Tag:relationships

Why So Many Women Regret Marriage

Japan likes to talk about marriage as if it were a moral good, a demographic duty, almost a civic service. Politicians mourn declining kekkon...

The Complacent Women Behind Asia’s Strongmen

Power in Asia has often worn a uniform, dark glasses, or a carefully staged smile. But behind many South, East, and Southeast Asian civilian...

Why Young Women Are Choosing to Live Alone

Living alone in China was once treated as a temporary failure of the life script, something you did between leaving your parents’ home and...

Meet The Coolest Lesbians In Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, lesbian life has rarely announced itself with slogans or parades. Instead, it has learned to whisper, to joke, to blend into...

If Intimacy Has Nowhere to Go

“Love on a Sunday schedule” is not a metaphor in Hong Kong. For many Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, it is a precise description...

The Masculinity Trap Behind Male Suicide

In Sri Lanka, male suicide is a pressing public-health concern shaped by long-term social, economic, and cultural pressures. After peaking in the mid-1990s, the...

Where Macau Tycoons Keep Their ‘Second Wives’

In the glittering global imagination, Macau is a city of baccarat tables, VIP rooms, and sudden fortunes. Just across the border, Zhuhai appears quieter,...

What Gen Z Really Thinks About Arranged Marriage

Arranged marriage in India has never been a quiet institution, but in recent months it has exploded into one of the loudest social media...
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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