A New Start

ST: Marriage Trends

The Straits Times

www.straitstimes.com

Published on Feb 26, 2012

 

When it is the wife who strays

Shifting power dynamics in marriage a factor, say experts

 

By Kezia Toh , Carolyn Khew

Cheating wives are on the rise, say divorce lawyers and marriage counsellors.

In recent years, they have handled an increasing number of adultery cases that involve unfaithful wives rather than husbands.

Ms Adriene Cheong, a partner at Harry Elias Partnership, estimated that cheating wives used to number 20 per cent of the adultery cases she handled, but the figure has since risen to 40 per cent. She has been practising family law for almost seven years.

Another family lawyer of 17 years, Mrs Aye Cheng Shone of A C Shone & Co, noted that allegations of adultery in wives have risen by 20 per cent.

In some cases, cheating wives outnumber the men.

Lawyer Gloria James of Gloria James-Civetta & Co said: 'The trend from last year is mostly women committing the adultery. For every one man, there are four women cheating.'

The four cases her firm has handled so far this year involved one cheating husband, but three cheating wives.

Promiscuity has been in the news lately. A married woman was implicated in the corruption probe that caused Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) commissioner Peter Lim Sin Pang and Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) director Ng Boon Gay to be removed from their posts.

The two senior civil servants were alleged to have had a close working relationship with the female IT executive from the private sector.

Hougang MP Yaw Shin Leong was given the boot by the Workers' Party for failing to account for his actions to the party and voters. He has remained silent over reports of extramarital affairs, purportedly with two married women.

Looking at figures of couples filing for divorce on adultery grounds alone may not even give one the full picture, lawyers say.

For example, many couples divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour, rather than adultery, even if there is cheating involved.

Family lawyer Rajan Chettiar, who runs Rajan Chettiar & Co, said: 'Many unreasonable behaviour cases are adultery cases in disguise.'

This is because filing for adultery is costly as it involves a report from a private investigator and identifying the third party to the marriage, for example.

Filing on grounds of adultery may cost $10,000 or more, but on unreasonable behaviour, it could total just about $3,500, said Mr Chettiar.

He said: 'People are really practical, and just want to get the divorce quickly and in the most effective way.'

Changing times

Shifting power dynamics where women are high earners and can pull their weight at home may be one of the factors adding to the rise of extramarital affairs.

Lawyer Kast Manickam of East Asia Law said: 'Both parties have equal earning capacity so there is no reason for the woman to be relying on her husband for finances.'

She sees an equal number of husbands and wives committing adultery.

This affluence could add to a sense of entitlement.

Marital therapist Benny Bong explained: 'Affluence doesn't come cheap, it comes at a cost. After working so hard, some people feel that they deserve to play hard.

'Some will think they are entitled to pleasures and if the other party is available, they think 'why not'?'

This could include engaging social escorts or prostitutes, either for entertainment or for business purposes.

But trouble arises when feelings of attachment develop, said Mr Bong.

Some spouses also attempt to soothe the guilt over an affair by arranging an extramarital liaison for their partner.

This happened when a cheating husband arranged for his wife to hook up with another man, said Mr Bong, who met such a couple in recent years.

The couple, who have two children, later got divorced and married their respective partners.

These tit-for-tat extramarital affairs are a sign of changing times.

Mr Bong said: 'It was a case of 'If I can do it, why can't you? Now you know how it feels'.'

Social media plays a role too. Some spouses contact former boyfriends or girlfriends to rekindle the flame.

Mr James Loh, founder of private investigations firm SG Investigators, gets about 10 such cases a year, starting from about three years ago.

Experts say that shining light on promiscuity may have also made it more accessible.

Ms Ho Shee Wai, director and psychologist at The Counselling Place, explained: 'Promiscuity is now shrouded in positive labels such as 'modern', 'free' and 'Westernised', which creates the false or otherwise acceptance and expectation that 'everyone is doing it'.'

It does not help that celebrities like Hollywood actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who claim they are in an 'open relationship', make it almost 'cool' to do it.

Such behaviour by public figures adds to changing social mores, said psychologist Daniel Koh from private practice Insights Mind Centre.

But these factors still do not make extramarital affairs acceptable in Asian society, said Ms Anita Fam, chairman of Marriage Central, an agency that helps forge stronger and healthier marriages.

'There is still shame and secrecy attached to having extramarital relationships, as can be seen from the public reaction to recent media coverage on the former chiefs of SCDF and CNB.'

Mr Bong added: 'Even among clients who have betrayed their spouses, many try to justify their actions but this very action itself shows that their behaviour is not acceptable to themselves.'

 

'PAYBACK' for hubby's inattention

 

After her miscarriage, Sarah (not her real name) expected emotional support from her husband of eight years.

When he ignored her pain, she sought comfort in the arms of another man - a client at the bank where she works. He was also married.

'I needed to talk about my feelings of losing my baby, but instead of offering support, my husband chose to bury his head in the sand,' said Sarah, 33.

Wanting to feel cherished and loved pushed her into another man's arms, she said.

The affair with the man - a businessman who is also in his 30s - lasted all of four months last year, ending in a split which she said was 'amicable'.

Besides, it was not all heart and tearful emotion. As he was her client, keeping him happy meant it helped her fulfil her sales quota of financial products for the month.

'There was a bit of gain involved, I won't deny that,' she said.

While the affair has drawn to a quiet close - her teacher husband and parents are not aware that it happened - divorce is not on the cards.

Her parents have been happily married for over 40 years, so the idea of her getting a divorce would be 'very hard for them to accept', she said.

Getting embroiled in an affair, however quickly it ended, was motivated by her husband's inattention, she said.

'In a slightly perverse way, it was a sort of 'payback' that he kept ignoring me.'

Even now, while relations between the couple are chilly, Sarah is not keen on severing her marriage.

'I find it hard to reconcile myself now to the same person I got married to, with those hopes and dreams,' she said.

'I did not think I would be the type to cheat, and fail at marriage.'

Kezia Toh

keziatoh@sph.com.sg

kcarolyn@sph.com.sg

Copyright © 2011 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

FT: Jerry Leiber

August 30, 2011 1:15 am

Lyricists’ lessons in rebelling for love

Music to elope by: a generation learnt how to say 'I love you'

From Mr Paul Frandano.

