Young Singaporeans look to TikTok for sex education as more challenge culture of shame

When she was 14, Shermaine Sng sat through two-hour sex education classes for the first time at her Singapore secondary school, puberty and sexually-transmitted diseases among the topics covered.

She walked away from such lessons feeling more uncomfortable than she did before about the idea of talking about sex or her body.

"The instructors left us with the message that having sex before marriage is really wrong and that if we do so, it's probably because we are immature and don't have control of our emotions or desires," she said.

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This experience later motivated Sng, now 24, to join forces with two others who want to demystify and remove the shame associated with talking about these topics, and paved the way for Hela, which educates women with bite-sized information online on sexual health and related issues.

"We realised that the fear and shame shrouding the topic of sex - sexually-transmitted infections, self-pleasure, contraception - is causing more harm," Sng said. "For example, people will not dare to get tested ... as people don't feel safe enough to talk about it."

In one year Hela has garnered almost 60,000 followers on TikTok and 3,500 on Instagram, most of them young adults in their twenties and thirties.

Similar accounts have cropped up in recent years to feed a growing desire by young Singaporeans to have open conversations about sex-related matters, traditionally considered taboo in the conservative Asian country.

While young people have become increasingly empowered to take charge of their health, participate in conversations and promote discussion in these areas, "liberation on this front is tricky" as societal values remain enmeshed with religion, said Nicole Lim, 26, the Singaporean creator of the Something Private podcast.

Most Singaporeans attend compulsory sex education classes growing up, which promotes abstinence before marriage.

According to the Ministry of Education website, the curriculum is anchored on "prevailing family values and social norms" and students are taught about "contraception, consequences of casual sex, prevention of diseases, and how to say 'no' to sexual advances".

Lawmakers have been discussing how the city state should approach sexuality and LGBTQ issues in schools and the media, following dual legislative moves last month to decriminalise gay sex and amend the constitution to maintain the status-quo definition of marriage.

The repeal of Section 377A of the penal code, which criminalises gay sex, and the introduction of an Institution of Marriage clause in Singapore's constitution will take effect after both bills receive presidential assent.

The amendment to the constitution, among other things, will protect the current definition of marriage - between a man and woman - from being legally challenged.

First announced in a key policy address in August, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong characterised the dual legislative moves as "political accommodation" that balanced different legitimate views.

During a two-day parliamentary debate last month, ministers said that most residents support repealing the colonial-era Section 377A law, but also prefer to maintain the traditional definition of marriage.

Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam, who spearheaded the months-long public outreach effort over the issue, said: "To a gay person, even if Section 377A is not enforced, it is there: memorialised in law, a sword hanging over his head, a daily reminder that every time he engages in private sexual activity behind closed doors in the sanctity of his bedroom, he is nevertheless a criminal."

In response to questions from MPs on how schools would broach sex education in schools, Minister for Social and Family Development Masagos Zulkifli stressed that the curriculum "reflects the national posture on the heterosexual family as the basic unit of society", and would remain secular and based on research and evidence.

Conversations on how sex education should be conducted are also taking place in other Asian countries including Japan and South Korea.

In the former, a petition calling for schools to adopt a comprehensive sex education, where students are taught about relationships, sexual diversity and gender equality, has garnered over 43,000 signatures.

Pilcon, the non-profit organisation pushing the petition, said the existing curriculum was no longer relevant as young people today are more exposed to sex than generations past and do engage in sexual activities.

Meanwhile, in 2019 the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child called for a revamp of South Korea's sex education curriculum, urging that information on LGBTQ issues, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy be included.

In a government-backed survey in 2019, which gathered views from 16,500 South Korean students, more than a third said they found sex education ineffective and obsolete.

However, the issue goes beyond sex education, and also lies in conservative attitudes towards sex, which are at odds with an increasingly liberal youth.

Conservative segments of Singaporean society believe the government's decision to base the sex education curriculum on family values and the heterosexual family unit is a step in the right direction.

The Catholic Family Life (CFL) charity said that amid high divorce rates and fewer people tying the knot, "the virtue of chastity, even though it is not in line with common mentality, is necessary to help marriages and family life flourish".

It said the challenges most partnerships face are "rooted in a hedonistic mentality that distorts the beauty and depth of human sexuality", adding that abstinence from sex before marriage would strengthen the bond of a couple.

Others believe, though, that such abstinence should not be seen as the only option, and that these kind of beliefs may result in unintended biases about sex.

Singapore's Sng said: "When it's assumed that sex isn't supposed to be enjoyable for women, underlying sexual health issues can sometimes be missed.

"Too many of us are subjected to judgments about our sexual history, like being too 'wild' or 'easy' and that makes it difficult to know, let alone ask for, what we really want in bed."

Echoing these sentiments, Lim said she was "socialised into thinking that sex was a shameful thing to partake in".

"The fact that we are a conservative Asian society, which led us to a more conservative approach to topics related to sex, and an abstinence-focused sex education growing up, has then led to us also being less interested in discussing such difficult conversations as adults," she said.

Experts who spoke to This Week In Asia say the challenge lies in developing a curriculum that strikes the right balance between reflecting the social values of the majority while being able to address the concerns of a more liberal youth.

Michelle Ho, an assistant professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies at the National University of Singapore, said that while the sex education curriculum remains focused on promoting abstinence before marriage, it has been updated to include issues like consent and respect, same-gender relations, and the impact of digital media on sex and sexuality.

However, there is still room for more diversity of perspective in what young people learn about sex in the classroom, she said. One way is to include more experiences of the LGBTQ community and tackle newer issues like digital forms of sexual violence.

Sociologist Tan Ern Ser, from the National University of Singapore, said sex education should not be "overly prescriptive" but instead teach students to think about their decisions around sexual matters.

Similarly, Tan Joo Hymn, a project director at the non-profit Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware), which advocates for gender equality, said the "just say no approach" promoted by the Singapore curriculum does not allow youths to grapple with grey areas.

One example of this is with pornography, where ethically-produced porn or consensual sex is not differentiated from content depicting degrading situations, she said.

"A sex-negative, abstinence-focused education in school may also ring hollow to young people bombarded by sexualised images everywhere they look, from social media to advertisements on bus stops," she added.

This bombardment may also make it hard for youths to understand the authenticity and accuracy of information, said Melisa Wong, executive director at pregnancy crisis and support centre Babes.

She added that this highlighted the need for a comprehensive and holistic sex education to start at an earlier age.

But beyond that, it is clear that many believe that overall attitudes towards sex and sexuality need to change. In July, a member of staff at a prestigious Singapore school was reprimanded for making anti-LGBTQ claims during a lecture, such as correlating paedophilia and domestic violence with homosexuality.

Tan from Aware said the incident sparked major public outrage but "similar incidents may be passing undetected".

"Schools should explicitly teach students to interrogate the discrimination that LGBTQ persons face in society, and articulate ways to counter that discrimination, for example, by debunking homophobic myths," she said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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