"Men want “babes”. That’s a code word for “gorgeous bodies without brains”. Well, no, actually, it’s more true to say that Singapore men want babes … I’ll provide an anecdote to show that I’m not alone in thinking that men here dig babes. Make that babes with boobs. No, make that babes with boobs, without brains. Last week, at a café sipping smoothies to wind down from work, I eavesdropped on four men who looked to be in their 30s … all of them had victory tales to tell.

Women seem to fall into their laps. Not just any women, but pretty ones who are below 30. And “cannot be graduate”, one of them declared. “Woah, these university women. Buay tahan! …

Pity the graduate women. It’s no wonder they form the crux of Singapore’s Great Marriage Problem. But it’s not any graduate women. It’s those who show their intellectual mettle — unabashedly and with delight — whom the men shun. A university degree is a symbol of a woman’s braininess. It is also a warning for men to not let their egos be walked over by her. So if she’s really smart, she’ll know how to keep her brains under lock and key.

As one very accomplished colleague, single and graduate put it: “The trick is to be so bimbo you don’t even know how to operate the washing machine or turn on the oven. I’ve been laughing at those columns recently by my female colleagues, lambasting the stupidity of the finalists in the Miss Singapore/Universe pageant. Why mock their poor English and shallow answers, their dumb silence in response to difficult social questions, their ah lian manners?

What if, just what if, they are showing off what Singapore men like? Quite likely these bimbos ah huays — if that’s how you want to view them — won’t have problems getting hitched and settling into a warm family life with three healthy kids and a loving husband. They will bask in the glow of the Great Singapore Family. Not the mocking graduate women, though, I bet. So guess who’s laughing her way to the church alter? (Leow, 2001)...

Xie Wen’s desire is to maintain the sanctity of traditional gender relations and prevent discursive intrusion which might disturb their meaning. For this reason he must try to repossess an essentialized Asian-ness and the feminine of past ages of national time when the boundaries between Singapore and the outside world, and between men and women were clear. He must also lay some blame on Western culture, and globalized feminism, which allows him to ally himself with a globalized offended masculinity. Xie Wen’s columns confirm Bhabha’s assertion that maintenance of the illusion of the political unity of the nation requires continual displacement of anxiety about its irredeemably plural modern space (Bhabha, 1994: 149). [Ed: Wth?!]"

- Peeling Prawns: Singapore Media and the Recovery of the Asian Feminine