Females, apparently, don’t do leisure.

It’s so sad, but true. But it’s also really funny - Germaine Greer cracks me up.

Sometimes I wish Singapore had had the suffragettes, the civil rights movement and the feminist movement. Even a little one. Even a tiny mini one would’ve done.

Then we probably wouldn’t have men in parliament who assume that gender equality is privileging women as opposed to giving them what they are entitled to, that men are still the breadwinners, that women would really stay at home all day long if they could, that women should stay in the kitchen, that women shouldn’t be allowed to speak up on important national issues because we’re so emotional and irrational and we don’t know what we’re talking about, that men shouldn’t have paternity leave because men don’t do childcare.

I swear, these people are dinosaurs - or rather, rich old dinosaurs who would’ve left childcare to their maids.

It’s also very easy to forget that a lot of women in Singapore, and around the world, still feel that their only purpose is to live vicariously through their husband. even though they may deny it themselves, and even though it seems as though they are empowered financially just because they hold down jobs.

I know too many Singaporean parents who’ve told their daughters, in mandarin, ‘why work so hard? all you have to do is get married’ (zhe me yong gong gan shen me, jia le jiu suan le) (and it’s always in mandarin. why? i don’t know, but it just is).

hello, auntie and uncle, which parallel universe do you inhabit?

Ignorance breeds complacency and stupidity. It’s a blinkered society filled with stereotypical views of ‘Others’, us/them dichotomies, and the pretence of ‘values’ which are merely constructed so as to legitimise and elicit support and tolerance for what is in actual fact unsupportable and intolerable.

And one wonders why I have doubts about going back permanently.