Ng Boon Gay’s wife making the deepest form of self-sacrifice

Posted on February 1, 2013 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Strong spouses in their own way’, 1 Feb 2013 and ‘When men stray, women should not feel that they are expected to stay’, 30 Jan 2013, Voices, Today

(Donovan Chee Kwok Hoe):…I do not condone cheating. When I see pictures of Ng Boon Gay’s missus holding his hand, I would never assume that she has forgiven him. But whether she is holding his hand because of the need to maintain a public facade or otherwise is not for us to judge or assume. That would be venturing into dangerous territory.

What I see, instead, is her willingness to support her husband through his darkest days. She has made the deepest form of self-sacrifice and should be applauded.

(Magdalene Sim Jia Ling):…In my view, a brave woman is someone strong enough to walk away as and when it is necessary to do so, someone who can stand up for what is right and wrong in her life, including standing up against her husband’s infidelities.

It is not that women should never forgive their unfaithful husbands, but it is for them, in their own circumstances and capacities, to decide. There should never be an expectation on them that staying with their husbands or publicly supporting them through scandals is the mark of a smart woman, or worse, a loving wife who is woman enough to stand by her marriage.

She stands by her man

Yap Yen Yen once told reporters that she ‘continues to believe in her husband, and that her love for him hasn’t wavered’. Throughout the trial, she has been portrayed by the media as the stoic, silent victim. Only time will tell if this display of bewildering affection is really a ‘public facade’ to garner sympathy, or a genuine show of solidarity and forgiveness. The latter, of course, is a virtue that’s been enshrined in all major religions and moral ethics, and between filing for immediate divorce and sticking by her man, it’s often the latter gesture that casts the victim in the glowing light of the ‘loving, magnanimous wife’ persona. It also helps that men are always seen as scheming bastards and are automatically thrust with the blame whenever they stray, regardless of how their wives have treated them previously.

The ‘suffering wife rising from the flames like a phoenix’ is a phenomenon that is publicly celebrated; the classic example of Hilary Clinton giving president husband Bill a second chance comes to mind. An ST journalist in Singapolitics called 2012 the year of the STRONG WOMAN, citing examples such as Diane Palmer and Howard Shaw’s model wife Jessie Xue. Chua Mui Hoong, Opinion editor, lauds Yap as the BRAVEST WOMAN in the news last year. Nobody knows anything about these women other than their apparent willingness to accept their husbands’ philandering nonsense and simply move on. They have become a fighting symbol of womanhood and little else. No one said anything worth applauding about Cecilia Sue’s husband, or Laura Ong’s boyfriend/husband, who are also victims in their own right. Nobody’s going to call a man a BRAVE SOUL for accepting a wife who sleeps around. If a woman keeps quiet about the affair, she’s grieving or struggling to keep the marriage afloat. If a man keeps silent, he’s plotting revenge and imagining running the lover through with a chainsaw.

Still a Great romance

A woman may be viewed as ‘strong’ whether she forgives her husband or packs her bags and leaves. Men, on the other hand, may be described as ‘strong’ in the same emotional sense if they can overcome immense grief like from the death of a loved one, but if they stand by a cheating wife, they are cast as weak cuckolds and not worth swooning over at all, unless they use it to their advantage as sob-story pick-up bait in their quest for one-night stands at the club. For all you know a woman’s sweet acts in public are secretly  out of personal repentance or even relief, if she herself has also been guilty of fooling around with other men.  Yap Yen Yen isn’t a heroine; she’s just a woman coping with her husband’s and her own shame her way, caught in the headlights by a public yearning for a story to tell and for her to be made a shining example for women in similar situations everywhere, even if Mother Theresa standards of forgiveness do not necessarily guarantee a lasting marriage.

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Filed under: Sex, Singaporean men, Singaporean women, Marriage, 2013 | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Double-barrelled surname sounding like CNY

Posted on December 30, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Bound together in name’, 30 Dec 2012, article by Lisabel Ting, Sunday Lifestyle

When freelance writer Yu-Mei Balasingamchow was in school, examinations were more of a nightmare for her than for most other students. “It was really troublesome to fill in my name on optical answer sheets. Sometimes, by the time I was done, it felt like half the exam had gone by,” says the 38-year-old.

Ms Balasingamchow’s unique last name is an amalgam of the names of her parents – Chow is her Chinese mother’ family name, and Balasingam is the name of her half-Chinese, half-Ceylonese father.

Her parents created it to “give people an idea of my heritage, although they did acknowledge that it would be troublesome”, she says.

…Double-barrelled surnames such as Ms Balasingamchow’s seem to be more acceptable now, and raise fewer eyebrows than in previous generations.

Mrs Wendy Chiang-Cheong, 40, who wed in 1998, recounts that her mother did not take similar steps to retain her family name as it was uncommon then.

…Mrs Chiang-Cheong, who is married to a 41-year-old IT project manager, admits that her last name can be quite a mouthful. “Some people have told me that my last name sounds very noisy and reminds them of Chinese New Year,” says the counsellor.

If you’re a member of British royalty in the 1930′s you could collect women surnames like Pokemon. There was an Earl of Buckinghamshire called John Hampden Hobart-Hampden-Mercer-Henderson, which made it much easier to just refer to him as the Earl of Buckinghamshire. Today if you want to sound like a conqueror you don’t need multiple surnames. You just need to give yourself a name like Romeo Tan. 

Having a double-barrelled surname that is onomatopoeia for cymbals clamging or almost a soundalike for a dim sum staple is awkward, but not as awful as the wacky permutations that Tweeters contributing to the hashtag #SurnameMashups have come up with. Here’s a sample of dual combinations of Chinese surnames that you may wish to avoid adopting or bequeathing to your children:

Hong-Gan, Chee-Tan, Long-Kang, Yam-Seng, Ngiam-Kheng, Seow-Leow. And the list goes on.

Some would use hyphenated/combined surnames to their advantage as a killer ice-breaker and personal marketing tool. Yu-Mei Balasingamchow herself mentioned in an interview that her surname made her more ‘Google-able’. Try it yourself (type Balasingamchow) and you’ll find her filling the entire first search page. And just about every page thereafter.

Even if, thankfully, your double-barrelled name doesn’t sound like food, drains, toasting or Hokkien expletives, there’s the question of order: Husband or wife’s surname first? This was a question posed since the early 1980s, when women were already using such combinations professionally. Without any formal convention on how hyphenated names should be arranged, you’d have people second guessing your actual maiden name.  Or perhaps the order is chosen solely to avoid the catastrophic reverse; Tan-Chee, for instance.

