I was thinking about this topic earlier in the day and wanted to write about it. On the surface, it may look as if a religious and conservative country like Malaysia doesn't have a sex culture, that's far from the truth and from what I'm going to explain below, I think that the Malaysian sex culture is going to experience a revolution in the coming decades.
I have a theory, that the more you repress the sexual desire of an individual or a society, the more curious and excited they'd become about sex. And there are tonnes of facts to support this theory. In the US for example, it was found that the Bible belt (specifically, the Southern states) consume porn at a much higher rate per capita than liberal states like California or New York. In Malaysia, it was found that the states of Kelantan and Terengganu consume a lot more porn per capita than states like Selangor or Penang.
The reason is simple. These people get constantly told either by their parents or their religious leaders that sex is wrong, porn is wrong and masturbation is wrong. It's all a sin. The problem with making something a sin is that you make it cool for youngsters to commit the sin. These young adults would still feel great sense of guilt when committing the 'sin', but the thrill and adrenaline of going against the orders of God and religion is just so pleasurable and addictive.
Such a situation can't be found in a liberal household. If the parents of a child tells them, 'I don't care about you doing all these stuff, just make sure to have some self-control. After all, we were the same when we were young', its a mood killer for the child. There's no thrill because there's no sin. "So what if I'm into sex, it doesn't make me so much different from my parents". And because of this, kids from liberal families, contrary to the popular belief, have less interest in sexual activity in general.
There's another theory, and I got this from an independent feature documentary on Youtube, called 'Four Horsemen - Feature Documentary'. They divided the lifespan of any empire in this world to 6 category, namely the age of Pioneers, Conquest, Commerce, Affluence, Intelect and Decadence. According to the authors, there are common cultural patterns that can be observed in all great empires when it comes to the Age of Decadence, and one of them is the obsession with sex. Whether or not they're right in their analysis is yet to be proven, but I find this observation to be interesting, especially on the sex part, the rest sounds like a prophecy by a doomsday theorist.
So if you put these theories together, I think you'll see a logical pattern. In the US for example, the age of sexual freedom was during the 1960s and 70s. I'm talking about the counter culture or the Hippie generation. This generation of people are noticeably rebellious and the polar opposite of their parent's generation. I wouldn't say that there was an obsession towards sex, but clearly there was an obsession towards everything that was considered wrong by the older generation and sex was one of them. As I mentioned in my theory, the more an individual is repressed of sex, the more he/she'd crave for it. I can imagine the young adults of that time from more religious parts of the country moving to San Francisco just to experience the sexual revolution.
During the 90s and 2000s, I think that sex culture reached another peak in the US, but for different reasons. Homosexuality was still by-and-large a taboo subject in most parts of America and what that did was create a culture of obsession towards same-sex interaction, particularly lesbian action. For those who grew up during these times, you'd probably know the time when Madonna kissed Britney Spears and Cristina Aguilera in an award show or Katy Perry's 'I kissed a girl' that propelled her into stardom. It's basically a culture of straight women doing lesbian stunts to gain popularity or just look cool. Today in the US, this culture has probably become passé, meaning out of fashion. I don't see young women in their teens or early 20s having interest in this.
The reason for that is probably because 1) Gay marriage becoming legal probably has something to do with it. When something is not wrong, there's no thrill in doing it, 2) They were't born in a society that banned homosexual activity, contrary to the previous generation. So the sexual desire to break the societal norms just isn't there. In conclusion, I believe that the US had two peaks when it comes to obsession with sex, one in the 60s and another in the 2000s. Right now, I think the US is experiencing a decline in interest towards sex.
Now coming back to Malaysia, we have neither of those experiences yet. Maybe the ethnic Chinese and to some extent, ethnic Indians have already experienced what Americans experienced in the 60s, but the Malays almost definitely haven't. I think the desire for sexual content and experience is a lot stronger among Malay youth compared to non-Malay and with the change in media, entertainment and internet freedom that has been taking place since May 9, which I predict will go on for years to come, I believe that the bottled desires will come out in a big way.
Like the US, I believe that we'll have two peaks; the first when recreational sex is accepted by the society and the second when same-sex union is accepted. That may be a long way to go but I'm pretty certain that the road from now is only up. Even if a new, more Islamic govt comes to power in 5 years, I don't think they'd change the course, they'd only postpone the peak of sex culture to a later date.
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