't even occur to him to consider how a woman like Monica would view the issue very differently. Whilst I was able to reason with my reader, I had stepped back from an argument with KD - instead I discussed the issue with my friend Abel who told me that it was quite pointless arguing with KD for he is an idiot (and he knows KD through work but they're not close friends).

I don't want to turn this into an attack on KD - the world is full of stupid idiots like that and I can't cure people of their stupidity by picking a fight with them. Instead, I want to try to find out why some Singaporean men are really struggling with the concept of consent when it comes to sex. After all, the way I see it, heterosexual sex is perfectly legal in Singapore (let's leave the issue of S377A and gay sex out of this article for now - that's another issue for another day), so if young men like KD have a high sex and want to have sex with a lot of women, then there's nothing to stop him from having loads of sex with loads of women. If he is rich and attractive, then he can find loads of women who will be willing to have sex with him. And even if he is ugly and poor, then he can still find a consenting woman in the form of a prostitute and that consent is bought at a price. What I found very disturbing is that people like KD seem to neglect the important function of consent during any kind of sexual encounter - so even if they do meet a woman who is willing to give consent, men like KD would be crap lovers if they are only caring about their pleasure rather than being considerate to the lady. Likewise, it is ridiculous that some men would indulge in activities like upskirting or voyeurism (such as in the case of Monica Baey, when Nicholas Lim Jun Kai filmed her having a shower) - how is that an alternative to actually having sex with a consensual human being? Why are the young men of Singapore today so warped then? What has gone wrong?

The problem stems from the total lack of any proper sex education - my parents for example didn't give me any sex education. Well, let's put it this way, if my parents don't speak French, then they can't teach me how to speak French. Their default stance was, "don't have sex before marriage, otherwise you will die from sexually transmitted diseases." Heck, my parents are not educated, so this is just one of many areas in life they don't know anything about. So in their eyes, all sex outside marriage is wrong and even within marriage, sex should be something done behind closed doors, well hidden away from the rest of the world. So if we're in a situation where they consider all sex being completely taboo and forbidden, then how are young people going to learn the difference between healthy, consensual sexual relationships and when a sexual predator imposes himself on a woman without consent? The problem is that people like my parents would view the latter as just as sinful and wrong as the former when really, there's a huge difference once you look at the function of consent during sex. So the kind of approach that my parents took would only work if I would simply obey and do as I was told - but life is never that straight forward. Instead, I thought, no thanks, you're uneducated, autistic and stupid, why the hell should I listen to you? I'm far more intelligent than the two of you put together for crying out aloud, I'll figure this out for myself and rely on my own judgement instead of listening to you. Fortunately, I have met other intelligent adults along the way who did help nurture and educate me along the way - but in the case of KD, it is quite possible that his parents were useless in this aspect and he is simply not intelligent enough to figure this out for himself. Thus in this case, do you blame KD, his parents or do you condemn the whole bloody family?

If our parents are not even willing to acknowledge the fact that many young people are sexually active and having sex outside marriage, then they are not even in a position to start a sensible conversation about sexual consent with their children. They'll probably just tell their children that they must abstain from all sex until marriage (and then even after that, sex is only for the purpose of procreation and not carnal pleasure). That is a hideously stupid approach of course because plenty of young people in Singapore are sexually active these days and their parents are pretending it is not happening - I certainly was one of them in my younger days, my parents didn't want to know and I didn't want to tell them, so they were oblivious to the fact that I had become sexually active in my teenage years. Is that good parenting? Of course not, my parents were so utterly useless and clueless as parents in so many aspects. The fact is young people can become sexually active if they can find someone willing to have sex with them, they can indeed have a lot of sex with a lot of people if they are able to find a lot of willing parties to have sex with them all. And even if you're unattractive, then you can always buy sex from a prostitute whereby consent is negotiated and given upon the agreement of the right price. That then becomes a financial or business transaction with the prostitute, but nonetheless once you pay up, she will give you the consent you need for intercourse to happen.You see, unlike my parents, I'm not anti-sex: please go ahead and have as much sex as you like as it's your right to do so. I just strongly believe that all sex ought to be totally consensual.