In fact, double-barrelled names were actively DISCOURAGED by the Registry of Births in 1981, when there was the possibility of quadruple surnames if two individuals with dual surnames married and had children. Things would get more complicated if you were of mixed race. If you took up your Caucasian husband’s name entirely, you may be accused of ‘selling out’ your Asian heritage. Yet, too much cross-fertilisation to the extent of triple and quadruple-barrells would make you sound like a theory discovered by a team of physicists or mathematicians rather than an actual person. And if pulled off creatively, that may not be a bad thing after all.

Filed under: 1930s, 2012, Kids, Marriage, Names, Parenting | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

LKY’s Haram Truths

Posted on December 10, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘M’sia religious body still studying Hard Truths’, 10 Dec 2011, article in Today

Malaysia’s government has said that a book on Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew is “still being studied” despite federal Islamic authorities earlier confirming that it has been placed on a list of books declared “haram”, or forbidden to Muslims.

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Mr Jamil Khir Baharom, said the book, Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going (picture), was being “examined”. “It is under the Home Ministry … it is not haram,” he told The Malaysian Insider.

When told that the book was one of 15 listed by the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia (Jakim) as haram, the senator replied that “this just means it is being examined by the censorship committee”.

In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a ‘fatwa’, technically a death sentence and manhunt, against Salman Rushdie for ‘The Satanic Verses’, declaring it ‘against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran’.  LKY’s Hard Truths, as its title suggests,  isn’t a work of fiction (though probably no less entertaining) like Rushdie’s Verses. If it weren’t written by a powerful politician, Hard Truths might have been regarded as more blasphemous than it really is and incite Muslim extremists to call for the old man’s head as well.

Our own authorities have a habit of putting authors in prison for exposing the criminal justice system (Alan Shadrake’s Once a Jolly Hangman, for example), so it would be indeed ironic if certain religious councils in our neighbouring countries call for more than just a ban on Hard Truths the book, but issue ‘fatwas’ on its prolific and outspoken author as well. Incidentally, Hard Truths speaks of Muslims marginalising themselves from society by being too ‘strict’ with their beliefs.

Memoirs aside, here’s a terrifying list of non-food things classified as ‘haram’ by Islamic authorities around the world.

  • Yoga: A fatwa was issued against yoga in 2008 by Sarawak authorities, and Muslims were advised to do other forms of physical activity to keep healthy, because yoga originated from ‘Hindu spiritual teachings’.
  • Aerobics: According to the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), aerobic moves ‘tended to spark sexual desire and therefore were contrary to Islamic mores’. Practitioners of this erotic exercise should also refrain from wearing ‘transparent clothing’.
  • Valentine’s Day: The JB state Religious Department issued a fatwa for V-Day in 2005, stating that such celebrations ‘involved elements of vice’.
  • Poco-poco: Though not eventually banned, this dance routine was frowned upon by the Perak Fatwa Committee, not because it was overtly erotic, but because the steps involved making a cross with your feet. Heck, some states even ban public SINGING and dancing altogether (No public singing and dancing, decrees Kelantan government, 7 Oct 1995, ST). Yet there’s a Malaysian Idol?
  • Sperm banks: The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI)  declared that the presence of sperm bank in the country was haram or prohibited. “Sperm donor is haram, so is sperm bank”, so says a spokesman. One can only speculate why the generous life-giving  act of donating sperm is forbidden.
  • Taking part in SMS contests: Jakim says this tantamounts to betting, and betting is a form of gambling, which is forbidden in Islam. I guess carnival ‘games of chance’ should be banned as well.
  • Tomboys, or ‘pengkid’: The fatwa reads ‘Pengkid, that is, women who have the appearance, mannerisms and sexual orientation similar to men, is haram in Islam’. It was supposed to ‘save these women from lesbianism’.
  • Marrying a transgender: In 1982, the national Fatwa committee in Malaysia ruled that it is haram for a man to marry another man who has undergone a sex change to be a woman (Sex change marriage is haram, 17 April 1982, ST)
  • Buying a cucumber: Not surprisingly this comes from Al Qaeda in Iraq. What about bananas then?
  • Elton John:   Josephine Teo would surely approve.
  • Wearing wigs: Especially those made of human hair
  • Body building contests: Banned by the Sarawak Religious Affairs Dept (Jais) for over-exposing bodies (Sarawak bans bodybuilding contests for Muslims, 24 Aug 1997, ST). I suppose Abercrombie and Fitch is haram too.
  • Delivering a buffalo head to appease a sea demon: Don’t ask why.

Filed under: 1950s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2011, Fun and games, Gay stuff, Marriage, Nudity, Politicians, Religion, Sex | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Viet brides bought for threesomes

Posted on October 2, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Childless couple has threesome with Viet bride’, 1 Oct 2011, article in insing.com, translated from Sin Ming Daily

The boss of a matchmaking agency that specialises in Vietnamese brides has come out to share some of his more bizarre experiences with clients. Lin Ma Ke recalls one of his clients, a well-to-do businessman in his 60s, had approached him specifically for a Vietnamese girl to bear illegitimate children for him.

The businessman had approached Lin three times for girls, the latest time only a few months back. According to Lin, the man is married but childless and wants children to hand down his business to. The couple decided to have a Vietnamese girl bear illegitimate children for them.

Through the agency, the couple went through two Vietnamese girls, both of whom packed up and returned to Vietnam after merely two weeks. Lin found out that the girls had left because the couple had tried to have ‘threesomes’ with them.

Some time ago, Lin introduced another 25-year-old Vietnamese girl to the couple, but she also gave up and left after three months. Lin made further queries to find out why the girls were leaving.

The businessman’s 50-year-old wife was said to be a control freak and had insisted on watching when the man had sex with the Vietnamese girl. The man’s wife also controlled when the man is allowed to have sex with the Vietnamese girl and does not allow the girl to be alone with the man. She also confiscated the girl’s passport and does not allow her to make phone calls.

Lin said, “Although the girl liked that the businessman was very kind to her, she could not bear with the way she was controlled.”

