The term is clearly understood to mean that females get free drinks on those nights, and the purpose is widely known to be that of attracting men (who have to pay full price) who would come in the hope of scoring with the women.

But letting them in would mean losing the paying customers - - the horny straight men.

Of course, we know where the root of the problem lies: the bar owners based their marketing gimmick on a model of society that proved to be a poor representation of reality. They assumed that all males and females were heterosexual.

The result then is that every night that these bars declare as Ladies Night, will always result in unhappy guests, and a very difficult job for the staff. Either the romeos inside are unhappy that the establishment has let in females who are unswayed by their charms, or the lesbians outside are kicking up a fuss at the door.

This is the price a business pays for operating in a world of make-believe.

* * * * *

Associated with the heterosexual construction of the universe is a very deep belief, so deep that much of it is unconscious, in the differences between male and female. Sometimes, these differences are seen as complementary, other times they are seen as opposed. But always, males and females are seen as two separates classes of people, not a common set of individually varying individuals.

Men are like this; women are like that. Males are seen as the ones with power and physicality; women are weak and emotional.

In some societies, this state of affairs is assumed to be natural and people are expected to respect the logic. When women are raped, the victims get the blame, for being seductively dressed ("immoral"), thus arousing the physicality of the men around them. Men's physicality, even to the point of rape, is excused. Their abuse of power, to the point of justifying rape, is uncritically accepted. 

Other societies have moved on a bit from there, but not very far, as we shall see. In accordance with the belief in equality, laws and social habits are planted to restrain the men, in order to compensate for their tendency to dominate and their physicality.

In Abused husbands, violent wives, I have archived a commentary that appeared on 31 Oct 2005 in 'Today'. In it, a husband writes about his abusive wife and how he had to seek a Personal Protection Order (PPO) from a court. There too, you will find another letter from Aidan L, about the hell he has suffered from his wife. He too took out a PPO.

Both wrote that when their wives created a scene in public, people around assumed that the men were at fault. In Aidan's case, he spent 6 hours in a lock-up as a result of a false accusation from his wife.

There has been a marked growth in the numbers of PPOs taken out by husbands against their wives. Either the number of abusive wives has been rising, or the number of men no longer prepared to hide their shame about being the abused party has been increasing. I think it's more likely the latter.

There probably must have been plenty of abused husbands in the last 1 or 2 generations (after many women ceased to be economically dependent on their husbands), except that in the make-believe world where men are supposed to be, invariably, the dominant party, they simply had to suffer in silence. It was too emasculating (now that's another macho heterosexist fear) to admit to being bullied by your wife.

Both husbands referred to the Women's Charter and how they felt oppressed by it. This law overcompensates for the perceived feminine weakness by requiring ex-husbands to pay alimony to their wives after a divorce, but makes no provision for ex-wives to do likewise. This is so even in the event that the wife was the higher-income spouse, or their former husband was the dependent. In other words, if a wife abused her husband, compelling him to sue for divorce, he might still have to pay maintenance to her after that. See Ego trumps equity

The whole thing begs the question of justice, and this has arisen because we are applying a very heterosexual understanding of gender relationships, where people are seen in two simplistic classes with different attributes and power positions. Society will benefit a lot more from applying a "queer" analysis of sexuality, where individuals are seen as lying on a spectrum, all of equal worth.

* * * * *

At this point, I wish to recall story that a friend -- let's called him Romy -- told me.

One day, in a crowded train, a woman screamed that he had molested her by touching her breasts. He was so shocked, he got off at the next station. She followed him, screaming all the way, and made a complaint to the officers on duty at the Station Control booth. They detained him and the police were called in.

Romy was taken to the police station, held for a few hours while they took a statement from her first and then from him, and had to think up some excuse why he was absent from work.

The police called him back twice more for "additional investigations" causing a lot of stress to him. On one occasion, the inspecting officer was abusive in his speech (not physically), issuing threats of severe sentences from the court unless he owned up.

Unable to sleep for nights, and finally getting sick of it, he asked his friends to help him with supporting statements. They agreed, so Romy referred the investigating officer to his friends.

The friends told the police that Romy was gay and that he would not have any interest in touching a woman's breast. Romy's claim from the start that it had been an accident was the most plausible explanation all along.

Why didn't Romy say he was gay from the beginning? He was in the closet. Can you imagine the degree of stress he felt to be accused of this and yet be unable to offer a defence, because the price of doing so would be to out himself in open court? What crisis might then erupt within his family? What about the job?

As a result of this episode, he harbours the grievance that society, police habits and the law are overcompensating, based on the belief that females are weak and males are brutes. That if a female makes a complaint, the burden of proof is on the male. And in a related way, society, police and the law assume that everyone is heterosexual and should be heterosexual, creating thereby this edifice of homophobia that made it nearly impossible for him to defend himself.