Let me use alcohol as an analogy - the consumption of alcohol is legal in most countries and indeed in places like the UK, the government runs plenty of education campaigns regularly to tackle issues like drinking in moderation and drink driving. So the government is not trying to stop people from drinking alcohol, they are just trying to modify their behaviour to make them consume alcohol in a more responsible manner so they can reduce the harm done. However there are countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan where alcohol is completely banned under strict Islamic law, yet you know that there is a huge black market for alcohol in these countries, smuggled across the border from countries where alcohol is legal and some people are indeed still drinking illicitly in those countries and they have all kinds of other problems: there are cases of people dying of poisoning when they end up drinking contaminated alcohol in the absence of any kind of quality control in the black market to far more irresponsible behaviour when it comes to drinking without moderation and drink driving. The medical professionals in these countries know that there is a problem with alcohol consumption of course, but since their conservation Muslim governments have completely outlawed alcohol in any shape or form, there's absolutely nothing the medical professionals can do to even initiate a sensible conversation about the responsible consumption of alcohol and modifying the behaviour of the people who do drink alcohol in their countries. Well that's the same problem in Singapore - if parents won't even acknowledge the fact that their children are sexually active, how are they supposed to even start talking about issues like consent; along with STDs, relationships and pregnancy prevention?

I remember this classic line from Donna in Beverley Hills 90210 way back in the 1990s. She used a swimming pool analogy to talk about sex - she compared sex to having a swimming pool in your backyard (these are rich Americans). A concerned parent may worry about their children drowning in the pool, so you can tell your children not to go into the water, you can even build a fence around the pool but if you know that your children are going to eventually get into the pool one way or another, should you at least teach your children how to swim? And that passionate speech was given when Donna stood up to her mother when her mother was preaching abstinence - ooh, I even found that clip on Youtube - I can't embed it here because Blogger won't let me but here's the link for it on Youtube. That was from a generation ago, from when I was a teenager myself in the early 1990s and a generation on, Donna's speech on sex and condoms is still as valid today as so many parents are still absolutely clueless when it comes to teaching their children about vital issues around sex, such as consent. A lot of Singaporeans merely rolled their eyes when they heard this line in the programme because the thought of Singaporean parents talking about sex with their children is just unthinkable, but if teenagers in Singapore are happily watching hardcore porn online whilst their parents are blissfully looking the other way because they are just too embarrassed to talk about sex, we are now seeing the manifestation of this kind of bad parenting in the form of people like Nicholas Lim and KD, who don't seem to understand the concept of consent. To start discussing the concept of consent, we have to start talking about sex and that's something that many of these clueless Singaporean parents are unable to do simply because they don't even have the right social skills to be good parents in the first place.

Many Singaporean parents simply expect us to figure difficult issues out when we get older - they seem to assume that a good education is all we need in order to learn how to figure stuff out but that is really expecting a lot from our teachers. After all, the teachers are merely there to get you through an exam in that subject, they are not really there to nurture you as young adults - that's the job of the parents but sadly, so many Singaporean parents are so inept and useless at parenting they are hoping that the teachers will step in and fill in the huge gaps they have left. For example, I shook my head in despair when I read about Singaporean parents expecting lecturers at university to teach their inept kids "how to present and speak confidently" - holy fuck. Where do I even begin? The ability to speak eloquently and articulate yourself with confidence starts at a very early age: infants need to be nurtured in an environment where they are encouraged to speak up, where they are engaged by a mix of adults and peers to develop their social skills. Instead, what has happened is this: Singaporean parents are working extremely long hours, leaving childcare mostly to maids or leaving the kids to fend for themselves. Devoid of human interaction, these kids turn to their mobile phones, tablets and laptops to passively consume entertainment, watching videos or playing computer games. After years of neglect, these shitty Singaporeans somehow expect the university lecturers to perform a miracle and fix their children's complete lack of social skills? The teacher has every right to say, I'm just a teacher, I teach - I'm not here to do your job: you need to fulfill your responsibilities as a parent. If you have been a lousy, neglectful parent, don't expect me to fix that problem. I'm just a teacher, not a magician. It seems that many parents expect the schools or government to take over the responsibility of sex education for their children as well but of course, the schools are not doing it so the issue falls through the cracks.