Foreign bride matchmakers are usually thorough in screening their bridal ‘stock’, but there appears to be no measures in place to protect helpless brides from abusive clients. These agencies used to specialise in helping lonely, aging men find a life partner if they could afford it, but have evolved into legitimate facilitators of kinky sex slavery. If Lin knew that his client was already married, why allow the trade? What was once a business of ‘finding one’s soulmate’ has branched into unlicensed womb rental, when all he really did was unknowingly pimp out his ‘bride-to-be’ as a sex-slave to be toyed about by a very depraved, decadent elite businessman with an unquenchable sex drive and a wife with a voyeur-dominatrix fetish.

Bride ‘shopping’ is really a more ‘humane’ form of human trafficking, with the formality of marriage thrown in as a guise of decency when the fact remains that these women are paraded like wares in a slave market, are haggled for a price, put through some ‘test drives’ and are asked to be ‘returned’ if deemed to be ‘defective’. For men who desire sex slaves but can’t afford to go through the ‘legal’ channels, there’s the riskier avenue of hunting young  innocent flesh in nearby Batam. But who wouldn’t be tempted by a $4000 price tag for a Viet bride (slashed by 50% in 2008 during the recession)? That’s even cheaper than that Chanel bag local husbands buy for their wives on wedding anniversaries.

The name of the agency was not mentioned in the article, but from  the  boss’s name (Lin Ma Ke), my guess is ‘Vietnam Brides International’, headed by one of the pioneers of Viet bride trading, Mark Lin of Taiwanese descent. Lin started out with ‘Sin Ye International Matchmaker’ and was featured in an ST article almost 10 years ago (Mate-in-Vietnam marriages, 21 July 2002, ST). According to the report, you had to fork out up to $22k for a wedding tour ‘package’, which includes a virginity check, transport, bridal passport application, and of course, a take-home bride. Viet brides also had the reputation of being ‘demure, conservative with simple needs and expectations’, which was perfect for not-so-well educated local men who have problems marrying ‘upwards’, or finding a  Singaporean woman who would give him a foot massage and a warm home-cooked dinner after a hard day’s work. China brides were out of favour by then, presumably because of increasing cases of men getting conned by them and not vice versa. Lin’s shrewd enterprise of combining matchmaking, holiday and wedding banquet all in one package was a godsend to many lonely Singaporean men with cash to spare.

Just a few years later in 2004, Sin Ye had Viet brides ‘imported’ to deal with the competition, with the Vietnamese embassy reporting that at least 300 brides had arrived in Singapore (Four hours – and he finds a Viet bride, 19 Oct 2004). The majority of clients were middle aged, and obviously wealthy, Chinese bachelors, who simply wanted an ‘obedient and gentle’ wife, contrary to the ‘materialistic, independent’ nature of the modern Singaporean woman, whose ‘spoilt princess’ label persists till this day. The Viet brides themselves were also reportedly ‘seeking’ out foreign grooms, in a bid to break away from a hard life of ‘backbreaking rice-planting’. To many, these agencies, and Singaporean men who craved genuine companionship, were lifesavers indeed. It was a hugely profitable win-win situation for matchmakers like Lin.

The dark side of choose-your-bride quickie marriages emerged in 2005, when an agency in Pearl’s Centre was conned by an old cobbler from Bishan and ‘sold’ a Vietnamese bride for $1 instead of the initial price tag of $10,000. It turns out that the client was already married, and sexually exploited his ‘bride’ for a week in a Geylang hotel, a fate worse than if she had been a prostitute instead. But the issue here isn’t the incompetence of the said matchmaking agency’s accounting department, but rather the lack of regulations to prevent men, rich or poor, single or married, from using such ‘legal services’ to fulfill their sicko sex-in-a-dungeon fantasies.

In the same year, a booth was set up an agency at a family carnival featuring ‘Viet brides on sale’ in a ‘fishtank’ . Note that this was 2005 and our quest for foreign brides had somehow thrown us all the way back to the days of Spartacus by putting human goods on display like chickens at a wet market, except that instead of cages we have ‘glass enclosures’. With such demeaning practices it’s no wonder that Viet brides are being treated like sex objects, used not only as nubile, fertile vessels for someone’s heir, but also forced to participate in lewd orgy games.  It’s not easy to have local men change their mindsets on the ‘ideal’ wife and start courting smarter women, or have successful women accept less well-off men to starve off these matchmakers. Or one could set up a watchdog group to keep all these agencies in check and ensure that their ‘livestock’ do not end up being living sex dolls locked up in a rich man’s wine cellar.  Clamping down on dubious transactions also wouldn’t stop rich perverts from taking their dirty business straight to the source, cutting out the middleman completely.  Despite the modern picture of unconditional love, as well as the sanctity and civility of marriage which we have painted ourselves, there are still things – dirty, sleazy, immoral things -  which money, sadly, can always buy. Meanwhile, Lin is already venturing into Myanmese brides as we speak, having milked dry developing countries of their village women. Before you know it he will be casting his fishing line at Laos or Papua New Guinea. As Bon Jovi once crooned: You give Love a Bad Name.

How much is that human in the window

Filed under: 2000s, Sex, Singaporean men, Singaporean women, Marriage, Foreign workers, 2011 | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

London weight management ad insults all women, everywhere

Posted on September 25, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Weight management ad draws ire’, article by Pearly Tan, 24 Sept 2011, TNP and ‘Controversial slimming ad sparks debate’, article by Liyana Low, sg yahoo news.

FURIOUS netizens have been slamming local slimming company London Weight Management for its insensitivity depicting women and suicide.

At scrutiny is the company’s latest television ad – which begins with what appears to be a woman crying atop a building with her baby in a pram next to her.

With the murder-suicide of Madam Tan Sze Sze and her 3-year-old son in Bedok Reservoir fresh in the minds of people here, anger erupted with many calling for the banning of the ad.

….TV host Anita Kapoor wrote and published an open letter to London Weight Management on her blog on Friday, saying, “You have insulted all women, everywhere.”

Noting that she had never experienced such a “deep, almost physical response” to anything as she had when she saw the ad on TV, Kapoor said, “You, and all who supported you to produce it, have colluded to portray women as pathetic, unworthy individuals. Losers on every level if they are overweight; winners at every level if they are slim.

“This is irresponsible, vile, atrocious advertising, and in every scene you have gone ahead to make many claims,”  she stated before outlining seven scenes she did not agree with.

The company’s view of women, as shown in the ad, is “extremely troubling” and should warn women to “avoid your services entirely”, she added.