Sir, Thank you for making a point to remember the lyricist Jerry Leiber (“Yakety yak no more”, editorial and obituary, August 27). He and his partner Mike Stoller, along with Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry, and other denizens of Broadway’s fabled Brill Building, created the emotional vocabulary of my generation’s young lives, teaching us how to say “Yes”, “No”, “Why?” and “I love you” in myriad variations, all imparted through 3-inch dashboard speakers.

They taught us that to rebel for love was most correct, and my wife and I took that lesson to heart – and, I’m delighted to report, preserve it still, 43 years after she climbed out of a window to marry me.

Paul Frandano,

Reston, VA, US

August 26, 2011 10:24 pm

Yakety yak no more

One of the peculiarities of the world of pop music is that, rather unfairly, songs tend to be associated with those who perform them, rather than the composers who tore out their hair writing them.

Take “Hound Dog”, for example, one of the iconic songs of the 1950s. For most people, the song will always be associated with Elvis Presley, who seared the number into the US public’s consciousness in a blur of pelvic thrusting on the Milton Berle show in 1956, before cementing the association by giving a less provocative rendition to a remarkably patient basset hound on a different television show a couple of weeks later.

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Look beyond the dog and the gyrations, however, and the song was the work of Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, the American songwriter who died this week. From their 1950s heyday, the duo’s songs helped launch a number of stars into the musical firmament.

That performers as diverse as Presley and Edith Piaf, the Rolling Stones and Fats Domino queued up to sing Leiber and Stoller’s various works is a testament to the pair’s musical dexterity.

Their tunes and lyrics became the backing track for the changes that swept through society in the US and Europe in the 1960s. This was partly because they wrote at a time when American culture was in the ascendancy, while the postwar consumerist revolution was bringing pop music to a young generation for the first time.

In the era of gangsta rap, “Yakety Yak”, a light-hearted song about parents ticking off their children, harks back to a more innocent age. But for the postwar generation, Leiber and Stoller’s songs were among the first to speak directly to their own experiences.

While their output dried up in more recent years, performers continue to record their classics. Noel Coward once remarked on the “extraordinary” potency of what he snootily called “cheap music”. Their names may not be as well remembered as Piaf’s, but the power of their music still endures.

August 26, 2011 9:44 pm

‘Hound Dog’ writer who chronicled rebellion

By Peter Aspden

The songwriter Jerry Leiber, who died this week at the age of 78, was a leading figure of postwar popular culture. With writing partner Mike Stoller he created some of the most memorable hits of an era that saw an irreversible shift in social attitudes. With songs such as “Hound Dog”, “Jailhouse Rock”, “Yakety Yak” and “Stand By Me”, the pair chronicled the rebellious mood of 1950s America with flashes of wit, and the sharpest of ears for the black vernacular that would dominate popular music to the present day.

Such was the lyrical and musical suppleness of their songs that they were covered by a wide variety of artists: Fats Domino, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Edith Piaf. They also allied their songwriting talents with an entrepreneurial intelligence that ensured they would remain in work and in demand. Leiber and Stoller managed the rare combination of reading the music industry at least as well as the epochal social changes of postwar culture.

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The most famous of the artists who covered their work was Elvis Presley, who took their 1952 song “Hound Dog” to astronomic success four years later. The song’s evolution served as an instructive fable for its time. The teenage Leiber and Stoller wrote the song for Big Mama Thornton, “the toughest looking woman we’d ever seen”, recalled Leiber years later, but not robust enough, it seems, to make an significant impact on the charts.

But Presley performed the mischievous song, about the relationship between a woman and her gigolo, on The Milton Berle Show in 1956, where his gyrations caused headlines and outraged middle America. It was a clamorous moment. For a subsequent performance on The Steve Allen Show Presley was called to account and forced to sing the song to a basset hound wearing a top hat.

The next morning the furious singer recorded the studio version, demanding 31 takes to achieve the necessary catharsis for his wrath. The finished product, snarling with aggression, though never liked by Leiber, was a massive hit and pinned down the moment that the rock and roll attitude was born.

Jerry Leiber at the Grammy Foundation's Starry Night gala in Los Angeles, California in 2008

Leiber was born in 1933 to a middle-class Jewish family in Baltimore. His father died when he was five, and he worked for his mother’s grocery store from an early age. He always ascribed his affection for and understanding of black musical forms to those experiences: “We were the only grocery store that delivered to black people, and I was the delivery boy. We had a great relationship. It started from there.”

He met Stoller, who was born the same year, in Los Angeles in 1950 and the pair struck a musical rapport, with Leiber predominantly supplying the lyrics to Stoller’s angular melodies. The young men worked fast and fluently.

Leiber and Stoller’s early songs were characterised by a deftness of touch and gift for irony that made light of the tensions felt across the racial divide, and between the generations. In 1953 they formed Spark Records, which signed The Robins, a group that combined R&B and doo-wop to pleasing effect and who were the forerunners of The Coasters.

As the pair’s songwriting confidence grew, so did their ambitions. In 1955 they signed a deal with Atlantic Records as a songwriting and production team, and wrote some of their most notable songs. A hit for The Cheers, “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”, was covered by Piaf, translated into “L’Homme a la Moto”.

They wrote further songs for Presley, including “King Creole”, “Loving You” and “Jailhouse Rock”, although their attempts to get closer to the singer floundered when they crossed his famously protective manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who terminated their relationship with his protégé.

In 1957 they moved to New York to take their place in the Brill building, a factory for similar hit-making partnerships such as Gerry Goffin and Carole King. In the same year they co-wrote the hit “Spanish Harlem” with Phil Spector, whom they had taken under their wing to teach the deft arts of record production.

Their 1958 song for The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”, was typical of the duo’s flair for original writing. The song poked fun at racial stereotyping, and its witty internal dialogue was similarly light-hearted on the theme of teen rebellion: “Take out the papers and the trash, or you won’t get no spendin’ cash.”

Popular culture idols such as Presley and James Dean may have put more intensity into their interpretations of the generation wars, but rarely achieved the succinctness of the song’s defining couplet: “Yakety yak! (Don’t talk back).” The song, delivered at breakneck speed, made the top of the US charts.