* * * * *

Also associated with the belief in the complementarity between male and female, and their opposite natures, is the idea that sex needs to be restrained. With it comes the idea of heterosexual marriage. In the absence of this "institution", males in their physicality would act brutishly and females in their weak submissiveness would be completely at the mercy of other marauding males.

In many societies, this idea has developed to the point that sex is seen as illicit unless bounded by marriage. In such a climate, the notion of sex independent of marriage is unspeakable. Just to broach the subject is seen as legitimising it.

Hence, in many families, particularly in the more conservative Malay and Muslim community (where the mother, being female, is also disempowered from speaking about sensitive subjects to her children without permission from the father), nobody talks about sex.

On the right is a report about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among teenagers. There were 206 cases in 2002, 490 in 2003 and about 600 cases in 2004. That's a tripling of the number of cases.

Clearly, they are not using protection, either because they don't know anything about protection or they can't afford it. Or, they are too embarrassed (the social climate remember?) to go into a store to buy condoms.

What they do know about is pregnancy, and they want to avoid it. Abortion costs money and brings social shame, but an unaborted pregnancy may lead to forced marriage, as we shall see below.

So they either practice coitus interruptus or fellatio. Either way, there is no barrier, so these kids get STDs in the mouth or in the genital area.

Now, STDs are associated with HIV transmission; if one can pass on gonorrhea, one can pass on HIV. Already in Singapore, a few cases of HIV have been found in teenagers.

At a recent meeting, I tried to persuade the Health Ministry to recognise the need for safe-sex education among teenagers. The response was that such an idea cannot even be considered. For teenagers, not only should the initiative lie with the Ministry of Education (who obviously have other more pressing priorities), but the only permissible message for teenagers is that of abstinence, not safe sex.

You can't help but think people are burying their heads in the sand. After all, hasn't the unstated message within all these conservative families all these years been abstinence? Look what has resulted. Has it worked?

Even more mind-blowing, not only did the Ministry refuse to consider the idea, they warned all NGOs at the meeting not to do it themselves -- not that any of them has the resources to do it anyway.

Partly, I think, the Ministry had good intentions behind the warning. For the gay NGOs to engage in safe sex education among teenagers would be highly controversial. The rightwing would raise a stink smearing them with trying to "recruit" youngsters to the "gay lifestyle". 

This speaks to another avatar of the "males are predators" belief. Gay men like all men are automatically assumed to be predatory towards the weak, in this case, the younger males. In fact sometimes grown heterosexual men imagine themselves, with quickening heartbeat and fixed eyes, to be prey for invariably lustful gay men. This belief scorches the minds even of those who instinctively associate homosexuality with effeminacy!

Coming back to the Health Ministry, I can't imagine the Ministry wanting such a crisis (of false accusation) to arise, which might overwhelm and jeopardise the entire HIV prevention effort, even that among adults.

So what is left? Nothing.

Do not talk about sex to teenagers. Let the Education Ministry (and mosques, as we shall see below) talk about abstinence. Pretend that it works, when clearly it doesn't.

Avoid controversy, even if teenagers are coming down with STDs and HIV. Prefer make-believe over reality.

* * * * *

Why mosques?

You would have noticed from the newspaper report about STDs that about half of the youngsters found to be infected are Malays, when Malays form about 15% of Singapore's population. This indicates that unprotected sex is happening disproportionately among Malays. So is teenage pregnancies, which I read about somewhere some months back, but unfortunately didn't archive the article.

This community, where the prevailing religion is Islam, has a very conservative outlook with regard to sexuality (actual behaviour notwithstanding). The degree of shame attached to sex outside marriage is acute, shame not just for the couple involved, but for the entire family.

When parents find out that their kids have been intimate, whether or not there is a pregnancy, too often the preferred solution is to pressure the couple to get married immediately. This preserves social honour for the respective families.

Here are data from the Census 2000 (Singapore citizens and permanent residents):

Percent married, by racial group, by age cohort

2.5% of teenaged Malay girls are married, compared to 0.5% of teenaged Chinese girls.

A quarter (26.4%) of Malay girls aged 20-24 are married, compared to one in eight (12.6%) of Chinese girls in the same age group.

The problem with such early marriages is that the couple may not really want to be married, they may be too immature to make it work, and they do not have the economic means to raise a family. As you can imagine, the marital breakdown rate is very high. Lives are totally messed up with spouses they don't really love and kids they don't know what to do with (and may not be able to support).

So religious elders have been roped in to talk to young Muslims, to give them a listening ear, to give them some sagely advice about love and sexuality. Well, it can't hurt, but I am skeptical how effective it is going to be. The problem is, what these elders can say must surely be circumscribed by social and religious orthodoxy. Look at the last sentence in the pink box. Halimah Yacob said mosques should strengthen chastity.

In itself, nothing wrong, but the danger is the way information about alternatives are censored out.

So even as they try to grapple with reality, I can't imagine any of them letting go of make-believe. 

© Yawning Bread