Different woman, same baby

Coming from a hugely profitable institution that relies on dubious methods of slimming, one shouldn’t put much WEIGHT (hur hur) on such ads, even if it were based on a ‘true story’. We’re used to the gross exaggeration of results from  such ads in the past which strain credulity, but London Weight Management has probably crossed the line here by associating weight issues with unemployment and marriage problems. They don’t just want to make you slimmer, but happier, which has always been the mantra of slimming centres.

In 1969, a company named Joanne Drew used Christmas as a ploy to entice customers to ‘get in shape’ and ‘look their best’ during the year end festivities within a guaranteed 7 weeks. Nothing was mentioned about staying trim thereafter, which gives the impression that it’s OK to be a bit fleshy on every other day of the year, but just make sure you can fit into your Xmas dress when the time comes. It became a ‘weighty problem’ in the late seventies, with the Hilton Health Club promoting the use of sauna, ‘special treatments’ and a ‘keep fit course’ for busy working professionals. Which means women actually got to sweat and burn some extra calories during these sessions.

In the 80′s, it was name-calling that was usually the trigger for women to turn to these companies, and ads were more realistic (see sample below), though the grim  slim = happiness equation has since imprinted itself on the psyche of women everywhere. Any form of exercise class became non-existent, and the emphasis has tilted towards  ‘trim’ rather than ‘fit’. Supposedly the Woman of the eighties onwards has no time to juggle between work and any form of exercise. She was also perfectly happy looking like a nerd.

Celebrities were subsequently roped in to endorse such centres. In 2002, Michelle Saram was the pin-up girl for Slimming Sanctuary, who was probably never fat, or depressed, to begin with. Hence the trend of the industry paying out-of-work entertainers to basically tell women that they still need ‘slimming solutions’ even if their BMIs were perfectly normal. Gone were the plain Jane  ‘aunties’ of the eighties. It wasn’t long before post-partum celebrities jumped on the bandwagon in a bid by slimming centres to expand their clientele. They were also starting to sell ‘confidence’ in addition to ‘youth’ and  ‘shapeliness’, and it wouldn’t be long before the master stroke that is making the conceptual leap from confidence to better career prospects was made.

In the opening sequence of the video we see a client tossed out of a boardroom for her undesirable ‘image’, and then lapsing into depression before succumbing to the magic fix that is LWM. No one doubts that such therapy may help some individuals otherwise they wouldn’t be so successful, but aside from the predictable furore over discrimination and misleading claims,  the makers of the video also need a lesson on storyboard consistency. The first error is casting a totally different, and visibly younger, woman for the ‘happy ending’ scene, taking the viewers for complete idiots. Even monkeys would notice the discrepancy. The second is that the baby hasn’t grown one bit in 3 months since the 20kg -shaving transformation, though according to LWM’s website, clients get to lose 4-6 cm during EACH SESSION of treatment. But on a serious note, it also undermines the role of doctors’ advice. The first thing that any health professional would counsel knowing that his patient was at risk of heart disease was to diet and exercise. Instead, our protagonist signs up for LWM the moment she gets up from her wheelchair, with determination to ‘do something about it’ written all over her face. Even if everything about the alleged ‘Kelly Phoon’ were true in the ad, from the deranged boss to the mirror smashing, the least LWM could do was at least portray some attempt at diet and exercise instead of selling themselves as first-line therapy for all the problems plaguing your miserable existence.

LMW, of course, isn’t the only company to perpetuate the epidemic of body dysmorphic disorder affecting female professionals today, girls who look fine but think they’re overweight and pressured into skinniness by their peers and the media. You don’t need a raging feminist like Anita Kapoor to tell you about the deceit inherent in the business. With or without this ad, we should have seen through the false glamour and mumbo-jumbo a long time ago. The only reason why this ad exists, if not giving a screaming part-time actress a shot at fame, is because in the world of Photoshop, you can’t just rely on ‘Before and After’ pictures any more. LWM, by breaking the ‘fourth wall’ and venturing into dramatised narrative to sell the myth of slim=happy, has become an unfortunate case study of how NOT to market ‘slimming’ solutions’ in the digital age.

Filed under: 1980s, 2000s, 1960s, 1970s, Advertisements, Singaporean women, Marriage, 2011 | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Desmond Choo nominated for Alamak award

Posted on September 25, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Aware to give our award for sexism’, 25 Sept 2011, article by Jamie Ee Wen Wei, Sunday Times

It’s not an award to crow about. But Hougang grassroots adviser Desmond Choo looks set to clinch what is believed to be the country’s first sexism award, in ‘honour’ of a person or organisation that has done the greatest disservice to gender equality.

The award is the tongue-in-cheek brainchild of the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware), which will dish it out on Oct 17 during its fundraising dinner at the Grand Hyatt Hotel to celebrate its 26th anniversary

…The sexism award, called the Alamak Award, has five nominees. Nominations were made by the public on Aware’s website over a six-week period that started last month.

Mr Choo, 33, who was the People’s Action Party’s candidate in Hougang in the May General Election, was criticised for being sexist when he made his maiden rally speech. During that speech, he recounted a meeting with an elderly Hougang resident who told him that choosing an MP is like choosing a wife.

‘If your wife is unable to cook, there’s no point. You must choose a wife who is able to look after you and do things for you,’ Mr Choo had said in recounting what the elderly man told him.

Besides Mr Choo, four organisations made the list. They are: the Singapore Obedient Wives Club; Singapore Airlines; the Singapore Armed Forces; and insurance company Great Eastern.

The ‘winner’ will be decided by an online vote, which started last Tuesday. It will end on Oct 7. Close to 60 per cent of the 600 votes cast have gone to Mr Choo. The Obedient Wives Club is second, with 33 per cent of the votes.

I Choo-Choo-Choose You

There’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about this award, unlike the much feted ‘Razzies’, a satirical spin-off  of the Oscars; it’s more like stiletto-in-crotch. This isn’t a Worst Dressed List, which ‘winners’ can simply ignore. The ‘Alamak’ award is an accusation and potentially damaging to one’s reputation, and you can’t attend it just to be a ‘sport’ unless you are a glutton for humiliation. Before tossing it around to random voters to take potshots, it’s only fair that AWARE chooses its nominees carefully in order to minimise bias. So it’s no surprise that Desmond Choo, recently blasted for being embroiled in the PA fiasco and being the only PAP nominee, or INDIVIDUAL, in the list, is in the lead considering that ‘how sexist you are’ is determined by anonymous voters clicking a button in a poll. Not only will he secure the votes of disgruntled housewives but both sexes of the anti-PAP camp as well.

