- Joined
- Jul 24, 2008
- Messages
- 33,627
- Points
- 0
<TABLE id=msgUN border=0 cellSpacing=3 cellPadding=0 width="100%"><TBODY><TR><TD id=msgUNsubj vAlign=top>
Coffeeshop Chit Chat - Seksun Boss: Ok to fark around...</TD><TD id=msgunetc noWrap align=right>
Subscribe </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><TABLE class=msgtable cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="96%"><TBODY><TR><TD class=msg vAlign=top><TABLE border=0 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%"><TBODY><TR class=msghead><TD class=msgbfr1 width="1%"> </TD><TD><TABLE border=0 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0><TBODY><TR class=msghead vAlign=top><TD class=msgF width="1%" noWrap align=right>From: </TD><TD class=msgFname width="68%" noWrap>kojakbt_89 <NOBR></NOBR> </TD><TD class=msgDate width="30%" noWrap align=right>5:47 am </TD></TR><TR class=msghead><TD class=msgT height=20 width="1%" noWrap align=right>To: </TD><TD class=msgTname width="68%" noWrap>ALL <NOBR></NOBR></TD><TD class=msgNum noWrap align=right> (1 of 1) </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR><TD class=msgleft rowSpan=4 width="1%"> </TD><TD class=wintiny noWrap align=right>30014.1 </TD></TR><TR><TD height=8></TD></TR><TR><TD class=msgtxt>Mar 12, 2010
All right to fool around?
Some men say that philandering is okay but what if your own daughters turn out to be the victims in the future?
<!-- by line -->By john lui, viewpoint
Adulterer Jack Neo's air of wounded male pride at yesterday's press conference reminded me of a lesson in morality I received last year.
I had visited the home of millionaire Felix Ong to interview him about his self-produced calendars. They feature his sayings and one of them goes: 'Good men: Acting cool is not a crime. Having physical desires is not a sin. Just remember that at the end of the day, home is where you belong.'
We ended up talking about fidelity, of course.
What he said floored me. Not because it was new or particularly deviant, but because he was the first man I had ever known to put on record what many of us know.
Among Chinese men in Singapore, there is an honour code that applies to sex outside marriage which can be summed up as: Do what you like outside, just do not bring it home.
As long as this code is adhered to, the extramarital exploits of married men, no matter how repulsive one may find them, are still within tolerable limits.
The ex-Rediffusion Hokkien-language presenter, singer, emcee, playwright and part-time actor knew enough to say that he was not encouraging cheating.
Mr Ong, 62, who made his millions after he sold his precision metal parts firm Seksun Corporation, liked to think of himself as an amateur social scientist and occasional marriage counsellor and he was simply describing a basic male impulse. Smart wives should just ignore it, he says.
'Do not expect every man to be loyal. Maybe one out of 1,000 will be. You cannot stop a man from doing what he wants when he travels out of Singapore. Put a box of condoms in his suitcase. Be safe. You cannot beat it, so follow it. If you keep on being jealous, you will spoil the relationship.'
In many ways, what he was saying varied only slightly from the values of the Sicilian-American mobsters from one of my favourite TV shows, the HBO drama series The Sopranos.
The gangsters fiercely believed in family values and were wiling to kill and die over family honour, yet all of them had mistresses, and wives who tolerated them.
The lengths the men would go to keep the boundaries between family and mistress intact provided the show with much of its humour.
The code, that even went into detail about what 'clean' and 'dirty' acts were between a mistress and her keeper, was deadly serious to the men. But to an observer like me, they are seen for what they are: Comical rationalisations for self-indulgence.
It really is no different from other self-serving rationalisations I have heard, such as the old one that goes 'I know someone who has smoked for 40 years and is still perfectly healthy'.
I have men friends who are married and go to hostess lounges and see no shame in it. Shame is not being able to provide for the family.
Men kill themselves because they fail to put food on the family table, but not when they have broken the vow of monogamy.
There is another Chinese saying that backs up what Mr Ong says.
The phrase in Mandarin 'nan ren bu huai, nu ren bu ai' translates as 'good guys do not get the girls', which is almost like saying that cheaters stand a better chance of getting married.
Case in point: Tiger Woods, the golfer who was caught in the same situation as Jack Neo. The watchmaker Tag Heuer, along with several other companies, stopped sponsoring him. But Tag Heuer chief exeucutive Jean-Christophe Babin says the brand kept using his image in China.
