When Malaysia’s Federal Court quietly struck down Section 498 of the Penal Code in December, the headline sounded almost quaint: a colonial-era law criminalising the “seduction of a married woman” was no more. But behind the antique phrasing lay one of the clearest legal expressions of how women’s bodies, sexuality, and choices had long been treated as male property. Its removal matters far more than its obscurity suggests.
Section 498 dated back to British rule. It made it a crime for a man to “entice” or “seduce” another man’s wife, punishable by up to two years in prison or a fine. Crucially, only the husband could lodge a complaint. The woman herself had no legal standing — not as a victim, not as an agent, not even as a participant with consent. The offence was framed entirely as an injury to a man’s honour and ownership, not as a question of a woman’s will.
In its unanimous ruling, the Federal Court of Malaysia found the provision unconstitutional, holding that it violated equality guarantees by discriminating on the basis of gender. The judges declined to “fix” the law through reinterpretation, choosing instead to invalidate it outright. Section 498 is now void, though convictions secured before the ruling remain legally valid.
On paper, this looks like a narrow technical decision. In practice, it reshapes how intimacy, marriage, and conflict are handled in everyday Malaysian life. First, consensual affairs between adults are no longer a matter for the criminal law under civil jurisdiction. Police can no longer be mobilised by a jealous or aggrieved husband to punish a third party. Emotional betrayal, however painful, is no longer treated as a public crime.
Second, marital breakdowns are pushed back into the realm where they belong: civil family law. Divorce, maintenance, custody, and division of assets remain available avenues for addressing harm caused by infidelity. What disappears is the ability to use criminal prosecution as leverage or revenge. That shift is especially significant in a system where power imbalances within marriage — economic, social, and gendered — remain stark.
The symbolism matters just as much as the legal mechanics. Section 498 rested on a worldview in which wives were quasi-property, and sexual fidelity was something owed to husbands rather than chosen by women. Striking it down is a rare moment in Malaysian constitutional law where the court explicitly acknowledged how the law itself reinforced gender hierarchy. It affirms, at least in principle, that adult women are autonomous subjects, not extensions of male honour.
Yet the ruling has clear limits. It applies only to civil criminal law. Muslim Malaysians remain subject to state-level Syariah criminal provisions governing morality, including offences such as khalwat (close proximity) and zina (adultery). In other words, two people engaging in the same conduct may face radically different legal consequences depending on religion and jurisdiction. The repeal of Section 498 does not end moral policing; it simply redraws its boundaries.
Nor does it erase social stigma. Affairs still carry heavy consequences in a society where women, in particular, are judged harshly for perceived sexual transgressions. Jobs, reputations, and family relationships can be destroyed without a single police report being filed. The law may step back, but social surveillance remains intense.
Still, the decision has broader implications. Section 498 was not a local invention; it was part of a suite of Victorian morality laws exported across the British Empire. India and Singapore inherited similar provisions, and India’s Supreme Court struck its version down in 2018 on comparable constitutional grounds. Malaysia’s ruling fits into a slow, uneven dismantling of colonial sexual governance — laws that pretended to protect women while actually denying them agency. More quietly, the case reinforces a principle with future potential: the state has limits when it comes to policing consensual adult intimacy. That idea could matter in challenges involving privacy, sexuality, or bodily autonomy, even if courts remain cautious about pushing too far, too fast.
This is not a revolution. It does not signal a sudden liberal turn in Malaysian society, nor does it weaken the cultural weight of marriage or fidelity. But it does mark a retreat of the criminal law from one of its most paternalistic roles. A woman’s desire is no longer framed, in statute, as something stolen from a husband by another man. For a provision that most people never encountered directly, Section 498 cast a long shadow. Its removal does not transform daily life overnight, but it does shift the legal imagination — from ownership to autonomy, from honour to equality. In a system where change often comes incrementally, that shift is worth noticing.
When I first read about Malaysia finally killing off the “seduction of a married woman” law, my initial reaction wasn’t relief. It was a tired, bitter laugh. Because the law didn’t invent the idea that women belong to men; it merely wrote it down in neat colonial prose. It gave it a number. Section 498. As if ownership could be indexed, footnoted, and archived.
The logic was painfully clear: a married woman could not be seduced unless she was taken. Stolen. Damaged goods. The crime was not that her consent had been violated — heaven forbid we centre that — but that another man had interfered with a husband’s asset. She herself didn’t even qualify as a complainant. Imagine being so legally irrelevant in your own affair.
And let’s be honest: the law may be dead, but the mindset is doing just fine. Ask any woman who has been interrogated after a breakup, a divorce, or a rumoured affair. Who tempted you? Who corrupted you? As if desire doesn’t live in our bodies, but arrives by male courier.
What amused me most — darkly — is how shocked some people are by the court’s reasoning. “Gender discrimination?” they gasp. As if this law wasn’t screaming it from the start. It punished men, yes, but only because men were the ones trespassing on other men’s turf. Women, meanwhile, were furniture. You don’t charge the sofa with adultery.
Of course, the fine print matters. Muslim women are still governed by Syariah morality laws. Social punishment remains alive and vicious. And the minute a woman asserts sexual agency, the whispers begin: immoral, unstable, selfish, too modern, not Asian enough. The cages may be legal, religious, cultural, or economic — but they all rattle the same way.
Still, I’ll take this small, symbolic crack in the wall. Because symbols matter. They tell young women that the state, at least on paper, no longer sees them as livestock traded between men. They tell husbands that their wounded pride is not a criminal case. And they remind everyone that marriage is a relationship, not a deed of ownership.
Property. That’s what we were. But here’s the thing about property: once you stop recognising it as such, it loses its power. You can’t repossess a woman who has already walked away.