Here’s a look at the other AWARE nominees to see why Desmond Choo will score a landslide victory, unlike the outcome of his Hougang campaign.

1) Obedient Wives Club

2) SAF ‘Our Army, My Boyfriend’ ad

3) Singapore Airlines employment policies

4) Great Eastern ‘It’s Great to be a Woman’ ad

It’s worth noting that AWARE labels this as ‘Who scored the biggest FAIL in 2011′,  which is the sort of language gossipy teenagers use to describe celebrity fashion disasters. The remainder of the list suffers from the ‘dilution of responsibility’ effect. I mean, who’s going to accept the award for SAF if they did win? Desmond is seriously outplayed here only because he’s a public figure, when the people directly accountable for the sexist ads (scriptwriter, marketing director?) were spared from embarrassment. Why wasn’t he put under the umbrella term ‘PAP’, which by the way, has a cabinet made up COMPLETELY of males (much to AWARE’s disappointment), or perhaps Desmond is just the unlucky scapegoat cum whipping boy for AWARE’s general dissatisfaction with the dearth of female representation in Government?

But hold your horses, ladies. Does Desmond even deserve being labelled as sexist here? According to the article he was RELATING what an old Hougang resident told him. It’s not clear if Desmond actually agrees with the analogy, so why didn’t AWARE drag the resident into the list as well, just because he’s an old anonymous fogey who can say whatever he wants? Like most GE analogies, this one is flawed anyway. Unlike a wife, you don’t have to LOVE your MP, and it’s easier to ‘divorce’ your MP every 5 years if you feel like it. The point both parties were trying to make here is not that ‘women should all be Nigella Lawsons’, but that MPs must have the necessary  ‘skills’ to run a GRC before you ‘marry’ them. Using a sexist analogy for political gain just isn’t the same as actually ‘advocating’ that women pamper their husbands with sex, which was what the OWC set out to do. Call him insensitive all you want, but to plant a trophy on his head  without digging deeper is unnecessary, frivolous, in bad taste, but more importantly, it’s not even funny.

Though I agree with the choices for SAF and the OWC, here are some more deserving nominees  for 2011 than those shortlisted by AWARE.

Filed under: Politicians, Singaporean men, Singaporean women, Campaigns/Elections, Marriage, 2011 | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

My son knows how to split an infinitive

Posted on September 21, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Mum’s the word on smarter children’, 21 Sept 2011, ST Forum

(DR Lee Siew Peng): THE announcement of my engagement to a Caucasian surprised many who had accepted my status of being ‘on the shelf’ (‘A PhD’s fine, but what about love and babies?’; Sept 6).

It is my PhD that is currently on the shelf as after more than 10 years as a full-time mother, it is almost impossible to return to academia. Many intelligent Singapore women will recognise this problem: most Singapore men are not inclined to marry women they consider to be cleverer.

This letter not only deserves to be reproduced in full, but given a piece of my Singaporean MALE non-ANGMOR, non PHD mind every couple of paragraphs. It’s baffling how such a piece of self-trumpeting, indulgent, I would dare say vulgar display of blinkered arrogance eluded the forum editor’s brainstem, an organ that Dr Lee herself probably left ‘on the shelf’ along with her PhD. The word ‘Caucasian’ appears only once in the entire article, the first line in fact, which pretty much sets an unnerving, emasculating tone for the remainder of the letter if you suffer the misfortune of being an egotistical Singaporean male who’s uncomfortable with smarter women. Coupled with the location where Dr Lee is based (London) in the sign-off, what we have right at the outset of this letter is an all too familiar scenario of an educated housewife married into a cushy foreign family, living in a foreign land, and telling Singaporeans,most of whom can’t afford to live comfortably off a sole breadwinner, how to choose their mates or raise smart children when she’s thousands of miles away and not adding her prodigious offspring to OUR gene pool instead.

I remember the look of one man who chatted me up after I had made a witty remark at a lecture. When I told him I was (then) a master’s degree student he – literally – turned away. Spot the difference: My husband (who holds a Bachelor of Science degree), tells people he is clever enough to have married me.

Here we are given another unwanted glimpse of the writer’s solid credentials through a rather useless anecdote. A pHD AND MASTERS holder. And she’s speaking on behalf of her husband, who ONLY has a BSc. Most people use emotional language when asked why we choose to spend the rest of our lives with someone, like ‘She makes me happy’, ‘She’s my soulmate, or the easy way out – ‘Because I love her’. When a man says he’s ‘clever enough’ to marry you, it suggests calculatedness and ulterior motive, especially if you’re a double degree holder and potential high earner. It’s fortunate that in this case, Dr Lee isn’t being treated like a sugar mommy, though the reason she gives for her man marrying ‘upwards’ isn’t the first thing men would consider when it comes to dating smarter women. Evolutionary scientists have their own theories on our aversion towards smart women, that men are hardwired providers and are attracted to women who appear to need our protection, though that’s still debatable considering how rampant gender reversals has become in recent years. But why pick on guys only? How about women refusing to marry ‘downwards’? What if smarter women just happen to be ‘pickier’?

Studies have shown consistently that a child’s educational attainment correlates with that of his mother’s. My son’s IQ is significantly higher than that of either of his parents. (I am convinced that 11 months of breast-feeding also helped.)

I might have opted out of a career where I could inspire many young people on to their own doctorates, but my son has also benefited much from our discussions on the scientific method, statistics in research, Descartes, splitting an infinitive (and atom), and so on. He is so far ahead of his cohort that he has skipped one year in Maths and is being ‘extended’ in other subjects within his normal classes.

There’s no mention of how old Dr Lee’s son is and he could well be a amateur professor of Nuclear Physics who splits atoms as a hobby for all we know, though what’s suggested here is that forsaking her career and focussing on bringing up a Megamind at home is well worth the sacrifice. What’s totally missing really, besides all the motherly nurturing, reading scientific journals instead of bedtime stories and 11 months of breastmilk, is the role of the FATHER in raising an intelligent child. That aside, more bragging here not just of her son’s achievements and the fact that he knows what an infinitive is (What the hell is this, Forum editor, a letter or a grammar thesis?), but also the IQ-boosting powers of her breast milk. Trust a pHD to summon the  ‘Studies have shown’ fallacy as nonchalantly as saying ‘The sun has been known to rise from the east’. Show me the studies before you tell me what they show.Does this apply across the board in societies where men are still predominantly the bread-winners i.e better educated ones? Have these studies factored in median income as a possible determinant? Perhaps the writer means ’1 STUDY has shown’, the one that she has conducted on her own son.

