Fridae

"How can you call it marriage when you cannot consummate it?" he asked, objecting to the way I referred to same-sex unions as marriage. I was a little surprised, although I shouldn't have been, how clear everything became in that instant.

Gay men are often accused of being obsessed with sex, and truthfully speaking, they way we embellish gay-related advertising with images of bare-bodied hunks only serves to prove the point in our opponents' eyes.

Yet here, on the question of marriage, when gay people define it as a union of two persons on the basis of commitment and love, the other side, as represented by this person across the table, essentially reduced it to just sex. It isn't marriage, in his view, unless there is penile-vaginal penetration.

Who's obsessed with sex now? Who has perverted love?

But why is penile-vaginal penetration, and only penile-vaginal penetration, consummate sex? And why is this particular act trundled out as proof positive of what would make a marriage?

"Because from that act, comes new life." Ah, the procreation thing again.

Somehow, everybody seems to ignore the fact that procreation and marriage have always been, throughout history, a very poor fit. Surely, we know that babies can be produced out of wedlock. But more interestingly, we seem to readily ignore the fact that even penile-vaginal penetration within marriage almost never result in new life, and deliberately so.

Say a married heterosexual couple engaged in sex twice a week for 40 years of married life. They would be doing it 4000 times. An average couple in the modern world would produce just two children, which makes a conversion rate of 0.05 percent.

I think you'd have a better chance of going up in a hot-air balloon from Bangkok, drifting randomly with the wind and somehow reaching Singapore.

Using penile-vaginal penetration is such an irrational definition of marriage that the continued reliance on it cannot be described as anything other than an obsession.

No sex outside marriage
Another crazy thing is how a condom is treated almost as a token of the devil. Recently, a woman wrote to the Straits Times, Singapore's main daily newspaper, complaining that on Valentine's Day, her 17-year-old son was given a gift of a condom when he bought a cake from a bakery. It was "definitely inappropriate," she wrote.

In Singapore it is entirely legal for 17-year-olds to have sex - unless they are two males, in which case it is illegal at any age.

Adding to her displeasure, the cake came with a garnish of a "kamasutra chocolate," a small chocolate sculpture showing a couple in embrace. She probably felt that the bakery was trying to corrupt her son by such references to copulation.

The bakery later clarified that the cake, complete with its chocolate garnish, had been on display and that it was the boy who chose it. No doubt, even this explanation would not have mollified the mother since the whole idea of sex being planted in her son's mind must have been too much to bear.

Once again, this flies against all reason. It is impossible in the modern world to isolate teenagers from sexual references. To create a taboo around it and anything associated with it, especially something as life saving as a condom, is to psychologically handicap a young person in life. He becomes unable to deal with the subject and all its temptations with maturity and rationality. Not to mention the risk that he is kept away from quite basic information, lest it be seen as corrupting.

Ignorance is rife
At a recent HIV and AIDS exhibition recently organised by a Christian charity group, Worldvision, during which a survey was also conducted among 705 persons, about one in five didn't know that a condom could protect you against infection. As the exhibition was held at the Singapore Management University, one can assume that most of the people who were there were relatively young, which means this statistic is actually quite depressing.

Worse yet, "about a third of the respondents believed that HIV and AIDS could be transmitted through a mosquito bite or by kissing," the Straits Times report said.

Neither the reporter nor the survey design can escape criticism either. Look at this sentence in the same story: "When it came to protecting themselves from catching the viruses, more than 80 per cent of the respondents knew that they could do this by using a condom during sex or having an uninfected sex partner."

I almost choked on my coffee when I read it. There were three things wrong with it.

Top would be the depressing fact that about one in five still do not know that condoms can protect you, this after a quarter century of AIDS making the headlines.

Secondly, why the plural - "viruses"? Does this mean the reporter herself wasn't too sure about the subject of HIV?

Thirdly, why conflate condoms with "having an uninfected sex partner"? In so doing, the study reinforces the stigmatisation of HIV-positive people.
More likely, the design of the survey might have been intended to subtly promote the idea of abstinence, or at least to equate abstinence as an equally effective method of prevention as condoms. If so, it is misguided, for the more likely result of such messaging would be to fuel the unsavoury business of johns looking for ever younger girls and boys for paid sex, in the belief that they would be "clean."

This is how perverted a sex-phobic approach can become.

Other times, our tongue-tied condition can be quite comic, as can be seen in the case of David Hernandez. This young man was one of the 12 finalists in the current season of American Idol. In the first week of March, it was reported on many blogs that he had once been a stripper in a "mostly male" bar called Dick's Cabaret. For three years, he had been lap dancing, sometimes fully nude.

Then on the March 11th show - as it would turn out, his last - he, like the other contestants, had to say something about his past in a prepared videoclip. Ryan Seacrest, the presenter, alluded to the online talk by saying what a "stressful week" it must have been for him, but in the videoclip, all Hernandez could talk about was how he was once fired from his job at a pizza bistro.

Why is it so hard to talk about sex?