Sexual indiscretion and public life in M’sia

Here's an excerpts of the article which can be read in full HERE

Hermit Hornbill

Wednesday, 07 October 2009 12:39

COMMENT Sex is big business in our political life these days.

The big power tussles in the up-coming MCA extraordinary general meeting will be held on October 10 to decide whether their deputy president Dr Chua Soi Lek ought to be sacked or suspended from the party for four years because his sex video scandal has damaged the image of the party.

Everyday, the national Chinese newspapers and the Chinese language net news portals are filled with endless pages of blow-by-blow coverage of the plots and counter-plots between the Ong Tee Keat faction and the Chua faction. Daily, numerous face-to-face meetings are held by both sides all across Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah to win the hearts and minds of the over 2000 voting delegates.

Chua’s scandal is an interesting case for political studies. It raises this important question: how much should the private sexual behaviour of our top public office bearers impinge upon the discharge of their official duties?

They say power is the most powerful aphrodisiac. We ordinary citizens leading ordinary boring lives can only imagine how those people in very high places can be subject to all sorts of temptation of sexual favours from various quarters.

Has Chua really been exonerated?

Malaysia has a large conservative Muslim population, and in the Chinese society, the teaching of Confucius on the relationship between husband and wife as well as between man and woman sinks deep roots. Sexual hanky-panky and extra-marital affairs may be practised by many successful Chinese businessmen, but publicly such lecherous sowing of wild seeds is still very much frowned upon. Even polygamy practised by rich Chinese men in old China has all but been abandoned by Malaysian Chinese.

Chua’s supporters claim that Chua has been exonerated by those delegates who have voted him in as party deputy president in the last party poll. That may be so. The political culture in Malaysia is such that members and leaders of political parties think of their party as the entire universe, and the voters should support them no matter what.

What others think?

So what do the people outside the MCA think about Chua’s sexual misconduct?

So far, the severest criticism against Chua’s sexual indiscretion has come from the women commentators, especially those on the alternative Internet media.

That should not surprise us, because on a sensitive issue such as this, only a woman can understand a fellow woman in gender relationship. All women - married or unmarried - know how a husband’s acts of infidelity within a marriage can leave deep irreparable psychological and emotional scar on the wife. Nothing hurts a wife more than her husband’s sexual infidelity.

But the magnanimous forgiveness of Dr Chua’s wife actually accentuated the injustice of Dr Chua’s act of betrayal. It is all about trust, especially the unmitigated unconditional and total trust between a married couple that is the bedrock of any successful marriage. Chua has broken the sacred bond of that trust. He has committed the most heinous ethnical crime of betraying his wife’s trust, thus wounding her forever.

Then we must not forget that the wife is the most loyal and the most intimate constituent for Dr Chua. If he can betray her trust, whose trust would he be unable to betray.