My points are:

  • First, Singapore men who wish to have clever children should consider marrying women who are better educated or cleverer (remember, one does not always imply the other), just as short men should marry taller wives if they want taller sons because sons are rarely shorter than their mothers.
  • Second, it is all right for well-educated mothers to stay at home to care for their children. Their education will not be wasted in the instruction of their own children.
  • Third, Mr Lee Kuan Yew first alerted us to our limited gene pool in 1984.
  • Fourth, what has been done since to preserve and enhance this gene pool? Has the foreign talent initiative superseded this urgency?

Finally, a lack of support for well-educated mothers who wish to take career breaks – which can only benefit their offspring, with or without breast-feeding – is myopic.

If a genetic defect suddenly struck the Y chromosome and all men went extinct, Dr Lee here stands a good chance of being Empress and Queen Mother of the world. She doesn’t need the male phenotype, the brawn, the musk, the low voice and hairy chest. She just needs a cupful of sperm of minimum BSc calibre to manufacture her little baby geniuses.  Though there may be some truth in  smart housewives raising smart children, this may not correlate so much with intelligence or educational status as much as the greater time housewives spend IN GENERAL on their own children compared to men. Who’s to say that a pHD househusband wouldn’t raise a genius as well?  Dr Lee has completely ignored the roles of society, nutrition (other than breast milk) and even luck in determining successful offspring, which is in line with LKY’s ideas on social engineering and why he urges pHD female students to get boyfriends. In fact, she has one-upped LKY’s call to propagate, by saying that not only should pHD women marry, but they should be stay at home moms/tutors as well. The fact is, you don’t need a damn pHD to teach your kids who Descartes was. Google nanny can jolly well (split infinitive) do that just fine.

Short men don’t marry tall women just to have children taller than them, nor do they marry smarter, more successful women just so they can have precocious kids to brag about in the ST forum page.  Men marry the woman they love, probably  just as often the woman they most want to have sex with, not just for her tall or smart genes but rather those that signal a state of physical health (i.e looks good, or at least looking like a human female) or a personality trait like kindness, though LKY’s daughter Lee Wei Ling would beg to differ, having deduced that men value intelligence more than looks. And it’s rather disappointing for all of the writer’s theories on breast milk and split infinitives, she’s hasn’t the slightest clue of how we men tick at all.

Filed under: Babies, Singaporean men, Singaporean women, Marriage, Kids, Parenting, 2011 | Tagged: , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

LKY wants PhD girl to get a boyfriend

Posted on September 9, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘My mind was a total blank’, 8 Sept 2011, article by Koh Hui Theng, New Paper

SHE had a burning question for former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew last night. Given the big influx of immigrants here in a short time, and a dilution of the national identity, what can we do to create a sense of belonging and foster social cohesiveness, she asked.

Singaporean Joan Sim, 27, a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) School of Biological Sciences, thought it was a straightforward query and expected an equally direct reply.

…Following her question, Mr Lee spoke about the fast ageing population. That, plus the drop in the fertility rate, are major worries for Singapore’s leaders.

Last year, the total fertility rate – which measures the average number of children born to a woman over her childbearing years – was at an all-time low of 1.15. Mr Lee said: “The birth rate today, the fertility rate, is 1.01. In other words, for every couple, you have 1.01 babies.

…“How old are you now?” he wanted to know. “Twenty-seven,” she replied.

The queries came thick and fast: Are you married? (No) When will you finish your PhD? (In two years) So you’ll be 29 then. Do you have a boyfriend? (No) That was when Mr Lee drew attention to the biological clock and a woman’s child-bearing years. After 35 (years old), the dangers of having children with Down syndrome rises, he said.

“My advice, please don’t waste time. I hope you get your PhD and your boyfriend,” he added.

The audience laughed loudly. Miss Sim turned red. She told The New Paper: “It was very, very embarrassing. At that moment, I wanted to hug myself and disappear.

“My mind turned into a total blank when he started asking those questions.”

It was a case of an NTU forum intended for intelligent and insightful discussion turned into a Chinese New Year reunion dinner grilling session writ large. Of course it’s normal for old people to have such simplistic views of romance and marriage, but LKY threatening and publicly humiliating a brave and smart woman reveals a deep, gnawing agenda for educated single women which he has been espousing since 1983. The reason for this ‘kah-poh’-ish enthusiasm is simple enough, that this is a woman with a PhD, letting her smart genes go to painful waste. Though he did not specify that Joan should marry a man of equal stature, his staunch Darwinian beliefs turned eugenics worshiping reared its ugly head in a National Day Rally 28 years ago, when he blamed the future dip in our talent pool on educated women choosing to have less children, or none at all (Get Hitched!..and don’t stop at one, 15 Aug 1983, ST)

…PM sees depletion of talent pool in 25 years unless better educated wed and have more children. Think about it, says the Prime Minister: If you are well educated, it is your DUTY to get married and have children.

…”For every two graduates, there will be one graduate, and for every two uneducated workers, there will be three…We will be unable to maintain our present standards..Levels of competence will decline. Our economy will falter, the administration will suffer, and society will decline (Full text on LKY’s speech here).

Such mechanistic ideas on social engineering led to the sterilisation incentive scheme in 1984, just a year after he made the above speech, in an ambitious ‘God-playing’ attempt to keep the ‘uneducated malaise’ in check. 25 years on and we know such tactics have not only failed miserably, but probably backfired and made the situation worse, with the influx of immigrants used as an excuse to buffer this ‘talent pool’. But no one would dare bring up the past without having the ISD come by with an invitation to a chit-chat session over tea the next morning. What LKY didn’t take into account in his back-of-the-envelope calculations, is that even our imported ‘talent’ aren’t staying here long enough to relieve the brain drain, especially in the realm of scientific expertise. Not to mention our homegrown talents deciding to apply their skills elsewhere, which makes LKY’s hard mathematical logic as useful as recruiting more rain-dancers to summon  showers to relieve a drought, when the real problem lies in the very soil of our harvest.