So, allow me to give you an insight about what actually happens in Singapore - now this case study is from many years ago but it is reliable as it involves my mother. I remember a year when she taught a primary 6 class and she was given the responsibility to explain to the girls in the class what would happen when they got their periods, how to use a tampon or sanitary pad and what was happening to their bodies. The lesson was supposed to cover a range of issues surrounding puberty and how they would be affected by this transition both physically and emotionally. The girls in the class were meant to be taken aside for that talk with a female teacher whilst the boys were supposed to be given the male version of that talk by a male teacher. Except of course, none of that ever happened - my mother defaulted to the fact that this was the job of the parents, not the teacher as the conversation involved intimate details of the children's bodily functions. I even confronted her about it as I felt she was letting down her students and she merely shrugged her shoulders and said, "don't be silly lah - none of the other teachers in the school are doing it, I don't want to be the only one to talk to my students about sex." Now if the teacher refuses to touch a topic like that and the parents are under the impression that this is being taken care of in the schools, then this falls through the cracks and the children are the victims because they are deprived of a valuable, important lesson. So if nobody is actually teaching young people about even the most basic, biological functions about sex, they are learning about issues like relationships, sexual health and consent from the internet mostly through porn but also through movies and TV, that is why things have gone very wrong.

The problem with letting young people learn about sex from porn is that consent is never featured in porn - the porn stars participating in the porn film are always willing and happy to have sex. You are presented with a vision of beautiful porn stars who are always up for it, where consent is never an issue. But of course, porn is there for a purpose: it is there to present an idealized version of how good sex can be, rather than how wrong things can go during sex if not performed well. An analogy I would use is cooking programmes or videos on Youtube - let's take the video below for example, we are treated to a master class as to how to create a perfect Black Forest cake. We expect the baker presenting the video to show us exactly how to do it to get the perfect result, we're not after the bloopers to see how things could go wrong whilst trying to make a cake. This is because we're hopping that in following this recipe step by step, we too can create that beautiful perfect cake in our own kitchen when in reality, we usually do make some mistakes when trying to bake a cake as we're not experienced bakers. Many people actually take that same approach to porn: the issue of consent is never featured in the film, it is a forgone conclusion and if that's your own source of information for your sexual education, you're missing a huge part of the equation. But of course, porn was never created to be a substitute for quality sex education, so it is both unfair and unrealistic to criticize porn for not highlighting this aspect of sexual relationships. Porn is simply there to entertain adults who like porn - it is not there to educate you about sex, that is your parents' job.

Furthermore, there's another part of consent which plays an important role in having a healthy self-esteem. If you ask someone to have sex with you and the answer is 'yes', then that's a massive vote of confidence for you as this person does find you sexually appealing enough to want to have sex with you. After all, if someone turns you down for sex, then that means that they find you ugly and unattractive. However, we're dealing with a younger generation with extremely poor social skills and don't quite know how to engage people in real life, never mind ask someone to have sex with them. It is a risky double edged sword which can either boost or dent your self-confidence, depending on the outcome of whether or not they are successful or rejected when they seek sexual partners. So for some of them, actually asking someone to have sex is way too difficult for them - they don't have the social skills, they don't know how to be charming, they don't know how to seduce someone they fancy, they are pretty much useless in that department and they know that. Because they fear the inevitable rejection they will get if they ask the most beautiful girl they know for sex, they start to think about ways to somehow gain sexual gratification whilst circumventing the tricky issue of consent. Fortunately, most of them will just turn to porn on the internet as a means to an end, but in the case of Nicholas Lim and KD, they seem to think that they can somehow get what they want without the consent of the woman through voyeurism. This is disturbing on so many levels - the normal response one would offer such guys is to teach them how to improve their self image: this means a crash course in fashion, personal hygiene and social skills. Hopefully, this would improve the way they come across when they are to procure consent, to make sex with them a more attractive proposition. But if there is nobody there to help them with these aspects of their lives, then they are doomed forever to be single, undesired and unloved.

