A man sneaking through a crowded Singapore bus, scissors glinting like a wrong-sided secret, then snipping off a woman’s ponytail to smell it—it sounds like a scene from a feverish noir, yet it happened not too long ago and it is far from isolated. Across Asia, cases of fetish-motivated attacks against women—from hair-cutting to voyeurism, groping, stalking, and theft of intimate items—continue to reveal a darker underside of gender violence, where obsession masquerades as compulsion and women’s bodies become objects of fantasy rather than persons with agency. The growing archive of such incidents is sparking debate about safety, misogyny, and the uneasy cultural silences around sexualized behaviour that is “not quite assault” but deeply violating.
In Singapore, the man in the bus case admitted that he had been captivated by the scent of the victim’s hair, following her over several days before using scissors to steal a lock. He was jailed—but the creep of discomfort his story created lingers. The city-state, usually imagined as tightly regulated and safe, has seen similar fetishistic offences surface occasionally over the years: upskirt photo collectors, public-transport gropers, and men who follow women home out of curiosity or “urge.” Police and courts tend to classify such motives under “outrage of modesty” or “insulting a woman’s modesty”, terms inherited from older British-era legal frameworks that still shape how these behaviours are understood.
Move across the region and the stories multiply. In Japan, a man was arrested in Osaka for cutting women’s hair on trains and keeping the strands in labeled bags—an eerie echo of the Singapore case. In South Korea, police have struggled with a surge in molka (몰카, hidden-camera voyeurism), with offenders collecting thousands of intimate images of unsuspecting women in public spaces. Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia have each reported cases of men stealing underwear from laundromats, following particular women due to obsession, or sniffing clothing left on balconies—behaviours the media often dismiss as bizarre quirks rather than boundary-breaking violations.
The pattern reveals a spectrum of fetish-driven acts that blend secrecy, desire, and power. While many perpetrators claim their behaviour is compulsive rather than malicious, the impact on women is profound: fear in public spaces, hypervigilance, shame, and a sense that their bodies are constantly surveilled or collectible. Cultural silence compounds this harm. In many Asian societies, discussing sexual behaviour—especially unusual or non-normative desires—remains taboo. Women reporting these crimes often face minimization: “At least he didn’t touch you,” “It’s just hair,” or “Maybe he’s mentally unwell.” These responses flatten trauma into inconvenience.
Some scholars argue that fetish-motivated offences exist at the crossroads of patriarchal entitlement and sexual repression. In places where conservative norms shape discussions about intimacy and desire, men may have few socially acceptable avenues to process deviance or seek help. Meanwhile, women continue absorbing the consequences. In India, the phrase “eve-teasing”—a euphemistic term for street harassment—still downplays a range of predatory acts, from stalking to unwanted touching. In Indonesia, women’s rights groups criticize the term “pelecehan ringan” (minor harassment), which reduces non-physical sexual aggression into an administrative inconvenience rather than a violation of dignity. Even in East Asia’s wealthier cities—Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei—victims often struggle to make police take these cases seriously unless physical harm occurs.
There is another dimension often overlooked: fetishistic offences thrive in anonymity. Crowded buses, tightly packed trains, nighttime markets, and endless apartment corridors offer offenders opportunities to mask their intent behind everyday proximity. Urban Asia’s famously dense environments—so often celebrated for efficiency and vibrancy—can also become unwilling theatres for boundary-crossing behaviour.
But the region is slowly pushing back. South Korea toughened its digital-privacy laws after massive protests led by young feminists. Japan has upgraded penalties for non-consensual photography. Singaporean courts, increasingly vocal about women’s safety, have issued firmer sentences even for first-time offenders. Grassroots activists across Southeast Asia are demanding harm-centred definitions of sexual offences rather than morality-infused ones.
The hair-cutting case in Singapore is a reminder that fetishism, when weaponized, is not a private quirk but a public threat. It reduces women to sensory objects—smell, texture, silhouette—and rewrites the script of daily life into something unsafe. For millions of women in Asia, safety on buses, trains, or sidewalks should not depend on luck, vigilance, or how tightly they tie their hair.
Let me take a deep breath before I scream into the void: a man on a Singapore bus quietly stalks a woman, pulls out scissors, cuts off her hair, and then sniffs it like some deranged sommelier of female scent—and the world still treats this as a quirky headline instead of the violation it is.
I read the story twice, not because it was complex, but because my brain refused to accept that grown men are still behaving like predators dressed up as “poor souls with urges” and that institutions around them keep nodding sympathetically, as if fetish-driven harassment were just another little mishap on the commute.
What astonishes me most is not the fetish—humans are strange creatures, and desire grows in crooked directions—but the utter infantilization of men in so many Asian societies. A man stalks a woman, follows her for days, cuts off her hair, terrifies her, and what do we hear? “He was overwhelmed by urges.” “It was a compulsion.” “At least he didn’t touch her.” Sisters, this is not a toddler caught drawing on the wall. This is a grown man violating a stranger’s bodily autonomy—an act of power, not passion.
And then, the authorities. Ah yes, the loyal guardians of “modesty,” that archaic legal term that sounds like it was bottled in a British colonial laboratory sometime in 1883. Why must violations of women’s safety be filtered through Victorian-era vocabulary? Modesty was never the issue. Safety is. Dignity is. Consent is. But the statutes still hum their old songs, and courts often treat these cases as minor infractions—misdemeanours on the edge of sexual violence, not quite serious enough to cause alarm.
Let me say it plainly: a fetish becomes a crime the moment it crosses another person’s boundary, and this region is drowning in examples. Hair-cutters, underwear thieves, hidden-camera addicts, train gropers, men who act like women’s bodies are public vending machines dispensing their preferred stimuli. And the media? More than once I’ve seen headlines that read like the writer is giggling behind their keyboard—“Odd Behaviour,” “Bizarre Act,” “Overcome by Urges.” As if the women targeted should simply shrug and be grateful it wasn’t worse.
I’m enraged, yes. But I’m also, strangely, filled with pity. Imagine being a man so emotionally stunted, so sexually repressed, so unaccustomed to treating women as equal humans, that the best he can do is steal a lock of hair. Imagine a society so forgiving of male fragility that it turns predation into a punchline.
Men will be men? No, Auntie refuses. Men will be accountable adults—or they will be dangerous. And women, as always, deserve far better than this circus of excuses.