Leiber and Stoller’s work at the beginning of the 1960s saw them at the top of their game. “Stand By Me”, co-written with Ben E. King, was a tender blues ballad.

But the new decade brought an entirely new sensibility to popular culture, as well as a change in songwriting’s business model, with the growth of singer-songwriters. The levity of Leiber and Stoller’s songs was unsuited to a more confrontational era.

There would be further highlights in their careers – they produced Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” and wrote “Pearl’s a Singer” for Elkie Brooks – but it was the rediscovery of their early work by younger generations that kept them in the public eye, especially after their 2009 autobiography.

Leiber is survived by three sons.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

ST: Oh, for the good old days of sex and passion

Think

Home > Think > Story

Jul 17, 2011

Oh, for the good old days of sex and passion

By Erica Jong

Lost piquancy

Everywhere, there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom.

Is sex less piquant when it is not forbidden? Sex itself might not be dead, but it seems sexual passion is on life support.

 

What could be more eternal than sexuality? The fog of longing, the obsession with the loved one's voice, smell, touch. Sex is discombobulating and distracting; it makes you immune to money, politics and family. And sometimes, I think the younger generation wants to give it up.

People always ask me what happened to sex since Fear Of Flying. While editing an anthology of women's sexual writing called Sugar In My Bowl last year, I was fascinated to see, among younger women, a nostalgia for 1950s-era attitudes towards sexuality. The older writers in my anthology are raunchier than the younger ones. The younger writers are obsessed with motherhood and monogamy.

It makes sense. Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called They Had Sex So I Didn't Have To. Her friend Julie Klam wrote Let's Not Talk About Sex.

Novelist Elisa Albert said: 'Sex is over-exposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.'

Meg Wolitzer, who wrote The Uncoupling, a fictional retelling of Lysistrata, described 'a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex'.

Lee Min Jin, a contributor to the anthology, suggested that 'for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective'.

Generalising about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere, there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom. Is sex less piquant when it is not forbidden? Sex itself might not be dead, but it seems sexual passion is on life support.

The Internet obliges by offering simulated sex without intimacy, without identity and without fear of infection. Risky behaviour can be devoid of risk - unless of course you use your real name and you are an elected official.

Not only did we fail to corrupt our daughters, we gave them a sterile way to have sex, electronically. Clearly, the lure of Internet sex is the lack of involvement. We want to keep the chaos of sex trapped in a device we think we can control.

Just as the watchword of my generation was freedom, that of my daughter's seems to be control. Is this just a predictable swing of the pendulum or a new passion for order in an ever more chaotic world? A little of both. We idealised open marriage; our daughters are back to idealising monogamy. We were unable to extinguish the lust for propriety.

Punishing the sexual woman is a hoary, antique meme found from Jane Eyre to The Scarlet Letter to Sex And The City, where the lustiest woman ended up with breast cancer. Sex for women is dangerous. Sex for women leads to madness in attics, cancer and death by fire. Better to soul cycle and write cookbooks. Better to give up men and sleep with one's children. Better to wear one's baby in a man-distancing sling and breast-feed at all hours so your mate knows your breasts don't belong to him.

Does this mean there are no sexual taboos left? Not really. Sex between older people is the new unmentionable - the thing that makes our kids yell out: 'Ewww - gross!' You won't find many movies or television shows about 70-year-olds falling in love, though they might be doing it in real life.

The backlash against sex has lasted longer than the sexual revolution itself. Both birth control and abortion are under attack in many states. Women's health care is considered expendable in budgetary negotiations. And the right wing only wants to champion unborn children. (Those already born are presumed able to fend for themselves.)

Lust for control fuels our current obsession with the deficit, our rejection of passion, our undoing of women's rights. How far will we go in destroying women's equality before a new generation of feminists wakes up? This time, we hope that the feminists will be of both genders and that men will understand how much equality benefits them.

Different though we are, men and women were designed to be allies, to fill out each other's limitations, to raise children together and give them different models of adulthood. We have often botched attempts to do this, but there is valour in trying to get it right, to heal the world and the rift between the sexes, to pursue the healing of home and by extension the healing of the earth.

Physical pleasure binds two people together and lets them endure the inevitable pains and losses of being human. When sex becomes boring, something deeper is usually the problem - resentment or envy or lack of honesty. So I worry about the sudden craze for Lysistrata's solution. Why reject honey for vinegar? Don't we all deserve sugar in our bowls?

New York Times

Erica Jong is the author of 22 books, including Fear Of Flying, and edited the new anthology Sugar In My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex.

ST: Plans for Singapore branch of club to go ahead

News

Home > News > Home > Story

Jun 19, 2011

special report: obedient wives' club

Plans for Singapore branch of club to go ahead

By Ng Kai Ling

'Happy Family' Club?

'Maybe we will change the name. OWC is too controversial. We can use a simpler name like 'happy family' or something.'

DR DARLAN ZAINI, a representative of the Obedient Wives' Club

 

Representatives of the controversial Obedient Wives' Club (OWC) said that they are disappointed by the statement made by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis), but will still go ahead with plans to set up a Singapore branch.

Singaporeans Darlan Zaini and Azman Ari told The Sunday Times yesterday that their intentions had been misunderstood and that their proposed club here does not focus only on sex issues but also wants to help people have harmonious families.

'I feel very disappointed. What we intend to do is totally different from what Muis is saying,' said Dr Darlan, 70.

Muis said in a statement on Friday that the club's view that a satisfactory sex life is the main solution to solving marital and social problems is myopic and goes against Islamic teachings.

It added that happiness in a marriage goes beyond receiving sexual fulfilment from one's wife.

Commenting on Muis' statement, Dr Darlan and Mr Azman - in separate interviews - said that while sex is not the main focus, it is important that the wife consents to the husband's needs.

Dr Darlan, who has a PhD in literature, said he agrees with Muis that sex between husband and wife is a form of ibadah (blessed deed in Islam). But in the same breath, he said: 'In Islam, if the husband wants sex and the wife is not in the mood, she has to give in to him. If not, the angels will curse her. This is not good for the family.'

Both men emphasised that in Islam, the husband plays the role of the leader and the wife's role is that of a follower.

But before the man can be a good husband and leader, said Mr Azman, the wife has to first be obedient.