'In China, conversely, you have Tag Heuer with Tiger Woods everywhere because with the Chinese, it rather increases their esteem. In China, by tradition, your success is measured by your number of mistresses,' he says.
There is one big difference between Tiger Woods and Jack Neo's philandering. Woods had sex with adult women while Neo seemed to have hit on very young women who were looking to break into showbusiness.
None of the women that Neo is linked with could be called mistresses in the strict sense of the word, but he did become intimate with one of them and there have been several forum posters who have given him pats on the back for trying so hard to increase his 'score'.
These macho men and virile stallions who prefer to live in a world where their impulses are not only tolerated, but justified by an unwritten 'brotherhood code' should remember that this is the world they leave behind to their daughters.
As Neo's own comedies like to emphasise, when karma bites, the laughter stops.
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
All right to fool around?
Some men say that philandering is okay but what if your own daughters turn out to be the victims in the future?
<!-- by line -->By john lui, viewpoint
Adulterer Jack Neo's air of wounded male pride at yesterday's press conference reminded me of a lesson in morality I received last year.
I had visited the home of millionaire Felix Ong to interview him about his self-produced calendars. They feature his sayings and one of them goes: 'Good men: Acting cool is not a crime. Having physical desires is not a sin. Just remember that at the end of the day, home is where you belong.'
We ended up talking about fidelity, of course.
What he said floored me. Not because it was new or particularly deviant, but because he was the first man I had ever known to put on record what many of us know.
Among Chinese men in Singapore, there is an honour code that applies to sex outside marriage which can be summed up as: Do what you like outside, just do not bring it home.
As long as this code is adhered to, the extramarital exploits of married men, no matter how repulsive one may find them, are still within tolerable limits.
The ex-Rediffusion Hokkien-language presenter, singer, emcee, playwright and part-time actor knew enough to say that he was not encouraging cheating.
Mr Ong, 62, who made his millions after he sold his precision metal parts firm Seksun Corporation, liked to think of himself as an amateur social scientist and occasional marriage counsellor and he was simply describing a basic male impulse. Smart wives should just ignore it, he says.
'Do not expect every man to be loyal. Maybe one out of 1,000 will be. You cannot stop a man from doing what he wants when he travels out of Singapore. Put a box of condoms in his suitcase. Be safe. You cannot beat it, so follow it. If you keep on being jealous, you will spoil the relationship.'
In many ways, what he was saying varied only slightly from the values of the Sicilian-American mobsters from one of my favourite TV shows, the HBO drama series The Sopranos.
The gangsters fiercely believed in family values and were wiling to kill and die over family honour, yet all of them had mistresses, and wives who tolerated them.
The lengths the men would go to keep the boundaries between family and mistress intact provided the show with much of its humour.
The code, that even went into detail about what 'clean' and 'dirty' acts were between a mistress and her keeper, was deadly serious to the men. But to an observer like me, they are seen for what they are: Comical rationalisations for self-indulgence.
It really is no different from other self-serving rationalisations I have heard, such as the old one that goes 'I know someone who has smoked for 40 years and is still perfectly healthy'.
I have men friends who are married and go to hostess lounges and see no shame in it. Shame is not being able to provide for the family.
Men kill themselves because they fail to put food on the family table, but not when they have broken the vow of monogamy.
There is another Chinese saying that backs up what Mr Ong says.
The phrase in Mandarin 'nan ren bu huai, nu ren bu ai' translates as 'good guys do not get the girls', which is almost like saying that cheaters stand a better chance of getting married.
Case in point: Tiger Woods, the golfer who was caught in the same situation as Jack Neo. The watchmaker Tag Heuer, along with several other companies, stopped sponsoring him. But Tag Heuer chief exeucutive Jean-Christophe Babin says the brand kept using his image in China.
'In China, conversely, you have Tag Heuer with Tiger Woods everywhere because with the Chinese, it rather increases their esteem. In China, by tradition, your success is measured by your number of mistresses,' he says.
There is one big difference between Tiger Woods and Jack Neo's philandering. Woods had sex with adult women while Neo seemed to have hit on very young women who were looking to break into showbusiness.
None of the women that Neo is linked with could be called mistresses in the strict sense of the word, but he did become intimate with one of them and there have been several forum posters who have given him pats on the back for trying so hard to increase his 'score'.
These macho men and virile stallions who prefer to live in a world where their impulses are not only tolerated, but justified by an unwritten 'brotherhood code' should remember that this is the world they leave behind to their daughters.
As Neo's own comedies like to emphasise, when karma bites, the laughter stops.
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
