Submitted by admin on Sat, 2005-11-26 09:00. ::
Durex' recent global sex survey has sent the city astir – apparently, Malaysians fare only sixth from the bottom on the global rankings when it comes to frequency of sex in a year. The whisperings about Malaysians being prudes seems only all too evident to the rest of the world.
We're also starting to have sex later than everyone else (starting at 19, when the global average is 17.3); finding out about sex later (14.9 versus 13.2); having sex with the fewest number of sex partners (5.8, compared to nine); and having sex the least number of times a year (83, compared to 103).
This comes as news to a girl whose conversations with almost everyone in her social circle are centred almost entirely around sex and composed of crude innuendos . . . then again, talking is not the same as doing. Perhaps, the excessive talk is making up for the lack of anything in the bedroom?
Not surprisingly, other countries in the region fare just as lowly in the rankings as Malaysia. According to the survey, people in India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand have significantly less sex and fewer partners than their Western counterparts.
In this part of the world, where societies pride themselves on moral uprightness, the naughty in's-and-out's of sex (excuse the pun) has long been relegated to the invisible bedroom and then never, ever discussed.
Now, things are a bit better – there are sex blogs, funny magazine articles about how to be a goddess in bed, silly crude jokes making their rounds on SMS, and plenty of lewd talk in every social circle. And yet, on the surface, we're still all being hush-hush about it. The family unit remains key; “face” continues to be all there is in the outside world.
It's a bit ironic then that these are the very countries known around the world for their lucrative sex industries. Bangkok has become synonymous with its sex tourism; anyone remotely acquainted with pornography will know of the huge, seedy treasure trove of sex scenes beneath Japan's polite world; and Malaysia itself boasts one of the largest communities on the online sex site, Adult Friend Finder.
And these full-fledged industries don't just cater to a sleazy tourist market. In her extensive study of sex slavery in Asia in the book Sex Slaves, Louise Brown argues that the domestic demands for commercial sex in Asia significantly exceeds that of the Western tourist market. We just don't know about them because they – and the patrons especially – keep well out of sight, behind closed doors.
Brown drives home the hypocrisy found within the sex lives of South and South-East Asians; that “the farcical assertion that Asian men uniformly adhere to a conservative sexual code of “virtue and fidelity” directly contradicts the rampant growth of the domestic sex market and continued exploitation of women.
That's not to say that all is clean and good in the West – but at least there, the violence and commercialisation of sex is highly visible for the world to see.
And we're experts at pathologising any sort of sex that deviates from that order of married and vanilla. But I've met enough people just in passing to learn of the underground parties, alternative lifestyles, and deviant sexual behaviour that thrives in spite of our refusal to acknowledge it.
Let's not kid ourselves: Malaysia, and its neighbours, are far from being the priggish, under-sexed, goody-goodies that Durex has made us out to be. We're not all “saving ourselves” for marriage, we don't mate with one partner for life like penguins, some of us are sampling flavours other than vanilla, and we're certainly doing it more often than 83 times a year . . . We just don't want anyone to know.
It's time to get over that silly pretense that sex doesn't exist or that it makes you a bad person (how can it?!). The fact is everybody's doing it and, unless you are deliberately hurting someone, neglect to be safe, or being a big, fat hypocrite, it ain't such a big deal.
This is cache, read story here