Incidentally LKY’s only daughter Lee Wei Ling is still single and she’s more than half a century old, and if Joan wanted to get even she could have rebutted the old man on his own failure to ‘harvest’ at least one more graduate grandchild out of his stubbornly single daughter, though I suspect the real reason why Lee Wei Ling never married, other than personal choice and the fact that she looks like a teenage boy, is because no man in his right mind would ever want LKY as his father-in-law, even if the old man were undisputed King of the Land and needed an heir to the throne.

Here’s what Wei Ling shared on remaining single (Why I  choose to remain single, 9 Sept 2009, ST)

…I had my first date when I was 21 years old. He was a doctor in the hospital ward I was posted to. We went out to a dinner party. I noted that the other guests were all rich socialites .

I dropped him like a hot potato. In 2005 , while on an African safari with a small group of friends, one of them, Professor C. N. Lee, listed the men who had tried to woo me. There were three besides the first.

Two were converted into friends and another, like the first, was dropped. I am now 54 years old and happily single. In addition to my nuclear family, I have a close circle of friends.

Most of my friends are men. But my reputation is such that their female partners would never consider me a threat. More than 10 years ago, when there was still a slim chance I might have got married, my father told me: “Your mother and I could be selfish and feel happy that you remain single and can look after us in our old age. But you will be lonely.”

Lee Wei Ling’s luck with eligible equals is living proof that LKY’s call for graduates to go forth and multiply is easier said than done. Joan shouldn’t take such teasing to heart and just treat it with the same pinch of salt as one would regard the self-indulgent proselytizing  of a granduncle with too much time and experience on his hands, that it’s not all unmarried graduate women’s fault that we’re facing a fertility crisis. Singaporeans, in general, are just not having much sex at all. Meanwhile, we’re hearing more coming out of LKY’s restless mouth than any other politician since his retirement. Someone get the man a job. Anything except Minister Matchmaker, please.

Filed under: Babies, Politicians, 1980s, 2000s, Singaporean women, Marriage, 2011 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Singaporean men not as attractive as China men

Posted on September 4, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Be my man…if you dare’, 4 Sept 2011, article by Joyce Lim, TNP online

SHE’S tall, fair and buxomy. And even though China-born singer Zhang Miao Yu thinks Singaporean men are short, workaholic and not as attractive as the men in China, she’s on the prowl to snag one of her own.

Since her arrival in Singapore five months ago, the 26-year-old, who performs at Shanghai Dolly, hasn’t had a shortage of suitors who lavish gifts and attention on her.

Zhang isn’t the only one – and lawyers are expecting a rise in Chinese women marrying and divorcing here due to a recent ruling by China’s Supreme Court makes it difficult for wives to claim a share of assets paid for by their husbands.

Hello Shanghai Dolly

As if being China-born isn’t a cause for worry enough, Zhang is also works in a nightclub. With a sharp tongue and dangerous curves, this is one woman all Singaporean men must be wary of. As one myself, it is my duty to warn any fellow Singaporean male thinking of taking the bait at Shanghai Dolly. The Singaporean male has been typecast with so many deficiencies, whether it’s being unromantic, ungentlemanly, wimps, unattractive or sheltered, that it doesn’t matter what a China woman calls us anymore because the fact that we haven’t been wiped out of existence by now means we’re doing something right after all. Here’s a short history of how China nationals have captured the hearts, and wallets, of our local men, with tangled tales of bankruptcy and death included:

In 2004, China national Li Jin was involved in a passport forgery scam, just one of the many charges laid on Asia Breweries finance manager and lover Chia Teck Leng, who  was eventually convicted of commericial fraud and sentenced to 42 years in prison. The following year saw the high profile ‘Kallang Body Parts’ murder case, in which Singaporean supervisor Leong Siew Chor chopped up production operator and lover (what else) Liu Hong Mei’s body into seven parts, dumping some into the Kallang River.

Also in 2005, a certain Mr Tan had his life savings swiped of $100,000 by his China wife, who was supporting her son from a previous marriage back in her homeland. She promptly disappeared after being granted her PR status. A Today letter from an anonymous victim of a China affair was also published in the same year, detailing how her husband cheated on her twice, BOTH instances with China nationals.

In 2006, China nightclub worker Guo Juan, also 26, disappeared after being embroiled in a scandalous tryst involving a ex-husband and a married NTU don Professor Bryan Ngoi, both Singaporeans, the latter being the chair of an immigration panel advising on citizenship application with whom she was having an affair (for obvious reasons).

2 years later,  Singaporean Lim Hok Lai was charged with murder for fatally retaliating against his China masseuse lover who ‘stabbed him at least 7 times in the stomach’, upon his failing to agree to a $30,000 separation fee which she was trying to extort from him. The most famous ‘China woman’ to Singaporeans, international star Gong Li (and probably soon to be ex-Singaporean), made headline news in 2010 by divorcing her Singaporean husband of more than 10 years Ooi Hoe Seong, 2 years after obtaining her citizenship in 2008, with rumours rife that she was being romantically linked with Sun Zhou, a Chinese director, and even actor John Cusack. It appears that there are 2 things which a China woman obtains before leaving her Singaporean man:  His money and/or a Singaporean PR status or citizenship. In terms of profiling, she’s also likely to be uneducated and a low-wage earner, excepting Gong Li of course. And what do our PRCs give back to Singapore in return for our hospitality? Heartbreak, broken families and empty pockets. So, we may be short and ugly blokes, but at least we ain’t conniving, greedy bitches.

From the brief history of murder and mayhem above, the greatest risk factors for getting your life utterly ruined by unscrupulous China nationals is that you’re rich or married with children. All the cases mentioned involved an illicit relationship and money. Of course there could be many happy, honest relationships between local men and China nationals out there, with the cases listed above among the more extreme outcomes of all possible liaisons.  However,  one also needs to consider all the unreported marital and financial damages caused by PRC flings which we hear about all the time. This also raises a startling social concern which our Government has chosen to overlook while trying to salvage the dismal fertility rate among Chinese Singaporeans, to the point of allowing a staggering 1 million PRCs, and God knows how many PRs, to make their living amongst us, even if it’s likely that they’re here on a ‘take and go’ basis. In fact, with gold digger PRCs ruining marriages, conning gullible loners and then disappearing, it’s even possible to have negative growth in the long run because 1. They break up families who could have had more children 2. They deprive local men of a chance to start a real family 3. They deprive local women of a chance with local men. In a way, our Government IS the embodiment of the typical smitten Singaporean male when it comes to embracing PRCs: Short (sighted), workaholic and oh so gullible.

