Southeast Asia

I’ve lost count of how many times men—usually smug, usually underwhelming—have told me that men are “visual creatures” and therefore need porn stars with impossible bodies and Olympic flexibility. Darling, if that were true, Asia would look very different after dark. What Asian men actually click on, linger over, and return to again and again is not the spectacular. It’s the plausible. It’s the woman who looks like she could borrow your charger and complain about the aircon. This does not surprise Auntie in the slightest. For decades, Asian societies...

Spicy Auntie has seen this movie before, and honestly, I could recite the dialogue in my sleep. Sexy dangdut singer appears. Hips move. Men cheer. Phones come out. Someone yells “haram”. Someone else yells “culture”. Cue apologies, moral outrage, calls for punishment, and a sudden national panic about the collapse of civilisation — all triggered by a woman doing her job on a stage. What amused me this time is the performance of shock. As if Indonesia woke up yesterday and discovered that dangdut involves bodies. As if villagers have...

Hollywood? Pixar? Disney? Princesses, princesses, mermaids, sparkly eyelashes and sidekicks who exist mainly to applaud? Pffff. Auntie yawns. Give me the girls and women of Studio Ghibli any day, every day, preferably with wind in their hair, dirt under their nails, and absolutely no interest in being “chosen.” What I love about Ghibli women—those created by the wonderfully stubborn Hayao Miyazaki—is that they don’t perform strength. They live it. They work. They get tired. They get scared. They mess up. They don’t strike power poses or announce themselves as icons....

Spicy Auntie has another embarrassing confession to make. I am weak for Old Shanghai kitsch. Put me in a dim bar with red velvet curtains, a jazz trio pretending it’s 1936, and a hostess in a perfectly tailored cheongsam, and my critical faculties immediately start fighting my pleasure receptors. I know exactly what is being sold to me — and yet, like so many of us, I keep buying the fantasy. Because Old Shanghai nostalgia is erotic in a very specific, very manipulative way. It doesn’t shout sex. It whispers...

I have several friends in Jakarta—well… acquaintances. Women I meet at dinners, at art openings, at those polite, exhausting lunches where everyone pretends not to notice who arrived with whom. Some of them, discreetly, unapologetically, enjoy the services—sorry, the company—of younger men. And honestly? Good for them. I’m not particularly fond of rich ibu-ibu, in Jakarta, Bogor, or anywhere else in Asia, but that’s not the point. The point is the hypocrisy. The thick, sticky, moralistic hypocrisy. When older men do this—especially powerful, wealthy, “respectable” men—it barely registers. A middle-aged...