Sex and the City-State: A Study of Sexual Discourse in Singaporean Women's Magazines

Abstract

Singapore's print media now presents frank and open discussions of sexuality, signalling what appears to be a liberating overhaul of the strict moral codes that have restricted media content for decades. The intensely competitive magazine market is leading the charge. This paper examines how magazines such as The Singapore Women's Weekly reframe discourses on sexuality to allow them to operate within Singapore's tightly controlled media system. Drawing from a Foucauldian approach to discourse and censorship, and broader themes of global capitalism and state rule, this paper contends that despite immense pressures to allow the print media and its wealth-generating advertisers a high degree of autonomy in terms of content, Singapore's sexual revolution operates within parameters set by a government keen to strike a balance between maintaining ‘traditional’ moral values and a more pragmatic approach toward sexuality centred, in part, on attempts to promote ‘civic nationalism’ and to arrest the declining birth-rate.

Keywords:

• Magazines
• Singapore
• Sexual Discourse
• Media Control
• Transnational Media

Notes

1. I use the term ‘transnational’ here to refer to those magazines that operate under syndication or licence from corporations that are increasingly part of the industrial convergence of global media markets.

2. Of course, Singapore is not alone in its perhaps overly prudish reactions to magazines such as Cosmopolitan. In its early days in the UK, Cosmo came under fire for ‘its use of the word “virgin” in an ad, and London Transport insisted that the word “frigid”, used in another ad, must be covered up with a black strip’ (Natmags, 2005).

3. This argument is certainly not new. For example, Richard Langhorne (2001) mirrors the work of globalists Appadurai and Giddens by contending that ‘[t]ransnational flows of capital, goods, services, technology and information have now acquired a speed, intensity, comprehensive and self-reinforcing relevance and fully global reach that make them qualitatively different from their precursors’ (2001, pp. 18–19). Langhorne suggests there are some grounds for anxiety on behalf of governments as technological change has ‘brought in its wake a fundamental restructuring of the global economy’ with a resultant disintegration of ‘state frontiers as far as the traffic of information, particularly technological knowledge, is concerned’ (2001, p. 37).

4. While it is argued that the opening up to outside advertising agencies was to fill a void in suitably experienced practitioners in Singapore, there is much to suggest that this dearth does not exist (see Wong, 2001, p. 45).