'If the wife is obedient, then God will give blessings to the family and most likely the husband will treat her fairly.'

The 45-year-old businessman, along with his sister Hamidah and Dr Darlan, plan to register the OWC here as a society and hold forums to educate women on how to be good wives.

The club's Malaysian branch plans to give lessons to wives to teach them how to satisfy their husbands in bed, since it believes that social vices stem from unfulfilled sexual needs at home.

Its vice-president, Dr Rohaya Mohamad, has said that a good married woman should obey and serve her husband like a 'first-class prostitute' to keep him from straying.

The OWC was launched in Malaysia earlier this month by Global Ikhwan, a group that promotes polygamy. The latter is an offshoot of Muslim group Al-Arqam which was disbanded in 1994 after the Malaysian authorities said it was preaching deviationist teachings.

That year, its founder Haji Ashaari Muhammad was barred from entering Singapore. He died last year.

Asked if the OWC's Singapore representatives were linked to Al-Arqam, Mr Azman said they are Global Ikhwan members but were never Al-Arqam members.

'Some of them in Malaysia were ex-members of Al-Arqam but we are not related to Al-Arqam. I don't know their teachings.'

Mr Azman and Dr Darlan said they will still try to set up their club despite opposition from Muslim groups here.

'Maybe we will change the name. OWC is too controversial. We can use a simpler name like 'happy family' or something,' said Dr Darlan.

FT: Recovery prompts US divorce rebound

 

waiting or the stress during tough times has created fissures?

judges cannot decide if underwater homes are assets or liabilities?

people no longer argue about who keeps the house but who is stuck with it

==

Recovery prompts US divorce rebound

By Suzanne Kapner in New York

Published: April 22 2011 20:35 | Last updated: April 22 2011 20:35

In a perverse sign of the economic recovery, the US divorce rate, which dipped in the recession, has bounced back, lawyers and matrimonial experts say.

A stronger economy, lower unemployment and a housing market that – while still weak – is no longer in free fall are all contributing to a rebound in divorce filings.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

US jobless claims stick above 400,000 - Apr-21

US housing starts recover in March - Apr-19

Foreclosures weigh on US homebuilders - Apr-18

Energy and food lift US consumer prices - Apr-15

Short view: Inflation expectations - Apr-14

High petrol prices hit US retail sales - Apr-13

“There is huge pent-up demand,” said Marshal Willick, a Las Vegas matrimonial attorney, who has noted an upturn in his business.

During the recession, couples who were out of work or unable to sell their house stayed married to save money. The percentage of the population 15 years and older who counted themselves divorced dropped to 9.7 in 2009, from 9.9 three years earlier, according to the Census Bureau. More than half of the 1,600 attorneys who are members of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers reported a downturn in their business in 2009, the most recent year for which survey data are available.

Now, those same lawyers are inundated with new clients. Linda Lea Viken, the group’s president, said her practice in Rapid City, South Dakota, was 25 per cent busier this year, compared with the same period in 2009.

One client first approached her about leaving his wife in 2008, but put the divorce on hold when the local bank would not lend him the money to buy her out of their ranch. As property values in the area rebounded following a steep rise in the price of corn and wheat, the once stalled divorce is “moving full steam ahead”, Ms Viken said.

Divorce has not become any less acrimonious but the fights have changed, lawyers said.

“People no longer argue about who’s keeping the house, but about who’s stuck with it,” Mr Willick said.

So-called underwater homes, that are worth less than the balance on their mortgage, are flummoxing judges who cannot decide whether to treat them as an asset or a liability.

In one Las Vegas case, the husband wanted to sell and the wife did not. While they argued, the value of the home continued to fall, said Gary Silverman, their lawyer. The couple is still in the process of splitting.

Other divorce rituals are also going by the wayside. It was once standard practice to make copies of family photos. “But today, people don’t want to shoulder the expense,” said Madeline Marzano-Lesnevich, a New Jersey lawyer.

Even in times of economic distress, however, there is only so much misery that people can bear. One divorcing Manhattan man had planned to use the proceeds from his Bernard Madoff account to pay for a new apartment when he had left home.

The man still moved out after Mr Madoff’s investment fund was exposed as a Ponzi scheme. “But he got a much smaller apartment,” said his lawyer, Alton Abramowitz.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

ST: Mistresses in business are back

 

Sep 19, 2010

GOOD TIMES IN CHINA

Mistresses in business are back

Perks go up as sugar daddies return with recovering economy

By Grace Ng, China Correspondent

Beijing: As China's economy roars back from the global economic crisis, Chinese mistresses are back in business again.

After suffering a dry spell when sugar daddies had to cut back, mistresses like Ms M are getting their perks back.

Last year, the Shanghainese, who is in her 30s, suffered an 80 per cent cut in her pay when her 'boss' went on an austerity drive.

But now, Ms M is getting it all reinstated - first the lingerie, then the designer bags, along with her 15,000 yuan (S$3,000) monthly allowance.

'It's good times again. I think market rates could rise back to pre-crisis levels soon,' she told The Sunday Times, on condition of anonymity.

As Ms M puts it, the mistress industry has had a V-shaped recovery: 'Just got VS (Victoria's Secret), new LV (Louis Vuitton) is on the way.'

China's mistresses, who are better known as er nai, which literally means 'second breast', are not the only ones benefiting. Their comeback is also stimulating the consumption of luxury goods, as well as secondary industries that serve their special needs, from property agents and beauticians to middlemen and legal consultants who form the 'er nai economy'.

So lucrative is the er nai business that the booming demand for nubile young college students has sparked a spate of on-campus recruitment.

Posters have boasted annual starting salaries of as much as 170,000 yuan for a student from the prestigious Shanghai Theatre Academy, to just 20,000 yuan for someone from a technical college.

This is 'at least a 30 per cent jump' in salary offers from a year ago, said one so-called 'er nai middleman', who identified himself as Mr Guo in an online advertisement which gave his mobile phone number.

'Half of my clients are from other provinces,' he told The Sunday Times over the phone, but did not reveal where he was based. He then hung up, saying: 'I'm too busy to talk.'

Some procurement agents, who include fellow college students, even run 'package deals' for philandering husbands, taking in turn - as it is rumoured - commissions of up to 15 per cent of the mistresses' pay.

