“Spoilt princesses”, rly?
A nation of spoilt princesses?
THE Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) seemed to suggest last Thursday (‘Singapore still far behind in true gender equality: Aware’) that women are free from blame for the declining birth rate in Singapore.
In Singapore, most parents urge their children to excel in studies and focus on their career. Few prepare their children for the rigours of parenthood.
Many households also employ maids. As a result, our boys and girls grow up lacking parenting skills and are clueless about household chores. The boys, however, have responsibilities forced upon them in the form of national service. Not so the girls. They are free to place personal ambition above all else.
Many women choose to remain single because they do not see the need or the urgency to get married. They do not need a man to provide for them and they can always depend on their girlfriends for emotional support. As for sex, few see the need to have it regularly.
Even when a woman does want to get married, her expectations get in the way. The man must be her ‘type’. He must have a great job, good income, be reasonably good-looking and he must also charm her off her feet before she will contemplate marriage.
Our society glorifies the career woman. Lifestyle and fashion magazines devote pages to tips for the career woman to get ahead. Floors in shopping malls cater exclusively to the needs of these women and credit card and insurance companies vie for their money.
As a result, women are spoilt for choice. Egged on by society, free from national service and reservist obligations and not needing a man, they are totally free to focus exclusively on their careers. Choosing to get married and have children is committing career suicide.
The conclusion is inevitable. We have raised a nation of ‘spoilt princesses’ unwilling and unable to handle the rigours of motherhood.
Sulthan Niaz, May 26 2010, ST Forum
I’m guessing Sulthan Niaz must have suffered a whole lot of painful dumping experiences because I can’t think of how else such concentrated misogyny could ever have developed. “As for sex, few see the need to have it regularly” – clearly this suggests that he isn’t getting any.
Okay, other than dissing this poor sick dude, I think that putting the blame on the ladies is going too far. Playing a blame game isn’t going to solve anything. Is anyone seriously going to advocate motherhood classes for schoolgirls to “prepare children for the rigours of parenthood” (at the very least it would be sending out terrible mixed messages – on one hand “don’t have sex”, on the other “this is how you look after kids”)? Is anyone seriously going to try to reduce the role of maids in our society (what conceivable mechanism – short of increasing the maid levy – would achieve that)? Or encourage / tell / force women to get married? Make them lower their expectations of an ideal partner? De-glorify career women? Reverse decades of social progress by reducing the choices available to the modern Singaporean woman?
Some social norms are changing, while others aren’t. For instance, it’s become far more acceptable to stay single, especially for women (think Sumiko Tan, Lee Wei Ling), yet I’m quite sure cohabitation and having children outside of marriage is still beyond the pale. Put more bluntly, it’s more acceptable for women to stay single but not for single successful career women to have kids. Obviously having a growing segment of the population on semi-enforced chastity (or at least childlessness) is bound to have an impact on the birth rate.
Clearly something has to be done about the birth rate (I agree with Mr Niaz on that point). If that entails the diminution of the role of marriage as an institution, so be it. Society has naturally evolved in response to modern career pressures; we need to keep up with the times, not turn back the clock as Mr Niaz seems to be suggesting.
Mr Niaz pins the blame squarely on the women but how about employers and broader society? We hear too often of women employees sacked or their career advancement put on hold because they choose to have kids – this reflects terribly on employers here and the kind of zero-sum relationship they have with their workers. Besides becoming more accepting and encouraging towards unconventional partnerships and living arrangements, Singapore society needs to change attitudes towards childbearing and childcare, especially amongst employers, so that having kids is no longer “committing career suicide”.
Mr Niaz ignores the broader social circumstances completely, choosing instead to paint a simplistic picture of increasingly modern, selfish women who, quite rightly, refuse to go to bed and have kids with men like him. After having cultivated well-educated, (somewhat) independent-minded women, it would be a huge mistake to pander to the kind of half-baked neanderthal drivel that Mr Niaz espouses.
