COMMENT: Taking the talk out of the bedroom on International Women’s Day
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.
Over the years we’ve heard plenty about the need for more Singaporean couples to have children. What we’ve not heard more of, though, is about sex and the quality of sex that Singaporeans are having.
It was this issue that a panel of three experts attempted to tackle Friday at a talk on emotional and sexual satisfaction. With 61 per cent of men and 57 per cent of women in Singapore agreeing that mutual sexual satisfaction is crucial for a successful relationship, remarkably little attention has been paid to such a topic.
As the talk went on, it became evident that society’s reticence in talking about sex has fed into issues of sexual satisfaction and dysfunction. Sex has been made mysterious, and people are uncomfortable to approach the subject with much openness.
It’s a subject that’s strongly relevant on International Women’s Day, especially in a society still so enraptured by notions of purity and sexual innocence in women.
Squeamishness over talking about sex can be found all over the world, and sex education in schools often end up feeding into the problem rather than addressing it. Professor Marita McCabe from Deakin University’s School of Psychology pointed out that schools often equate providing information on sex with promoting promiscuity, although the reality is that such information would provide young people with the ability to make decisions and recognise healthy and unhealthy sex.
“Why do we take sex out of the regular function of our bodies?” she asked, adding that the sex negativity prevalent in society and sex education has often contributed to sexual dysfunction in women in terms of problems with desire, arousal and orgasm.
“Women need to have permission to engage and talk about sex,” she said.
Dr Angela Ng, a sex therapist from Hong Kong, highlighted another serious consequence of ignorance: most of her patients had suffered from vaginismus, a condition that prevents women from engaging in penetrative sex. The women, she said, had been so in the dark about sex that they had developed a phobia of it.
Such observations can easily be applied to Singapore, where sex education is often co-opted into conversations over morality, “core values” and the “purity” of Singaporean girls. Where parents and educators alike seem to prefer burying their head in the sand and denying the existence of pre-marital sex rather than providing their children with information about sex and its part in relationships.
Sex is not simply about making babies to boost the country’s birth rate. It is an important part of relationships, heterosexual or homosexual, and it’s vital that young people are able to identify healthy sex based on mutual consent and respect.
