Tag:body

Spicy Auntie is tired. Not jet-lag tired, not menopause tired (well, that too), but tired in her bones of watching women’s bodies in Asia treated like unfinished products on an assembly line. Too dark? Buy a cream. Too round? Buy discipline. Not pregnant yet? Download an app. Too pregnant? Different app. Everything monitored, optimized, monetised. Welcome, sisters, to vagina capitalism. Let’s start with the whitening creams, because Auntie grew up with those ads whispering poison into young girls’ ears. I still remember them: sad, dark-skinned girl, no boyfriend, no job,...

Ah yes. Yangyang again. The sea is blue, the surfboards are cute, the sunsets are cinematic—and somehow, miraculously, only the girls come back with a stain on their reputation. Let’s be clear about how this story is told in Korea. When Yangyang is described as a “hunting ground,” men are framed as active, adventurous, virile. Hunters. Boys being boys. Having fun. When women go to the exact same place, drink the exact same soju, talk to the exact same strangers, suddenly they are no longer travelers or surfers or partygoers....

Honestly? Auntie watches these Chinese short dramas and feels like she’s eating instant noodles three times a day. Salty, addictive, strangely comforting… and nutritionally empty. Stereotypes on steroids. Women wronged, crying, reborn, revenge served hot. Men rich, cold, emotionally constipated until love magically cures them. Same tropes, same fantasies, same gender roles, looped endlessly in vertical format. Swipe, gasp, cliffhanger, repeat. Stimulate the gut, not the brain. Auntie is not shocked. I get it. Life is exhausting. Work is brutal. Marriage is pressure. Dating is a battlefield. When your commute...

Spicy Auntie is angry today. Properly angry. The kind of anger that simmers, not the Instagram-friendly kind with a hashtag and a flower crown. Because reading Kartini’s letters again, you cannot escape the cruelty of her time—or the uncomfortable truth that much of what she fought against is still very much alive, polished up, rebranded, and defended by today’s political and religious gatekeepers. Kartini was locked in. Literally. Pingitan was not some quaint cultural ritual; it was a prison with embroidery. A girl educated just enough to know what freedom...

Let me say this slowly, darlings, so everyone at the back of the staffroom can hear it: children notice who is missing. They notice before policymakers do, before education departments commission yet another report, and certainly before the culture warriors crawl out of the woodwork to shout “reverse discrimination!” every time someone mentions men and primary schools in the same sentence. In Australia’s primary classrooms, the missing presence is obvious. Male teachers are rarer than a quiet parents’ WhatsApp group. And no, this is not about claiming men are somehow...