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Cold, clinical and callous single women
Susan Leong's article on The Great Marriage Debate, "What you said about the Singles issue" (ST, Oct 30) carried comments too provocative to be left unchallenged.
In particular, the amusing alliterative description of Singapore men as "looney-looking losers" is downright rude, sexist and unfair.
In the midst of this brouhaha, we may indeed have missed out the true culprit or villian of the piece.
Imagine how a mother would feel when it is time for her daughter to get married after graudation.
She would have invested many ardous and painstaking years nurturing and cosseting her daughter, and would have forgone many luxuries in order to give her the best education.
With such a priceless treasure, the minimum requirement would be someone who family tree is enshrned in the pages of Debrett's Peerage, or failing this, a title such as Tan Sri or Tun would be acceptable.
As such suitable matches are hard to come by, it was not surprising that Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew some years ago mentioned a figure of 38 per cent for single graduate women, sparking off the now famous Social Developement Unit programmes.
I am relieved to see the figure quoted is now a mere 25.5 per cent for which perhaps congratulations to SDU are in order
Or is it because the numbers are reduced by emigration or inter-racial marriages, as we seem to see many of our women marrying foreigners?
With the passage of time, the female graduate's mother may relent somewhat in her rigid requirement of a suitable son-in-law, but with that same passage of time the
not-so-young graduate would have have undergone a metamorphosis into a hard-driving, arrogant, self-opinionated, whatever-preneur capable of making alliterative remarks about the poor men who during this time have grown more and more in awe of them.
Hence it is not surprising that the woman's "want-list" included a nice apartment, car, clothes, holidays, dining-out, and even sex if possible.
Nowhere is there mention of affection, family life or companionship which to me would seem to be the sine qua non for an enduring and happy marriage.
Singaporean men, astute by nature, are overwhelmed by this female attitude and so prefer to marry "downward" or look to the less demanding and more feminine women from China whose mothers have yet to set the same standards.
Singapore's hard-driving approach where everything has to be "number one" has produced some people who harbour a cold, clinical, calculating and callous approach to life and marriage, and the attitude that they do not need anybody to "interfere with their wants".
Perhaps they should examine themselves to discover why 74.5 per cent of their sister graduates are married while they remain undesireable, unwanted and unwed.
Unfortunately, as they are de-selected from the procreation process, this trend, if left unchecked, will result in a significant depletion of the desireable genetic material in our species of "Feminis Singaporeansis" to the detriment of the country.
- Mr CSC, Straits Times' Forum Page Contributor
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