For this, they provide a one-stop service for sugar daddies: getting the girl, setting up the love nest and arranging for the luxury car to pick her up from school.

Last month, two universities in southern China made the headlines when they threatened to expel students caught moonlighting as mistresses.

Moral issues aside, mistresses like Ms M no doubt make a significant contribution to China's economy.

According to a 2008 estimate by Hurun magazine, which publishes the annual China Rich List, er nai account for one-third of the country's consumption of luxury products.

'Er nai are a very powerful consumer segment who contribute greatly to the local economy,' observed social affairs commentator and blogger Wang Jinghui.

Stroll through Shin Kong Mall, one of Beijing's luxury megastores said to be frequented by er nai shopping brigades, and you may come across beauties dressed to the nines, chalking up massive bills on their credit cards.

'Of course, there's no way to tell who's a rich man's daughter or his mistress,' said a cashier. 'But they are all shopaholics who love Miu Miu cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden anti-ageing creams and LV bags.'

Even the car industry benefits. Websites like chetx.com help mistresses make informed choices, recommending 'er nai-appropriate cars' like the compact Mini Cooper and the flashier BMW 3 Series.

Still, for every mistress who squanders her money on fine dining at the Ritz Carlton, there is another who sends money home to pay for her parents' tractor and her brother's schooling.

Some have also saved up to set up businesses in case they are forced into early retirement.

A Shanghai taxi driver, who gave his name only as Mr Pan, recalled how a young girl from his wife's village in Jiangsu province had stunned fellow villagers when she returned after disappearing for five years to open a mobile phone shop and a jewellery shop.

'She also built a 10-bedroom house to appease her parents for having a child without getting married,' he said.

The success of the er nai economy has also spread from first-tier cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou - long known as 'er nai heaven' for their large pools of rich officials and businessmen - to second-tier cities like Chongqing and Xiamen, where the consumption of luxury goods is gaining popularity.

Its recovery has, in turn, revived popular 'er nai villages' such as Shenzhen's Futian Shangsha neighbourhood and Dongguan's Zhangmutou zone, which are said to be frequented by businessmen from Hong Kong and Singapore.

These areas had languished in late 2008 when scores of mistresses were forced to move out, but they are filling up again, as some housing agents tailor their search to the needs of sugar daddies.

One enterprising housing agent in Beijing posted online ads for 'luxury one-bedroom er nai apartments with ceiling mirrors'.

Not surprisingly, the er nai economy is poised to grow in line with national economic targets in the coming years, said blogger Mr Wang.

'China's economy may grow at 8 per cent a year, which is the government's target,' he said. 'So probably, the er nai economy will grow faster than that.'

graceng@sph.com.sg

---

 

Rosy market

'It's good times again. I think market rates could rise back to pre-crisis levels soon.'

Ms M, a mistress living in Shanghai

 

High-spenders

'Er nai are a very powerful consumer segment who contribute greatly to the local economy.'

Social affairs commentator and blogger Wang Jinghui

Latest comments

Money is only a dirty word when moral values are low as in the case of Mainland China. You go to China and learn about its 5000 years of history and then see low down these mainland Chinese women would go to prostitute themselves. If that is the case, wouldn't lack of self-respect be part of the culture then? Posted by: yahoo747 at Sun Sep 19 14:52:25 SGT 2010 In China, wealth is everything. Poverty is a sin. Shame on these lowldown despicable PRC Chinese. Posted by: Parry_Avenue at Sun Sep 19 08:49:27 SGT 2010 Where there is money, there will be women selling themselves. Money and sex go hand in hand, Mainland Chinese are well known for prostituting anything for money. Posted by: epoxyeyes at Sun Sep 19 08:18:05 SGT 2010

FT: Lucy Kellaway on office romance

It is easy to see why offices are Petri dishes in which jargon and management fads grow but it isn’t so obvious why they are also the perfect breeding ground for sex and even for love, which thrive in this alien environment.

The office demands that one is guarded and restrained; sex is about being unguarded and unrestrained. Office life requires a suppression of emotion; sex – and love – require just the reverse. Offices demand that everyone is treated on their own merits, while sex and love demand just the opposite: a mad irrational preference for one person over every other.

Yet despite – or because of – the fact that illicit love is the last thing the office was designed for, it is now the most popular place for it in the western world.

Statistics show that variously two-thirds of workers have had sex with a workmate at some point, that one in 10 have had sex with a boss, and that one-quarter meet their future partners in the office.

These stats are, of course, more than usually dodgy. People lie about their office affairs even more than they lie about how many units of alcohol they consume.

---

And now Tom Rachman has written The Imperfectionists, a story of a group of journalists plugging away pointlessly on a doomed newspaper, ignoring the cracks in their careers because the cracks in the rest of their lives are so much bigger.

---

But as I listened I realised this was much more tragic than comic. All six affairs ended badly, some of them horribly so. One ended in divorce. One woman had to leave her job. The rest soldiered on, wounded. Not one had walked off into the sunset hand in hand.

What was compelling about the stories was the madness of it all. With one throw of the dice, these women were compromising their jobs, their home lives and their reputations. I realised that what I was dealing with, even more than tragedy, was mystery. Given how high the risks, and given that everyone agrees it’s always and inevitably a bad idea to have an affair with a colleague, why do people do it?

There seem to be five main reasons, the first of which is proximity: two people are holed up together for most of the waking hours of the day. The second is shared interest – simply by working together people have a great deal in common. Third is boredom: work can be dull and a bit of flirtation can make it considerably less so. The fourth explanation is that to have an affair at work turns out to be terribly easy, and technology makes it easier still. And then there are business trips, company away days and drunken Christmas parties.

But the fifth reason is the oddest. It is that people look at their most alluring at work. They are more capable and more in control, particularly seeming that way to anyone further down the hierarchy. For this reason people end up having office affairs with colleagues they would not otherwise look twice at had they seen them across a crowded room at a party.

But all these reasons still don’t fully explain why sensible people are willing to risk so much. The real answer is that an office affair works like a drug addiction. All but one of my six women said it was not something that they had set out to do. Indeed it was something that they would have been horrified to find that they were capable of. But they were all lulled into it, thinking it harmless and that they could handle it, only to find themselves head over heels and quite out of control.

