Commentary

I read about the police bust in Bắc Ninh and sighed the kind of sigh that comes from being proven right yet again. This case confirms exactly what I’ve been saying for years, often to polite smiles and raised eyebrows: prostitution does not exist because people are immoral, greedy, or broken. It exists because pleasure, desire, and intimacy are hemmed in by social, religious, and cultural constraints so tight they leave very little room to breathe. What shocked the public in this case was not the secrecy, not the messaging...

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...

I loooove the courage of these brothers and sisters. Truly. In a region where “progressive” politics so often means adding one rainbow flag to an old boys’ club and calling it a day, what these Nepali activists are doing feels bracingly honest. They’re not asking politely to be included in someone else’s dinner party. They’ve cooked their own food, set their own table, and marched straight into the political hall with it. Nepal likes to congratulate itself for being enlightened. Third gender recognition, court rulings, constitutional language that looks fabulous...

Spicy Auntie has lived long enough to recognize an old trick when it shows up wearing new tech. Call it an “online date auction,” call it entertainment, call it sogaeting with Wi-Fi and PayPal—Auntie calls it the same dusty patriarchy, freshly rebranded for the livestream age. Let’s be honest. This isn’t really about dating. Dating implies mutual curiosity, awkward silences, a coffee you can escape from if the vibes are off. Auctions are about dominance, money, and spectacle. When men throw cash at a screen to “win” a woman while...

I was a bit too young to actually enjoy the nightlife of old Bugis Street, but I remember it vividly anyway. Memory is funny like that. It doesn’t always need alcohol or lipstick or bad decisions to lodge itself in your bones. Sometimes all it takes is one evening, one old aunt, and a street full of people who refuse to make themselves small. An auntie — not my mother, of course, but one of those aunties who smoked, laughed too loudly, and didn’t explain herself — took me to...