Sometimes, its best to keep quiet
So, here Jeffery is a Malaysian woman, at the risk of being labelled Western-educated-feminist-liberal-whatever-whatever, giving her thoughts on the deluded "Asia Bagus" crap.
The assumptions and prescriptions made about women, and Asian women are no exception, are designed to 'keep them in their place' to maintain male superiority.
It is even more beguiling when these assumptions come from someone who deems to know what Asian women want .
I find it loathsome when some argue that Asians are so fine and dandy, decent, with cultural and religious norms that are different from the West that we keep in check cases of social problems of fractured family and children uncared for by both parents".
Get a grip on it, Jeffery! The 650,000 female headed households in this country due to 'death, divorce, desertion' by their Asian male life partners will tell you where to stick your Asian values argument. The thousands of women and children who are raped by family members each year will tell you that there was nothing particularly Asian or Western about the rape. The thousands of women who are battered every year in the country know how deep cultural mores and religious interpretations affect their lives daily.
These are also the women that will tell you that Asian women, just like their "Scandinavian sisters" have hopes, dreams, fantasies, longings, fears and the desire to be treated as equal partners.
And whether society approves or not "extramarital sex (you forgot premarital sex!), single motherhood, or abortion by choice, marriage of same genders or the philosophy of serial monogamy" has happened in Malaysia, still happens and will continue to happen. Same-sex marriages may not be common, although one couple attempted it anyway, only because the law is unable to cope with it, but same-sex live-in partners are common. The rest of your list is extremely common in Malaysia. So get real.
Don't relegate this to an East-West debate because these are dimensions of human relations since time immemorial. It is just that some communities and individuals don't go round pretending that these issues don't exist!
Which reminds, me. If you don't know what you are talking about, Jeffery, don't pretend to.
If you don't know what it's like to have — or have never met anyone who has had — hangers, bottles or broomsticks shoved up your anus or other orifices, don't presume to know whether it is more or less traumatic than having a penis violate you.
That would be giving the penis far too much credit for what it really is and downplaying the heart of the injustice, which is the violation!
Whether it is non-consensual 'finger-probing' between two women, or anal rape between men, the issue is the violation of the body, the offence against body integrity. Of course, you poor and narrow definition of 'rape' based on an archaic construct would find this difficult to deal with, but that is your unfortunate limitation. Sexual assault and sexual coercion is about sex-based violation of a person. Let that distinction be clear.
If you have never met a woman whose husband has shoved glass bottles or metal rods into her vagina, reconsider the gift of your gab! And in case you were thinking that the glass-bottle-bloke was only joking or really 'mentally disturbed', the guy is a high-school counsellor, a well-respected 9-5 kind of guy in his community. Only she can't say it, because there are enough 'Jefferys' running around minimising her experiences and wondering if she is telling the truth.
If you have never met a person who's thighs and genitals have been burnt with a hot iron by her husband, reconsider your 'reasonable provocation and state of undress' arguments. They sound crass in the face of the realities that women in Malaysia have to deal with and you sound like a total misogynist, however 'well' your intentions may be.
Jeffery has this strange notion that women can't wait to skip to our police stations — at the risk of running the gauntlet of ridicule, 'it's your duty as a wife', 'don't make a big thing out of nothing' comments. And then there is the medical examination where you have to expose parts of you that have been declared no-go zones from childhood to total strangers, going through the details of the violation blow-by-blow to yet another set of strangers for the pendakwaraya's office, then again to another bunch of strangers in court. All this while you have to continue to care for your kids and maintain some semblance of a life. Oh, yes, Jeffery, women are just lining up for the experience!
Your suggestion that "in the face of sexual coercion...the wife could be accorded the peremptory right to divorce him on this ground, or short of that finality, apply for a judicial separation or injunction order for him to "cool" off" made me laugh out loud. If you have tried to get such an injunction, you would know that it is not nearly as easy as you make it sound.
Your legal-speak may sound impressive, but is bereft of the analysis required to understand the politics of gender and rape. In other words, you need to read more so that your legal knowledge is rooted in lives, not purely academic mastication.
And in case you were wondering, I am not from Awam.