And once in, their ability to read risk was quite distorted. They simply did not believe that they would be caught. They did not believe it would end badly and that the secret world would be prised open. Yet half of the women I talked to did get caught. And they all got caught in the same way: discovery of e-mails. That very thing that made the affairs seem so secret and so safe – the private little bubble of messages silently sent to and from – turns out to be the most dangerous of them all.

===

Lucy Kellaway on office romance

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: April 30 2010 15:21 | Last updated: April 30 2010 15:21

It was the graveyard slot just after lunch and the bankers assembled in the ballroom of a London hotel were sleepy. The middle-aged woman in the seat next to me – who was to be one of the afternoon’s speakers – was surreptitiously sending e-mails on her BlackBerry. Bored, I glanced across and saw that the messages going to and fro were composed predominantly of kisses. I positioned my head so that I could see more and was rewarded by the discovery that the other side of this conversation appeared to be in the room. The e-mail exchange was an (unflattering) running commentary on the current speaker, leavened with endearments and lascivious thoughts and a plotted assignation once her speech was over.

I turned around to see if I could spot the man equally engaged with his BlackBerry but half the audience seemed to be prodding at gadgets in their laps, their faces all blank and blameless.

The speaker was coming to a lacklustre close and my neighbour calmly got up, positioned herself at the lectern and proceeded to give a presentation on the success of diversity policies at her bank.

Mostly her colleagues looked on with the sort of torpor that comes over an audience at 3pm when listening to a talk on diversity. But I was riveted. She struck me as both perfectly ordinary and perfectly professional; nondescript in a plain trouser suit and clicking through her PowerPoint slides with total conviction.

Since then I have thought about her often. I have thought about her in meetings and in offices when everybody is doing what they are supposed to be doing. And I’ve wondered: who are they really e-mailing? What are they really thinking? What is going on beneath all that quiet, seemly behaviour?

Offices are the strangest of places. They are where the bulk of western humanity spends the bulk of its time, following rules that do not come naturally. Armies of workers turn up to work at a certain time, dressed in a uniform, and behave in a proscribed fashion. Under these conditions it is perhaps not surprising that all sorts of dysfunctional things start to happen.

In the past 15 years at the Financial Times I’ve become an expert on the weirdness of office life, writing about the lengths people go to in order to bend themselves into the right shape for office survival. For the past 10 I’ve written a fictional column about a male executive as he goes up the ladders and down the snakes of corporate life. Martin Lukes understands better than most that to do well in the office you cannot talk or think or behave in a natural way and therefore, like the real executives he is based on, he talks in out-of-the-box business jargon, 24/7.

It is easy to see why offices are Petri dishes in which jargon and management fads grow but it isn’t so obvious why they are also the perfect breeding ground for sex and even for love, which thrive in this alien environment.

The office demands that one is guarded and restrained; sex is about being unguarded and unrestrained. Office life requires a suppression of emotion; sex – and love – require just the reverse. Offices demand that everyone is treated on their own merits, while sex and love demand just the opposite: a mad irrational preference for one person over every other.

Yet despite – or because of – the fact that illicit love is the last thing the office was designed for, it is now the most popular place for it in the western world.

Statistics show that variously two-thirds of workers have had sex with a workmate at some point, that one in 10 have had sex with a boss, and that one-quarter meet their future partners in the office.

These stats are, of course, more than usually dodgy. People lie about their office affairs even more than they lie about how many units of alcohol they consume.

I met my own husband at the FT and, in the early stages of our relationship, used to lie through my teeth. I remember the surreal transition from being workmates to lovers and how I found it quite impossible to admit to colleagues that David and I were going out – if that indeed is the right term for a romance that blossomed in a windowless, dirty newsroom. Almost certainly everyone knew anyway, otherwise why was he endlessly phoning me from across a crowded room pretending to be an irate captain of industry incensed at whatever I’d written in the paper that morning? And why was he so gleeful when I started blushing and stammering?

It now seems silly to have been so coy given that we were young and equals and unmarried. By contrast, the woman at the conference was not young. And judging by her comments on multitasking, she appeared to be married with children and the man to whom she was sending e-mails was most certainly not her husband.

She, it seemed to me, was living at the extreme point where the professional and the personal collide. Everything that was demanded from her as a responsible senior banker was at odds with what was happening in her personal life. This situation, I thought as I watched her calmly give that presentation, was begging for fictional treatment.

What is so strange is that this material features so little in novels. The armies of commuters who travel to and from work on trains and Tubes may have in their hearts romantic yearnings towards a colleague but they have their noses in love stories that are more likely to be taking place in a leper colony in Greece or in the court of Henry VIII than in a modern-day office.

The reason that this richest of seams has been mined so inadequately is probably that the sort of people who write romantic novels don’t work in offices. In fairness, neither do they work with Greek lepers or 16th-century courtiers but, as the readers don’t either, the writers may feel at less of a comparative disadvantage than dicing with the contemporary workplace.

Indeed, there aren’t many literary novels set in the office either, perhaps for the same reason. By far the most famous and still the best book about the office is Something Happened (1974), Joseph Heller’s account of a miserable manager who loathes his wife – who is a drunken flirt – his retarded son and conniving daughter. He hates and is bored by his job and works in an office where everyone fears the people above them on the ladder and is feared by those below. Yet the most feared person of all is a half-mad typist who hasn’t got the hang of disguising her feelings. They dread that one day she’ll go crazy in the office, because that would be embarrassing and embarrassment can’t be tolerated.

The thread of how the office infantalises us and makes us powerless was picked up 30 years later by Joshua Ferris in Then We Came To The End (2007), a study of boredom and disaffection in an advertising agency. And now Tom Rachman has written The Imperfectionists, a story of a group of journalists plugging away pointlessly on a doomed newspaper, ignoring the cracks in their careers because the cracks in the rest of their lives are so much bigger.

In all three books, work is mostly boring and hateful and pointless but it is also a distraction from the greater pain that takes place outside work; the office, despite being mostly disagreeable, can be the best sort of refuge.

Yet I wanted to write something different: a novel in which the emotional tumult of life was going on in the same place as the work. Where the office wasn’t a place to escape to, it was the focus both of the personal anguish as well as the professional calm.