A little prejudice as a precaution against any potential crime of passion or trickery may be useful here, not just towards China nationals but any beautiful woman who claims she’s looking for a lifelong partner among short, ugly men. It’s also no coincidence that to be ‘Shanghai-ed’ is to be ‘put by trickery into an undesirable position’ according to Merriam Webster. The New Paper is irresponsibly sensational here in acting as a dating agency for the likes of Zhang Miaoyu, and I can only hope the same paper doesn’t report another story about her a few years down the road in which someone gets conned of his life savings or jailed for murder.

Filed under: 2000s, 2010, 2011, Foreign workers, Marriage, PRCs, Sex, Singaporean men, Violence | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Lee Wei Ling: Singaporeans prize intelligence too

Posted on August 7, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Smart guys win fair ladies’, 7 Aug 2011, article by Lee Wei Ling, Think, Sunday Times

…I am not a psychologist, but I do not believe Singaporean men are so simple-minded or our women so calculating as Prof (Norman) Li’s findings (that women are significantly more materialistic than their American peers) indicate. So I constructed a simple questionnaire asking what people would look for in a potential spouse. I listed seven features for my responders to rate: attractiveness, intelligence, occupation, social status, education level, wealth and temperament.

…I would hazard the suggestion that mine (survey) is representative of Singaporeans. And I would further suggest that there are grounds to believe that both Singaporean men and women prize intelligence in their spouses, though some of the men may be intimidated by women more intelligent than they are.

Perhaps former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s repeated exhortation that well-educated men should marry women as well, if not  better, educated as they are, so as to produce intelligent offspring, has finally changed public opinion.

Norman Li’s study assessed the preferences of  19 -21 years old psychology students, while Lee Wei Ling’s informal poll was conducted on security officers, clerks, clinic assistants and doctors (probably within her own hospital) . Therein lies the problem of both studies, that they’re hardly representative of the true population, a limitation which Norman Li et al acknowledged in the conclusion of his paper.  There is also the issue of whether it’s fair to pose these questions to people who are already married, as their choice of attributes may be used to justify the choice of their spouse, regardless of how happy they actually are in the marriage.

According to Wei Ling’s findings, women rated looks the lowest and  intelligence as tops. But if you look closer at the top 3 qualities for women they are intelligence, education and occupation. It’s hard not to ignore the correlation between these 3 attributes and wealth and social standing (4th and 5th respectively). So by deliberately selecting attributes which are so closely linked and forcing her subjects to choose, this led to a situation whereby ‘nicer sounding’ terms like the top 3 were chosen over social status and wealth, which suggests that intelligence alone is not enough; it should come with some level of success. For men, the contradiction lies in the desire for intelligent woman without the social standing.

Intelligence (60% M – 1, 66.7% F -1)

Attractiveness (42.5% M – 2 , 17.5% F – 6)

Occupation (36.2% M – 3, 35.5% F – 3)

Social status (23.8% M- 6, 26.8% F – 5)

Education (32.5% M – 4, 43.6% F – 2)

Wealth (25% M- 5, 19.3% F – 4)

Temperament was rated separately, with both sexes agreeing on the importance of kindness and truthless, with a meagre percentage on filial piety. Both studies have different objectives too. The SMU study was intended to show how perceptions of an ideal partner among Singaporean women could explain our dismal fertility rate, i.e being choosy and wanting more money is detrimental to population growth, as well as to compare American and Singaporean mate preferences. For Wei Ling, she just seems determined to prove that ‘looks are not everything’ and even exhibits disturbing echoes of her father’s controversial theory that smart parents breed smart children (More graduate men marrying graduate women, 18 Aug 1986, ST). An unnecessary remark really, especially when there’s no proof that children will turn out as smart and well-off as their smart and well-off parents.

The perception of  intelligence itself is somewhat subjective. Would those  who voted intelligence date a smart man, even a graduate,  from a poor family background, or if he’s unemployed? It would seem possible on paper, but unfortunately the real world doesn’t work that way. Why people marry is a complex interplay of luck, circumstance and mate attributes, and just because women prefer rich men and men pretty women doesn’t mean our society is doomed to fail. Not only is her methodology primitive by scientific standards, but no investigator, especially a single, successful, brilliant, self admittedly ‘aesthetically challenged’ woman like Wei Ling herself, should embark on such surveys with a preconceived notion which would just bias her conclusions and cast doubt on her methods. Compare her selection criteria with those of Norman’s below, which excludes terms like ‘social status’ or ‘wealth’, instead using more objective, restrained terms like ‘good earning capacity’.

Although both studies included the fuzzy ‘intelligence’ as an indicator, you can milk a few more suggestions about young Singaporean women from the SMU study, that they value ‘kindness and understanding’ (ranked a desirable 2.57) and don’t care much for being ‘creative and artistic’ or ‘good housekeeper’. This means struggling artists have no chance with Singaporean women. For the men, ‘kindness’ ranks tops, but little value is placed on educational level or whether she does housework, which implies that men are more tolerant when it comes to the skills of their mates, as long as she’s physically appealing, has a good heart and not smarter than them. But I have to emphasise that as much as this mirrors what we already know, it’s not the kind of data one should cast in stone and readily brand our women as money-grubbers or men as shallow. Mate expectations also change as people get older. What surprises me though, is how both Wei Ling and Norman failed to assess one characteristic which I believe most women would rank quite highly in a potential partner: GSOH (Good sense of humour)

One also shouldn’t slam Norman’s conclusion on the impact of a materialistic mindset and birth rate, since he also factored in ‘satisfaction with life’ and ‘desire to have children’ scores, which are both critical in influencing fertility rates and may be related to this obsession with worldly possessions, again a trait that Lee Wei Ling disapproves of. A random trawl through local personal ads reveals some popular character-driven traits people use on themselves or their dates: fun-loving, easy-going, simple, open-minded, honest, spontaneous, intellectual. I had trouble finding ‘intelligent’, though ‘intellectual’ has a hint of ‘smarts’ but without the ‘better qualifications’ connotation.

Filed under: 1980s, Singaporean men, Singaporean women, Marriage, 2011 | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

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