Looking Beyond

My best girl friend Nisa said it would be nice to have one.

My ex-colleague Richard the Closeted is currently looking for one.

Stanley my sex bunny friend has had several in his lifetime, but of course doesn't mind more.

We're talking about penises.

Not just any penis, mind you, but penises that don't belong to a Singaporean.

"These days, it's not enough to spread your legs wide any more. You have to cast your net wide too," complained Stanley over a quick lunch last Wednesday.

Stanley was meeting a client near my workplace and we squeezed in some catchup time.

Our lunch place was a very tiny outfit that served Japanese food.

"This place is yummy for obvious reasons," Stanley said sitting down, eyeing a boyish Japanese salaryman who was nodding like a woodpecker at an older, fatter person.

"Can I have sashimi on him please?" Stanley licked his lips furtively at his imaginative lunch.

When our sashimi don was served, Stanley dove right into our lunch topic.

"I've been thinking," he said without really meaning anything, "that it's time for me to look for a foreign partner."

"I'm tired of having only foreign objects in my life. I want a foreign man in my life too," he said.

"What's wrong with Singapore men?" I asked.

"Please. Don't get me started," Stanley responded in faux anger, then softened his expression with genuine lust as he cast a forlorn look at the young Japanese salaryman who was still nodding like a woodpecker at the older, fatter person.

"He's so cute," Stanley said, licking his spoon with feeling.

"I'm just tired of Singaporean men who are so firm with what they want that they no longer take the time to flirt or smell the roses any more," he said later.

"All I ask for, is someone tall, dark, and handsome - and they don't even need to be the same person rolled into one," Stanley said.

Case in point.

Stanley was recently on Grindr, hoping to find someone to chat with.

That was him on one of his off days when he truly wanted to connect with people in a non-carnal sort of way.

"All I got were one-worded replies, and queries about my penis size, photo, sexual preference," he said.

"You were on Grindr right? Not Linkedin?"

"Tsk. Shuddup and listen, Adam. Point is, Singaporean men don't know how to flirt at all - if not, any more," Stanley said with a conclusive nod.

"So in the end, I gave up looking for a chat, and the guy and I hooked up and then we moved on with our respective lives."

Later that day, while at work, I thought about it over a quiet coffee break at my workplace balcony.

The lush view of the bustling city which made the Raffles crowd look like ants going about the urban nest has a very comforting feeling - the perfect setting for sorting out important reflections such as this.

It is true that Singaporean men have lost the art of flirting.

And leave it to men our generation to feel the brunt of it.

You see, we grew up witnessing the evolution of gay networking.

We were born into an era of IRC where the most common means of meeting other gay boys were online, in gay chat forums.

Sebastian Yang, an older gay friend of Stanley and I, would hiss at our convenience of IRC.

He would boast that he, in his time, had to resort to cruising or scribbling his phone number in pencil at the back of library gay literature (or sometimes, behind toilet doors).

Old mister Yang would always say we boys have it easy.

But point is, gay men of the 1979 batch were indeed lucky.

IRC was like our birth right.

IRC to the rescue, at a time when we were ripe for exploration.

And IRC to the rescue when we have healthy needs stemming from puberty.

And as we grew older, we were introduced to apps like Grindr, where sex meetups were literally at a snap of our fingers.

With photos of men on display, time is not wasted for a man in heat: He logs on, browses through the catalogue, makes his selection and uses pithy words to quickly make his point.

Every. Second. Counts.

Gone are the days when a first impression is made over a witty pickup line, or an earnest remark about someone's cute or unique IRC nick.

That would be followed by an exchange of niceities which would segue into one's hobbies, family background, favourite food and colour before sex was mentioned.

Over time, convenience of apps waters down the need to be socially apt.

For men our batch, this form of skill can still be found among some, but the art is slowly dying.

For gay boys born into the Grindr era, it's worse.

They would never go through what their predecessors had experienced just to get other men in bed with them.

I can imagine pioneers like Sebastian Yang shaking his head in disapproval at the current state of gay culture.

But there is hope still.

The only gay people these days with good online manners are not Singaporean.

Tapping on Stanley's years of rich background, I requested for some anecdotal evidence from him for this blog post.

Based on Prof Stanley's years of, well, research, his data revealed that only foreigners would bother forming actual sentences to chat on Grindr.

It could be because they're generally more polite, or they still value the art of human interaction.

I would never know.

And that's perhaps what makes them so attractive - because there's foreplay involved, if you look at it bluntly.

Richard my ex-colleague told me that he's had enough of materialistic Singaporean men, who are mostly after his money and have no appreciation of his personality at all.

Nisa my best girl friend thinks that Singaporean men have no balls (to which, Stanley responded that Nisa had no right to say that given that she and the Virgin Mary had one thing in common).

"Singaporean men are not chivalrous at all," she told me and Terry, my best friend over coffee on Thursday evening.

Nisa said she was on exchange in Paris when a drunk man barged into the house that she and her housemates were staying.

Nisa screamed at that sight and who came to her rescue but a (cute) Malaysian student who was also on exchange with her?

What made her blood boil was that there was a Singaporean man in the house - but that wimp had said that he heard all the commotion but didn't want to come out to help.

"What if I got raped?!" Nisa told me and Terry in exasperation as she recalled that horrible experience.

"What if she didn't get raped?" Stanley asked when I related this to him later. "I'd be so upset if a drunk man barged into my house, looked at me and decided that even I am not worthy of rape."

But I do see Nisa's point.

That some Singaporean men can cause your blood to boil.

But then, Terry my best friend made another good point.

Straight men also sometimes have it with Singaporean women - who are generally materialistic, demanding, highly strung, and who are all about chasing money, and the high life.

Why do you think so many Singaporean men are marrying Vietnam brides, their Filipino helpers,  China girls, or go for the simple-minded Malaysian kampong lasses?

Nisa, a true blue Singaporean woman who is still single, went pale at that thought.

But it brightened me up - because it struck me then.

When it comes to choosing a partner, Singaporean gay men are being viewed the way Singaporean women are being viewed: That they are so caught up with their materialistic need, so engrossed with paper chasing, climbing the corporate ladder, stressing over bills and their CPF, that they no longer have that sense of adventure, love, or the tendency to smile over simple joys.

At the rate we're going, do we have to really look overseas for Mr Right?

"I don't know about that," Stanley told me over whatsapp later that night.

"If I don't see Mr Right, I'll go for Mr Right Now. And I don't even have to waste energy typing an entire essay on Grindr."