My life as a sex columnist in an uptight country

As readers of this blog know, I was a magazine journalist back home. With recent events in my life, I’ve been doing a lot of reflection on the past and what I want out of the future in my career.

While I was leafing through my memories, I stumbled upon my my two-year stint at a certain women’s magazine. Besides travel and technology, I wrote articles about sex and relationships fairly regularly.

At the time, another colleague took the column on products and trends, while I did the special sex supplements and at least one or two articles about relationships per month.

I was teased by friends that I was a “Carrie Bradshaw”, but honestly, I felt there was nothing chic or fabulous about my job. Imagine this: I lived in a country where blow jobs were illegal between consenting adult men and women till Oct 2007. And being a sex columnist doesn’t seem easy in other more liberal countries, either.

Here’s why it was hard.

Writing about sex gets mundane. If you look at the human body, there are only so many orifices, and seriously, is the average person that flexible?

Sure, I think if you let your imagination run wild, you could probably drum up some jaw-dropping stuff, but with a magazine in a country such as our little red dot, we had to write stuff that was within taste and bounds of our famously strict media authority. So, you really have very little to play with, in terms of story ideas.

There were no sexy freebies. Many friends would nudge and wink at me (and the kangaroo) about getting to try all sorts of sexy contraptions. Reality check: Sex shops in Singapore are not glamorous flagship stores and they are dinghy out-of-the-way holes trying to make a buck.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this means they always wanted their products back after our photo shoot and with the seals on. I could only work my imagination on what mysterious powers these sex toys had.

I couldn’t do much empirical research. It was hard to experiment when the kangaroo was living in another country, so it was really like armchair travelling (which, by the way, many travel writers do — that’s another myth debunked. Sorry, guys!).

I was scared my ultra-conservative parents would find out. I never admitted this to my folks, nor did they ever confront me, but I never told them I wrote raunchy articles for my job and I wanted to keep it that way.

I had some fervent hope that, even if any of my relatives picked up a copy of the magazine I worked for, they would be too embarrassed to take the gossip back to my parents. Since I got free copies, my mother never felt the need to get them herself and I didn’t bring home the ones that had my byline on sex stories.

It was exhausting. Once, I did a tame article on the best hotels for a sexy weekend getaway, which was a relief from thinking up of incredible headlines (“Experience 30 orgasms in one night!”) and finding the sex books that actually made such claims. But little did I know that most reputable (and sexy) Singaporean hotels didn’t really want to be associated with the label “sex”.

After I convinced 10 hotels to participate, I hopped from one to another within three days. I did not “test” any of them, even though the kangaroo was in town, because I had like friggin’ 10 hotels to tour and 10 hospitality managers to interview in 72 hours.

In the end, I fell sick but went to work on the following Monday anyway, and turned lobster red when my editor quipped, “How was your sexy weekend getaway? Did you bounce a lot on the beds?” I actually felt embarrassed admitting I didn’t grope the kangaroo even though we were given a free night’s stay in three hotels.

It got technical. Have you tried breaking down pole dancing moves on paper? It’s not fun. It’s like describing exercise stretches or yoga poses.

Newsmakers were shy. No one wants to wash their dirty laundry in public and it was like pulling teeth to get saucy quotes. Generally, people just want to keep their private lives private.

Oh, and while our bookstores were happy to stock many sex books, they refused to be featured in the magazine, because it was not “aligned with [their] company policies”, so I couldn’t loan them for photo shoots or research. Alas, I spent many hours browsing sex manuals standing up in an aisle.

I felt like a fraud. I was no virgin but I was just your average gal who had her fair share of men. What did I know about sex and relationships? Nothing! But I had to write like I owned it and made having sex (lots of it!) an ambition — sort of like how Brothers & Sisters makes married sex look so hawt.

I wrote convenient tips and put up a dressing window on having a great sex life with these awesome frisky ideas (not that I don’t have a great sex life but regular people don’t put it out there, you know… and the kangaroo might be reading this).

By the way, I lied when I said the Frog was a great position to try. When I did get a chance to squeeze in some empirical testing, this didn’t rock the kangaroo’s boat. Not at all. Why? I was desperate and the positions were sent for illustration even before I could write the piece. There, I feel much better.

Direct references to sexual acts and body parts were verboten. Yes, you read that right. Do you know how difficult it is to find metaphors for penis, vagina, and intercourse? Schlong, d***, tool were also not allowed. I remembered “equipment” bypassed the cutting board at the editor’s desk, while my memories are tainted with resentful frustration that I had so many limitations.

Does that sound too vanilla to you? How did the sex column survive? It actually thrived — every time there was a special sex issue, the circulation numbers went ballistic. So instead of its annual appearance, the sex issue was slated to come out twice a year! Well, that was three to four years ago, so maybe things have changed.

I think we fell back on making it look chic with sleek images and full of cool alliterations. Basically, most stories could get away with it if you kept to the above-stated rules in my last point.

And the editors had this crazy idea to “seal” it, like it was so “hot”, it had to come with perforated edges. While it placated anxious parents of teenage daughters (like they wouldn’t know how to rip paper?), it made the curious even curiouser.

…Then there were sensational stories like orgies in HDB flats and a married man’s quest to bonk all the maids in his block, which actually sold thousands and thousands of copies. I think those were the articles that really reeled the readers in.

Maybe it doesn’t take much to shock the average Singaporean? Who knows, we are not the most liberal nation around, but we’re certainly not the most uptight.

Apparently, we are not romping rabbits in the sack either. A few years ago, there was some dismal statistic published by Durex that Singaporeans had one of the most infrequent sex in the world and was only just above the Japanese who were at the bottom — how can that be possible? Japan screams sex everywhere!

[Just an aside: In 2007, the Japanese only had sex 34 times a year on average (still the lowest globally), but Singapore got it up to 62 times annually, beating the UK (55) and the US (53). I guess the subprime crisis also wreaked havoc in the bedroom…]

One thing of interest to note is the media industry goes through waves of tolerance and intolerance. I think magazines and newspapers try to push the boundaries, and if they get a slap on the wrist (like a written warning from the media authority), they just retreat and stop publishing such torrid stuff — for a while. Like six months.

There you have it, if you ever consider putting down “Sex Columnist” as a career aspiration, you might want to think again…

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