The New Paper Column: Sex

The view from my dorm’s common room window is amazing. You can see the Empire State Building in the distance, the Manhattan Bridge nearby, and, every Thursday night, the free sex show from a college student in the opposite tower.

Yes, you read the last statement correctly.

The first time she brought a guy over, she forgot to pull down the blinds. The second time, it wasn’t because she forgot. In the third week, a unanimous decision was made in my dorm that we should watch The O.C. somewhere else. Since then, various elevator conversations have convinced me that That Girl’s show is even more regular than network TV (and a lot less censored).

You would think that this exhibitionistic behavior was mostly confined to the West. In Singapore, for example, you would never walk in on university students having sex in a Starbucks toilet (which has happened to me twice in the last month).

But are Singapore and the US really that different? In last year’s Durex Global Sex Survey, Singapore was second last out of 41 countries when it came to frequency of sex. But according to various articles in The Straits Times and this paper, sex shops have penetrated downtown and heartland office spaces in the past year, making exciting profit figures selling erotic toys to naughty boardgames to kinky lingerie.

According to my friends, it’s also long been an open secret that, among other places, you can catch a R(A) movie if you walk by a certain downtown school that has glass-walled study rooms.

With Singapore’s first-ever Sex Expo soon to open, we seem to be gradually adopting the West’s openness about sex. But we’re also similar in another disturbing way.

Sex education is a divisive topic here in the US. Morning-after pills targeted at 17 or older females can prevent pregnancies if taken up to 72 hours post-sex. Last month, a vaccination was also invented that can prevent cervical cancer, a disease that stems largely from a sexually transmitted virus. But both are being blocked from reaching the masses because the government prefers pushing the message of abstinence, and so it can’t be seen to be condoning teenage sex in any way.

We are facing a similar situation in Singapore. Teenagers are becoming increasingly blasé about sex, but the increasingly out-dated message of abstinence is still being pushed. And the result has been published by The Straits Times in various reports, one as recent as two weeks ago: The age-group of 10-19 now make up 6 percent of all sexually-transmitted infection cases, a handful of seventeen year-olds have been diagnosed as HIV+, and the AIDs infection rate has been steadily on the rise. And yet we continue to prevent condoms from being handed out at nation-wide parties, and we continue to think that the abstinence message is working, despite various online studies showing that at least 60 percent of Singaporean teenagers have had multiple sex partners by the time they’re 18.

The results of this year’s Durex Global Sex Survey will be released on Tuesday, but we already know the really important sex numbers. The question is, will we continue to preach only abstinence, when we can all see (sometimes literally) that the college student next door is having sex 53 times a year, at the very, very least?