It does take a fairly large dose of self-confidence to be able to seek this kind of vote of confidence of course. Look, I don't pretend to be good looking, I'm a bald 43 year old middle aged man way past his prime, yet I regularly post selfies on my Instagram account and whilst I do generally judge how well liked my photos are from the number of likes I get, I also get a lot of personal messages from people on Instagram and the bottom line is that I love the way social media has allowed me to feel beautiful and loved when I get so much positive feedback and compliments each time I post something on Instagram. The fact is Instagram is a platform where you fish for compliments and getting nice feedback certainly makes us feelgood and want to continue doing it. Sure, I may get a small amount of negative feedback but thankfully that doesn't happen very often. Now, there's a paradox here: we do live in a society which normally disapproves of excessive vanity (the Hokkien word of it is hiau2) but by the same token, just look at anything from music videos to movies to the ads in our newspapers - we do appreciate beautiful people, we tend to mostly see images of beautiful people in media whilst fat, old or ugly people are mostly rendered invisible. Take the medium of K-pop music videos for example, Psy was the one exception being somewhat chubby middle aged man in a world populated exclusively by young and beautiful singers with perfect bodies and flawless skin. So if you are indeed 'ugly' for whatever reason, then the message that social media is sending you is this: you don't have the right to be seen, you're invisible. You may only post pictures of flowers, sunsets and cute puppies on Instagram but if you dare to post a selfie, you'll only be ridiculed by haters from all over the world. So what happens to these people then when they feel the need for love or sex? What can they do then? 

There is a long-running controversial C4 TV series here in the UK called 'Undateables', it is already into its tenth season - the cast include people with a condition that makes it hard for them to get a date be it a physical disfigurement, a disability or just severely autistic people with extremely poor social skills. The TV series has offended a lot of people because the viewers feel that the show is exploiting and even humiliating the people who take part in the show, but others feel that without the help of the professionals involved in the programme, these people might never ever have the confidence to even go on a date, never mind find love or sex. But at the end of the day, the aim of the show is not to make fun of the participants but to help them find love and get into a relationship. Of course, the casting of the programme is somewhat controversial of course because nobody likes to be labeled 'undateable' and it has offended many, but at the end of the day, it does reinforce a very important principle about consent. That if you want someone to like you enough to have sex with you, to love you and want to have a relationship with you, then you have to make yourself appealing and attractive enough to them and this programme does go a long way in helping people do just that. The fact is if Singaporean men can actually get some help in terms of their poor social skills, then they would go a long way in terms of rectify the problematic situation when it comes to finding love and sex - but even if help was available, you know the saying: you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Would Singaporean men with very poor social skills be willing to participate in a programme like the Undateables to get the help they need to find love and sex?

So what we are seeing in Singapore is a combination of a woeful lack of proper sex education and social skills affecting young men, the effect this combination has on their ability to relate to women is very toxic - for starters, they often come across as autistic without any ability to empathize, unable to even try to see things from a woman's point of view. I have come across a few Singaporean men making this claim, that Nicholas Lim's crime isn't that serious because he didn't "harm" Monica Baey in any tangible way, it was not like she was raped - he didn't even lay a finger on her and he merely saw her naked (be it with his own eyes or through his mobile phone). To these people, I would challenge them: how would you like to be filmed naked whilst showering, then for the footage to be uploaded onto many gay porn sites around the world to have millions of people see that video - to probably have to read the comments of people making fun of every aspect of their imperfect bodies right down to the size of their tiny penises. The kind of psychological damage that this can do to a person is immense, it is a very extreme form of cyber bullying. Of course, no one wants to be subject to that - goodness me, even when I post pictures on my Instagram, I delete the unflattering photos and am careful about what I do post. It is a woman's right to decide whom she wants to show her body to her and under what circumstances - the men who ignore the psychological harm they inflict on a woman by violating her privacy in this manner are merely seeing it from their point of view,  they unfortunately totally incapable of placing themselves in the shoes on the woman to see things from her point of view. Am I surprised that young men in Singapore have such poor social skills? No. This is why we need much stronger laws to protect Singaporean women in this context if they are going to have to live amongst such men devoid of any basic social skills - Nicholas Lim should have been jailed and caned to send a clear message.

Thus how safe women feel in society depends a lot on whether there is an effective deterrent in terms of harsh punishments for those who do violate the privacy and/or modesty of women - that's why so many of us recognize the need to punish people like Nicholas Lim extremely severely because it is goes way beyond this specific case: making an example of Nicholas Lim would go a long way in deterring other men from even thinking about trying what he did. If you're thinking that this is a problem that can be tackled and solved through education, then you're only deceiving yourself - we are in this situation in the first place where Singaporean men are struggling to understand the concept of sexual consent because they have such incredibly poor social skills. There was perhaps a time a few decades ago when we could have created a better society where men were taught to respect women and develop better social skills, but that ship has sailed a very long time ago. This is a much wider issue that goes way beyond protecting women from voyeurs - the state needs to recognize the gravity of the problem and how dire the situation is when it comes to basic social skills amongst young men in Singapore. This is why the current situation is highly unsatisfactory for a lot of Singaporeans (both men and women) who feel that not enough is done to send a message to men who think that there is little wrong with what Nicholas Lim did - that's why it is necessary to send the only message that will resonate with them: a threat of a very long jail sentence along with caning. If sacrificing Nicholas Lim's future will allow Singapore's women to feel a lot safer, then I say, lock him up and I will personally throw that key into the Mariana Trench.(See the video below.)