This time, I decided to tackle the subject as a woman. Not only was this the easy option, being one myself, but after having cross-dressed as Martin Lukes for a decade, I needed a break. Martin has no emotional intelligence and no self-knowledge and is so endlessly boastful, I found myself longing to reinvent myself as a pair of women, one of whom was lacking in confidence and the other with rather too much emotion for her own good.

The problem with this, I soon realised, is that being female is somehow less funny than being male. A man who doesn’t know himself is stiff with comic potential, while a woman who is well aware of the mess she is getting into might be mad or sad or wayward but she’s not particularly funny.

When I started on this project a couple of years ago I had been excited by the slapstick possibilities of office affairs. Who can ever forget the way that the then deputy governor of the Bank of England, Rupert Pennant-Rea, was exposed as having conducted an affair in Threadneedle Street? And then there are all the ludicrous trappings of an office romance: the hilarious Christmas parties, the scope for double entendres and misapprehension, with the comedy afforded by CCTV cameras and misdirected e-mails – all of which surely lead to a novel as funny as a Carry On film.

Yet the more I looked into it, the blacker the humour became. In researching the book I assembled a group of half a dozen women, each of whom had had an office affair, and who, after a bit of coaxing and reassurance that I wasn’t about to blurt out their secrets, seemed willing to spill their stories in all their gory detail. But as I listened I realised this was much more tragic than comic. All six affairs ended badly, some of them horribly so. One ended in divorce. One woman had to leave her job. The rest soldiered on, wounded. Not one had walked off into the sunset hand in hand.

What was compelling about the stories was the madness of it all. With one throw of the dice, these women were compromising their jobs, their home lives and their reputations. I realised that what I was dealing with, even more than tragedy, was mystery. Given how high the risks, and given that everyone agrees it’s always and inevitably a bad idea to have an affair with a colleague, why do people do it?

There seem to be five main reasons, the first of which is proximity: two people are holed up together for most of the waking hours of the day. The second is shared interest – simply by working together people have a great deal in common. Third is boredom: work can be dull and a bit of flirtation can make it considerably less so. The fourth explanation is that to have an affair at work turns out to be terribly easy, and technology makes it easier still. And then there are business trips, company away days and drunken Christmas parties.

But the fifth reason is the oddest. It is that people look at their most alluring at work. They are more capable and more in control, particularly seeming that way to anyone further down the hierarchy. For this reason people end up having office affairs with colleagues they would not otherwise look twice at had they seen them across a crowded room at a party.

But all these reasons still don’t fully explain why sensible people are willing to risk so much. The real answer is that an office affair works like a drug addiction. All but one of my six women said it was not something that they had set out to do. Indeed it was something that they would have been horrified to find that they were capable of. But they were all lulled into it, thinking it harmless and that they could handle it, only to find themselves head over heels and quite out of control.

And once in, their ability to read risk was quite distorted. They simply did not believe that they would be caught. They did not believe it would end badly and that the secret world would be prised open. Yet half of the women I talked to did get caught. And they all got caught in the same way: discovery of e-mails. That very thing that made the affairs seem so secret and so safe – the private little bubble of messages silently sent to and from – turns out to be the most dangerous of them all.

Lucy Kellaway is an FT columnist. Her book ‘In Office Hours’ (£12.99, Fig Tree) is published on May 6. To buy at the discounted price of £10.39 plus p&p, call the FT ordering service on 0870 429 5884 or go to www.ft.com/bookshop

FT: TV breaks out of the wardrobe department

TV breaks out of the wardrobe department

By Nicola Copping

Published: July 15 2010 23:57 | Last updated: July 15 2010 23:57

Back in style: the lauded show ‘Mad Men’ has revived a 1960s look

Betty Draper, a glacial blonde housewife, wears prim, wasp-waist dresses in lemon, peach and pistachio. Flame-haired Joan Holloway, a smouldering and voluptuous advertising agency secretary, prefers hourglass silhouettes, shift dresses in primary colours, and leopard print coats worn with killer heels. Together, they encapsulate the seductive sartorial charm of fashion’s most beloved television series, Mad Men.

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In September, the sumptuous early-1960s style worn by the show’s leading female characters will be available to all when Janie Bryant, costume designer on the show, launches Janie Bryant Mod, her own independent clothing collection, on QVC, the television shopping channel.

“Now is the time for me to come from behind the camera . . . to establish a direct rapport with the customer,” she says.

The timing could not be better. Ms Bryant’s collection will debut as the fourth season of the series airs on AMC television in the US later this month, when the characters’ costumes will veer subtly from the prim towards the progressive.

“We do get to see a different world this season,” the designer says, scanning through Betty Draper’s pastel-hued wardrobe in video footage released by the network to showcase the new look. “Characters are not so done up, there is a more mod lifestyle, a youth culture.”

At the same time that Ms Bryant appears on QVC to promote her collection, fashion boutiques will be filled with Mad Men-inspired clothing. Two of the most influential luxury brands, Louis Vuitton and Prada, have produced autumn collections replete with Mad Men leitmotifs: bosom-enhancing, waist-nipping, calf-skimming dresses at the former; full camel skirts, pointy-bra shapes and restrained Betty Draper classicism at the latter.

Ms Bryant, however, is not the first costume designer to break out from the confines of the television wardrobe department. The way was paved by one of the most influential costume designers of all time, Patricia Field of television series Sex and the City. When Ms Field collaborated with Marks and Spencer on a one-off, 35-piece collection in October 2008, the range made £1m in the first five days of trading.

Eyeing Ms Bryant’s merchandising potential, Matchbook Company, a US licensing agency, was appointed to develop and implement a licensing programme for the costume designer last October, two years after Mad Men debuted. The partnership found immediate success: Ms Bryant designed a suit in the style worn by Don Draper, the series’ swarthy male lead, for US men’s wear retailer Brooks Brothers – it sold out within two weeks.

As Linda Kearns, Matchbook’s marketing director, says: “Janie makes people look good for a living. Now she is able to go beyond actors and actresses and reach the masses.”

After the launch of Mod, Ms Bryant and Matchbook plan to develop a men’s wear collection and a women’s wear line for 2011 and 2012, while evening wear and home design will also be explored.

