Tag:foot binding

I have zero patience for poetic euphemisms when they are used as moral deodorant. Calling a sex worker a “butterfly,” a “service woman,” a “guest relations officer,” or heaven help us, a “miss,” does not magically confer respect. It just makes you feel cleaner while she still does the work everyone pretends not to see. Let’s be honest. When people say kupu-kupu malam, or “night butterfly,” they’re not admiring beauty or fragility. They’re saying: she floats, she doesn’t belong, she will disappear by morning. Butterflies don’t need rights, contracts, healthcare,...

I read the Supreme Court ruling and, for once, I didn’t feel like clapping politely from the feminist sidelines. I wanted to stand up, adjust my auntie red shawl, and say: finally. Finally, someone in power has said out loud what millions of girls have known in their bodies for decades — that periods are not a personal inconvenience, they are a structural issue. What struck me most was not the free sanitary pads, though God knows they matter. It was the language of dignity. Dignity is a big word...

I have a deep, slightly obsessive love for Asian history—not the postcard version with temples at sunset and wise men dispensing aphorisms, but the messy, sweaty, power-soaked kind. The kind that, if you scratch just a little below the surface, reveals the same story over and over again: patriarchy changing uniforms, accents, and justifications, but never its core mission. Keep women in line. Control their bodies. Police their pleasure. Call it morality. What fascinates me is how creative this control has been. Imperial bureaucrats, military strongmen, colonial administrators, postwar reformers—different...

I laughed when I first read it. I really did. That sharp, involuntary laugh you make when the absurdity is almost elegant in its stupidity. Work stress makes you gay? Darling, if that were true, half of Asia’s middle management would be marching in Pride parades by now, waving rainbow lanyards and asking HR for trauma leave. The joke practically writes itself, and judging by Malaysian social media, the public got there very fast. But once the laughter fades, what’s left is not funny at all. I’m not surprised —...

I have met this auntie everywhere in Asia. In Jakarta, she wears batik and pretends not to understand why a young woman “needs” to live alone, while quietly wiring her rent money every month. In Seoul, she clicks her tongue at an unmarried niece, then slips her a business card for a lawyer, a gynecologist, or a therapist she knows “just in case.” In Bangkok, she laughs loudly about farang men and loose morals, then watches the door while a girl packs her bags to leave a bad marriage. In...