But let's go back to another alternative that I have talked about in this article: visiting a prostitute. There is a huge social taboo about prostitutes in Singapore for two reasons: firstly, it is generally seen as something immoral or seedy because you're paying for sex - the man is perceived to be taking advantage of the fact that the woman desperately needs the money and has no other way to earn it. It is often associated with the exploitation of women and men who pay for sex are thus often very secretive about visiting a prostitute. Secondly, there is the whole issue of shame, because if you're good looking, charming and witty, surely you can find someone willing to have sex with you - thus by that token, it is assumed that paying for sex would tantamount to admitting that you're just so ugly and disgusting that nobody would want to touch you. That is why many people are hesitant about the whole notion of paying for sex still but if you were to leave aside any issues about morals (and let's  assume you are visiting a woman who is happy and willing to do this for money), then at least consent is given in exchange for the right amount of money. Surely you would rather someone like Nicholas Lim go visit a prostitute rather than becoming a sexual predator who preys on innocent women who have no desire to ever have sex with him. I would say that visiting a prostitute in this context is definitely the lesser of two evils and there is certainly no shortage of prostitutes in Singapore. In my army days, it was common for the guys to go to Johor Bahru on a Saturday night for a night of drinking, partying and it all ends with getting a 'massage' but of course, the masseuse is also offering sexual services as well if you're willing to pay for it. So it is not as if Singaporean men would never use the services of a prostitute - so many of them actually do but keep quiet about it because of the social stigma attached to it.

Nonetheless, to even consider this as the lesser of two evils is a big stretch of imagination for a lot of Singaporeans. I remember how my mother nearly choked on her rice when I used prostitution as an analogy when discussing looking for a bargain. I used the Chinese phrase 一分钱, 一分货 (you get what you pay for) to describe a situation where it is a false economy to try to save money by buying an inferior, cheaper product and I said it was the same whether you were buying a shirt, choosing a good bottle of wine, buying a new bicycle or paying for the services of a prostitute: you get what you pay for. Even the very mention of the word 'prostitute' made my mother so uncomfortable, she nearly spat out her food in shock. My mother couldn't even deal with the fact that I had introduced the topic of prostitutes at the dinner table over what was polite conversation as it was such a taboo subject for people like her. She was so shocked that I had compared it to any other business transaction when in her eyes, it was such an immoral act involving illicit sexual activities that she couldn't even contemplate the financial aspects of that transaction. I can't imagine someone like the mother of Nicholas Lim asking her son to visit a prostitute if he was really that horny - but surely that would have been the better option given how he has ruined his future now. Every time he applies for a job, any gatekeeper who looks him up on Google is going to realize that he is the sexual predator associated with this case - good luck trying to get any job interviews now Nicholas, this news is now being shared all over the internet and you can't scrub this story off the internet even if you tried. Now within this context, perhaps the occasional discrete visit to a prostitute wouldn't seem like such a bad thing if it would have somehow stopped him from turning into one of Singapore's most notorious criminals of 2019. 

In conclusion, whilst we're easily horrified by the way so many Singaporean men have totally failed to understand the concept of consent during sex, this is but a symptom of a much bigger problem - that of a younger generation having extremely poor social skills, having been brought up with parents who are equally clueless about parenting. We can bitch about how socially inept Singaporean men are when it comes to social skills, but what is even worse is the lack of action on the part of Singaporean authorities to enforce laws in a way to keep women in Singapore safe in this context. So what do you think? Have I been way to harsh on Singaporean men or am I merely scraping the surface when it comes to attitudes towards women in Singapore? Do Singaporean men deserve to be condemned or are we dealing with just a small number idiots online who fail to show even the most basic social skills when it comes to respecting women? What is the root cause of the problem and what is the best way ahead for us to try to make sense of this? What would you like to see happen in the Nicholas Lim case - has justice been served? Do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.