Malaysia’s Weird Relationship With Sex: Sexually Repressed, Yet Sex-Obsessed

“dia tu gatal, kene kawin awal”

“batuk batuk ni, kene buat cpr”

“perempuan tu janda, mesti pandai main”

“Kalau pakai macam tu, memang mengundang”

“Kalau tak nak bagi, jangan marah kalau dia cari tempat lain.”

List of double meaning jokes. I am sure there are hundreds more. Growing up in Malaysia, I grew familiar with these statements. They are everywhere. In conversations, in school, online. It is quite interesting to me because Malaysia is a country that is mostly religious and modest, yet sexual innuendo jokes are so normalised in our everyday life. We don't really talk about sex, but somehow we are always joking about it.

In comparison to Western countries where you might hear someone casually ask “when did you lose your virginity?”, I think Malaysia has a very strange relationship with sex. We are supposedly very conservative about it. We don't want young people talking about it. We don't even like naming body parts. Vagina becomes “bunga”, penis becomes “burung”. We tell people not to think about sex, not to talk about sex, not to ask too many questions. But at the same time, sexual jokes are everywhere. We have somehow created a culture where sex is simultaneously taboo and constantly present.

I think there is something quite interesting psychologically about the way we suppress conversations around sex while constantly exposing ourselves to sexual humour. We tend to assume that if we don't talk about something, people will simply stop thinking about it, but human curiosity does not really work that way. When something becomes taboo, it can become even more interesting, especially to young people who are already naturally curious about their bodies, attraction and sexuality. 

I remember being 15 and being quite excited to learn about the reproductive system in Form 3 Science, and I am not going to pretend that I was not curious because I think most teenagers are. We are going through puberty, our bodies are changing, we are beginning to experience attraction, and suddenly there is this entire part of being human that adults seem extremely uncomfortable discussing. I went to an all-girls school, and I kid you not, I don't think an adult ever once sat me down and told me what I was supposed to do when I started feeling attracted to someone of the opposite gender. Like, ever. What do I do when I feel desire? What do I do when I start liking someone? What do I do with these feelings that suddenly exist in my body? Am I supposed to ignore them? Suppress them? Feel ashamed of them? Pray about them and hope they go away? And if I am not supposed to act on them, then what does it actually mean to manage them?

But I wonder what happens to that curiosity after the reproductive system chapter ends. If our introduction to sex is limited to the biology of reproduction in Science class, where do young people go when they inevitably have more questions? Because the curiosity, desire and questions do not disappear. For some, maybe the answer becomes pornography, smut novels, social media, anonymous forums or conversations with friends who are equally uninformed. Maybe someone encounters pornography before they have ever had a proper conversation about sex and unfortunately that becomes the framework through which they begin to understand what sex is supposed to look like.

From a psychological perspective, I think this matters because so much of what we understand about relationships and sexuality is shaped by observation, learning and the schemas we develop from our environment. If pornography becomes one of the most accessible sources of information about sex, then young people learn about sex and also a particular representation of what sex is supposed to be. They may learn that sex is about performance, penetration, domination or gratification, rather than communication, vulnerability, trust and intimacy. This is where the problem becomes much bigger than simply whether someone watches pornography or reads a smut novel.

There is another aspect that I found interesting about these sexual innuendo jokes. We might see them as completely harmless because they are “just jokes”, but I wonder whether the things we repeatedly joke about tell us something about what we have normalised. A lot of these jokes are also misogynistic, where women become the punchline, their bodies become something to comment on, marriage becomes a joke about sexual access and having multiple wives becomes something to laugh about. We might not take these jokes seriously, but when certain attitudes are constantly repeated and reinforced socially, they can become less shocking over time. I don't think making a sexual joke automatically leads to sexual violence, because that would be an incredibly simplistic argument, but when we talk about the rape pyramid, I do think it is worth thinking about how seemingly small attitudes can exist within a wider culture of objectification, sexual entitlement and normalisation.

And I wonder where people even got all of these ideas from in the first place. Probably BDSM porn, maybe smut books with titles like “choke me daddy”. Even writing that makes me sick, because I think what bothers me is how easily intimacy has been removed from sex. I believe sexual intercourse and intimacy are different things, and what makes me uncomfortable is how we have managed to completely eliminate intimacy from the way sex is often portrayed. Sex becomes nothing more than penetration, something mechanical, something performative, something about consuming another person's body for gratification, and I find that incredibly sad because where is the vulnerability, the tenderness, the trust (pun intended to show easy making a sex joke is) and the emotional connection that can exist between two people?

I think this is also where our lack of proper sex education becomes dangerous. As a Muslim, I don't believe the solution is to simply allow zina to happen or to tell young people that because sexual desire is natural, every expression of that desire should be acted upon. I don't believe that. But pretending that sexual desire does not exist is not going to make it disappear either. Sexual desire is a human desire, and acknowledging that it exists is not the same as encouraging someone to act upon it. We can acknowledge that young people will experience attraction, curiosity and desire, while also teaching them what to do with those feelings. How do you regulate it? How do you set boundaries? How do you understand intimacy? And within Islam, what does it actually mean to navigate all of this while having boundaries around sex before marriage? These are conversations that young people should be able to have without immediately being made to feel ashamed for asking.

And before anyone start labelling me as a "liberal", this is not a suggestion to make young people more sexually liberated, and I don't think the answer is to remove the religious boundaries around sex. I think the answer is to stop treating sex as something that can only be approached through shame or jokes. If we actually want young people to have self-control, then they need to understand what it is that they are controlling. If we want them to make responsible decisions, they need to have the language to understand their bodies, their desires, their boundaries and their relationships. 

Because young people are going to be curious anyway. I was curious at 15, and I don't think there is anything shameful about admitting that. The question is whether we are going to give them a healthy way to understand that curiosity, or whether we are going to leave it to pornography, smut novels, social media and sexual jokes to teach them what sex and intimacy are supposed to mean.

Disclaimer: While I am very open to talking about sex as a topic, this writing is not an invitation for anyone to approach me with sexual conversations, nor is it an invitation to privately message me inappropriate things. Please don't mistake my willingness to discuss the subject openly for consent to make personal or sexual comments towards/with me. Anyone who starts doing that will be blocked immediately.