Salt * Wet * Fish

A lot of people asked: “Why keep talking about this issue?”

Well, actually it depends what people are talking about. I believe that there should be enough voice and visibilty around supporting her or criticising those who gives her a hard time in order to balance the difficulties that she must have to deal with. Sure, if we keep quiet, things will go away….or NOT!

Its a bit like being gay. If everyone around you keeps telling you that you are bad, wanton, slut, evil and worthless, then its just too easy to believe this. However, if there is an equal voice tell this gay person that he is okay, functional and a worthy person, then its up to that person to decide whose voice is more sane and what kind of outlook he/she wants to see him/herself as.

So its important to talk about the issues around the Tammy videos issues, not about Tammy, that is, but why are people only faulting the girl only? Just like that Chu Mei-feng sex scandal that happened in Taiwan, everyone was calling her a slut, loose and bad woman, but the man in the video is a known married man, yet nobody seemed to be bothered by it. Instead most of the comments about the man is how good he is, how big is was and how long he could last. Tammy’s case is almost a mirror image of that case, except that none of them are celebrities and it happened in sex-deprived Singapore. People are almost blind to the fact that there is a guy in the video, almost as if she did it all by herself!

This is probably a product of our patriarchal society whose views are obviously more beneficial towards the men folks, and straight men at that. Women must dress like men or be as agressive as men to succeed in the corporate world. Men wants virgin wife, but cannot keep their own virginity. In fact, men are probably encouraged via peer pressure to loose it to proof his manhood! Of course, societal views has been changing, but it looks like its still a men’s world out there when it comes to sexual views. Men who sleeps around are ‘genki’, but if women were to do it, they are ‘loose’.

Of course, this does not help with the American fundamentalist right-wing Christians driven ‘Abstinence’ program by Focus on the Family and funded by the government. No, I am not against abstinence. I am only against the way the message is being propagated: full of guilt and shame (very typical of groups like that anyway) and the untruths around the ineffectiveness of the condom. This makes making any informed decision difficult if not ridden with fear, guilt and shame.

So the same things are happening here, people are trying to laid their own fear, guilt and shame on the girl, trying to make her feel as bad as they would. And indeed, it seems like they will only be happy when she feels bad about it. Of course, its a dumb thing to record yourself in a phone, forget about and gets it lost and that is the only thing that Tammy should knock her head about. That only and NOTHING else.

Notice that in some documentaries they will have an advisory:

Documentary contains scenes of nudity. Viewer discretion and parental guidance is advised.

Isn’t is a strange society we are growing up in? If scenes of nudity could cause such dramatic horror and/or sexual perverts in children or the viewers, we must conclude that there must be lots of horrified children and sexual perverts in those tribes!

Sex education and view on sex cannot be approached from the angle of fear, guilt and shame. This does not make people think or act better. In fact, people either totally ignore the message as stupid (as most wiser kid’s do nowsadays) or believes in them so much that they carry those fear, guilt and shame and becomes the crusaders of the “morally right”.