On 24 October 2005, a 64-year-old cobbler walked into a marriage agency, Vietnam Brides International Matchmaker, selected a young Vietnamese woman from inside a glassed-up room [2]. She was in Singapore on a 2-week social visit pass. The man, Fan Kiet Teng, gave the agency a cheque and took her off to the Registry of Marriages.

This apparently commonplace transaction only came into the news because the cheque bounced. The fuller story from the Straits Times can be seen at right.

By the time the bank told the shop that the cheque was a dud, and that the account had been closed three years earlier, the 21-year-old (19-year-old, according to The New Paper) Vietnamese woman had become uncontactable.

The cobbler, after booking a solemnisation date at the Registry of Marriages, leading her to believe that his intention was sincere, put her in a cheap hotel and had sex with her over 5 days.

He then took her back to the marriage agency in order to collect her belongings, but absconded as soon as he had a chance.

The slant of the news story was that the man tried to defraud this and two other marriage agencies. On 24 November 2005, he was charged in court for cheating, this being the state's interest in the case.

Nowhere is there any expression of horror that such a trade in human beings exists.

The Vietnamese woman, like so many others, desperately wanted a better life. The agency wanted to make money. The cobbler wanted sex.

The only legal way in which all three could be satisfied would be through marriage, except that it would cost the client a lot of money, and require a lifetime commitment from both the man and the woman, who didn't even share a common language.

(Well, there was another impediment -- the cobbler was already married, with 2 children, and it would be illegal for him to marry another. But his wife was not giving him sex, so what's he to do?)

Nobody is happy. And why is that so? Because the law pretends that the route to happiness is via marriage.

The simplest way in which all parties might be happy, if they so wished, would be if the agency ran a brothel, the cobbler paid a one-time fee with no marital strings attached, and the woman made lots of money without having to be tied to a man she hardly knew nor was able to communicate with. But that would require us to decriminalise brothel-running [3], give legal protection (and work permits) to sex workers and most importantly, get off the high horse called morality.

Now, you might say, it's terrible that I speak so lightly of women going into prostitution in order to make money. Isn't this another form of trading in humans? 

It's only terrible if one is wedded to the idea that sex is dirty. Remove the stigma, and where's the problem?

No doubt, many women will not want to choose such a career, just as many women will have no ambition to be a dental assistant or a war photographer. But some will, and we should respect that choice.

Nor is it a question of gender politics even. I just as much believe men should be equally free to be sex workers too.

But as things stand, we all kid ourselves that marriage is bliss, or at least the only legitimate way to sexual bliss. We create a worldwide social climate in which women would rather be enslaved for life to one man, than freely serve many, because that enslavement is termed "marriage" in which we invest social and moral value.

In response to this climate, the state facilitates marriage, refusing to interfere in how that marriage came about -- not even when the man chooses the bride from a photo album! -- while at the same time, interfering in how non-marital sex is procured, no matter how consensually it is.

So young Vietnamese women come into Singapore with the hope of getting a husband, sight unseen, within 2 weeks, or else have to bear heavy expenses for travel and accommodation. That desperation to get a husband within a fortnight imperils them, since the effect is that they have no realistic choice as to whom they marry. If they dislike the man, they're stuck with him for life.

Why can't we just give them work permits, so they can work here and give people happy times? This way, if they dislike any particular John, they can throw him out at little cost to themselves. It also frees them from the control of "agencies" if we give them the option of being independent freelancers.

A system in which only marriage is conferred moral and legal legitimacy for sex victimises people and we are guilty for supporting it.

* * * * *

On the left is another Straits Times story which caught my eye. 

Again, like the above example, the news angle was on how a crime was committed -- two, actually -- and the state had to intervene to punish two men. The abuse of basic human consideration and autonomy that first led to the drama was hardly mentioned.

A police sergeant's wife introduced Didar Hossain, a worker from Bangladesh, to her 14-year-old niece, and the teenager's family agreed to marry her to Didar in 2006 or 2007 when she would have turned 16, and finished school.

Expecting her to be his wife, Didar had sex with the girl, but since she was underaged at the time, it gave the police sergeant an opportunity to extort $10,000 from the Bangladeshi.

Two crimes were thus committed: sex with someone under the age of 16 and attempted extortion.

Didar was jailed for 5 months for the sex crime and the police sergeant (the girl's uncle) jailed  one month for the money crime.

But, like the later Straits Times story, nowhere in this story was there any expression of horror that teenage girls can be married off by their families (presumably in return for a dowry, as is common among Muslim Indian families).

Did the girl have any say in the matter? Probably not. Does the state take an interest that girls have no say as to whom they are married off too? No, because marriage is so morally elevated, we accept the form without inquiring into the substance.

Why do we as a society accept a state of affairs where people are married off for a lifetime without free choice, whether it's because parents make the decision for their daughters, or economic desperation and an expiring social visit pass makes it necessary to accept the first cobbler who asks? 

This only subsists because of the hypocrisy that marriage is laudable and good, and sex is shameful and bad.

* * * * *

And it gets crazier. The 'marriage' that traditionalists exalt, without a thought about the rape of human dignity that befall the women, is only heterosexual marriage. The consent is tenuous to the extreme, for the women do not even know their husbands before marriage.

Yet when true love and fully informed consent is evident between two mature adults who want to be married, albeit that they are of the same sex, cries of horror arise. It threatens traditional marriage! It demeans the sacrosanct union!

© Yawning Bread