Tag:politics

Bangladeshi Parties Would Not Candidate Women

As Bangladesh heads toward its next national elections on 12 February 2026, the numbers alone reveal how profoundly women remain sidelined from electoral politics....

The Unspoken Rules for Women in Japanese Politics

In Japan, politics still quietly asks women a question it rarely asks men: who are you at home? For unmarried or childless women seeking...

Dating, Desire, and Sex in North Korea

Sex in North Korea exists in a narrow corridor between silence and control, where intimacy is not simply private but political, and desire is...

India’s Grey-Pink Vote Could Decide Elections

India’s elections are often described as a battle for the youth vote, yet a subtler but potentially decisive force has quietly been reshaping electoral...

How Gender Is Redefining Thai Electoral Politics

Thailand’s 2026 general election is shaping up to be one of the most socially charged ballots in years, propelled not just by traditional debates...

A Girl’s Life Story, on Her Face

For decades, the Māori chin tattoo known as moko kauae was pushed to the margins, dismissed as a relic of the past or misunderstood...

Women in Power for 30 Years, and No Gender Justice

For more than three decades, Bangladesh lived under what commentators came to call the “Age of the Begums,” a political era defined by the...

Queer Filipinos: Visible, Accepted, But Never Equal

In June 2025, a survey found a striking contradiction: while a majority of Filipinos said they were tolerant of LGBTQ people, many LGBTQ Filipinos...
Auntie Spices It Out
Commentary

Asian Men’s Top Fantasy? The Woman Next Door

January 25, 2026

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...
Commentary

When ‘Dangdut’ Dancers Cross Religious Red Lines

January 25, 2026

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...
Commentary

The Radical Feminism of Studio Ghibli’s Girls

January 24, 2026

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....
Commentary

The Seductive, Erotic Power of Old Shanghai Style

January 24, 2026

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...
Commentary

Rich Women, Young Gigolos, Old Hypocrisy

January 24, 2026

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...
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