7 January 2004

Ban on oral sex may be lifted as nanny State goes soft on sin

Eric Ellis in Singapore

SINGAPORE'S ban on oral sex, a statute dating from the island's days as a Victorian British colony, looks set to be repealed in another apparent effort by its notoriously strict Government to shake off its nanny-State image.

Ho Peng Kee, the Deputy Home Affairs Minister, told parliament yesterday that "an option being considered is to decriminalise consensual oral sex between a male and female, so long as it is done in private and both of them are above 16 years of age".

The move follows a government propaganda campaign to soften the image of Lee Hsien Loong, the austere Deputy Prime Minister and son of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father, before he officially takes over as prime minister, perhaps as soon as this year.

It is one of a number of curious liberalisation measures announced by a government worried that foreign investors -and Singaporeans -will abandon the island. It has made chewing gum available on prescription and relaxed restrictions on bungee jumping, table dancing and the television series Sex in the City.

Those measures have been dismissed as window-dressing by many in Singapore's growing middle class, who hanker after more political pluralism and a livelier press.. They say that overbearing government stifles entrepreneurism and creative thinking, as the once-booming economy stagnates.

Singapore's law on oral sex states that "whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal" can be jailed for ten years and fined. As with homosexuality, the Government has tended with oral sex to "look the other way" and it has been several years since anyone was prosecuted for the act.

The delicate matter resurfaced last November when a policeman was jailed for two years for receiving consensual oral sex from a teenage girl.

The Singapore Government, always reluctant to liberalise lest the ruling People's Action Party's unbroken 45-year grip over the island be loosened, insisted that the errant policeman had actually been prosecuted for carnal knowledge. But letters to local papers, one of Singapore's few avenues of dissent, pilloried the Government as out of touch.

Liberalisation in Singapore has limits, however. A newscaster with Channel NewsAsia was sentenced to 16 months' jail and four strokes of the cane yesterday for molesting a 30-year-old female colleague whom he took home drunk from a party.

* In Singapore, Playboy, Penthouse and hard pornography are banned

* Freedom of speech is limited

* Gambling (apart from lotteries) is banned

* Public discussion of race or religion is taboo

* Thousands of websites are banned

* The movie Titanic was censored

* Permits are required for public gatherings of more than four people