The two designers will not be the last examples of a television-to-fashion-trade trend. Although he is yet to launch a collection, Randall Christensen, costume designer of Dancing with the Stars, the US version of the British television show Strictly Come Dancing, is also signed up to Matchbook. “What we liked about him is he designs for all shapes and sizes, from size zero to size 18,” says Kristi McCormick, Matchbook’s founder.

The democratisation of luxury will also be instrumental to Ms Bryant’s success. The Mad Men aesthetic has plucked at the heart strings of women who yearn for clothes that suit curves.

As Hugh Devlin, a lawyer and brand consultant at Withers, the law firm, in London, says: “Mad Men is set towards the end of the golden age of haute couture, when women really looked fantastic and groomed. What the series has done is give real women a bit of fantasy.”

Now that fantasy can become reality.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

ST: A Love Story

 

Jun 20, 2010

A love story

Love at first sight is romantic but may not hold a candle to love that lasts a lifetime & is for better or for worse

By Lee Wei Ling

 

 
 

-- PHOTO COURTESY OF KWA KIM LI

An advertisement for the 'Sassy Miss 2010 Workshop Series' in The Straits Times caught my eye recently. The headline was: 'The Power of First Impressions.'

The text claimed: 'It takes just 30 seconds for your first date or prospective employer to form an everlasting impression of you. So flash your X-factor, from the way you look to the style in which you carry yourself. Come uncover all the trade secrets of image-making at this power workshop!'

I was amused. If I want to make an impression, it would be to show my competence, sincerity, pragmatism and willingness to fight for what is right. My appearance and how I carry myself are highly unlikely to make an impression in a 30-minute encounter, let alone a 30-second 'flash'.

As for assessing someone on the first encounter, it would take me at least five to 10 minutes to appraise a person. I do not base my judgment on whether the person is good-looking or how he carries himself. Instead I would focus on his facial expression and body language.

If these contradict what he says, I would be wary of him. Body language and facial expressions are rarely under voluntary control and hence are better indicators of the true intent of a person than speech.

I am fairly good at sizing up people. There have been quite a few instances when I have accurately assessed someone at the first brief encounter. But even then, I seldom depend solely on first impressions. I will reassess the person on subsequent occasions. Only if I observe certain traits repeatedly would I be confident in my assessment.

Some people do indeed judge others on the basis of first impressions. Their judgment may well be strongly influenced by the person's appearance, how well he carries himself and how eloquently he speaks. I think such people are shallow. In life, we have to interact with people; and the more accurately we judge people, the fewer mistakes we are likely to make about them.

Research on interpersonal relationships between strangers shows that physical appearance does influence first impressions. But this does not explain why people stick together in long-term relationships. Commitment is a key variable in sustaining such relationships.

The one remarkable relationship I have personally observed is the one between my father and mother. Theirs was certainly not love at first sight. Nor were looks the main factor in their mutual attraction. Rather, it was personality and intellectual compatibility.

They are not only lovers, they are also best friends. There has never been any calculation about how much each had invested in the relationship. Theirs is an unconditional love.

Before my mother suffered her first stroke in 2003, she lived her life around my father, taking care of his every need. The stroke and the resultant disability made my mother quite frail.

From that point on, my father lived his life around her. He was still in the Cabinet, first as Senior Minister and then as Minister Mentor, but he tried his best to arrange his working schedule around my mother's needs.

He also took care of her health, strongly urging her to swim daily for exercise, and supervised her complicated regime of medication. He would also measure her blood pressure several times a day, till I got in touch with Dr Ting Choon Ming who had invented a blood pressure measuring equipment that is worn like a watch. Next day, when Dr Ting came to take the watch back to analyse the recorded blood pressure, my mother said to him: 'I prefer to have my husband measure my blood pressure.'

After my mother's second stroke in 2008, she became bed-bound and could no longer accompany my father on his travels overseas or to social functions here. Every night after returning home from work, my father now spends about two hours telling my mother about his day and reading aloud her favourite poems to her.

The poetry books are rather thick and heavy, so he uses a heavy-duty music stand to place the books. One night, he was so sleepy, he fell asleep while reading to my mother, slumped forward and hit his face against the music stand. Since the music stand was made of metal, he suffered abrasions on his face. He cursed himself for his carelessness but still carries on reading aloud to my mother every night.

I have always known my father was fearless, willing to fight to the bitter end for Singapore. When Vietnam fell in 1975, it looked for a while as though the domino hypothesis - which held that other South-east Asian states would also fall to the communists like dominoes - might turn out to be true. My father knew how ruthless the communists were, but he was determined to stay on in Singapore, and my mother was just as determined to stay on by his side.

I began this article because I was reading an article in a psychological journal on 'love at first sight versus love for a lifetime, for better or for worse'.

Love at first sight is rare and often does not endure. The affection my parents have for each other is also rare. They are each other's soul mates; their happy marriage has lasted beyond their diamond anniversary.

But they have never made a show of being a loving couple in public. Even in private, they have rarely demonstrated their love for each other with hugs or kisses. It was only after my mother's second stroke that I saw my father kiss my mother on her forehead to comfort her. They don't seem to feel the need for a dramatic physical show of love.

I have great admiration for what my father has done for Singapore - and at age 87, he is still promoting Singapore's interests. But he being the first-born son in a Peranakan family, I would not have suspected him to have been capable of such devotion as he has shown for my mother, taking care of her so painstakingly. My admiration for him has increased manifold because I have watched him look after my mother so devotedly over the last two painful years.

The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute. Send your comments to suntimes@sph.com.sg

lee kuan yew

ST; Angry Spouses

Looks like our spoof headline “How I caught him the Act” isn’t so far fetched after all

 

===

 

May 29, 2010

China's unexpected graft busters Angry spouses

Estranged wives and husbands increasingly ready to blow whistle

By The Straits Times China Bureau

BEIJING: The Chinese Communist Party may have found an unlikely ally in its 'life and death' battle with corruption. As a spate of recent cases demonstrates, the angry, estranged spouses of corrupt officials are emerging as a new breed of accidental graft busters - more than willing to expose the dirty deeds of their once beloved as soon as the relationship turns sour. The strained married lives of corrupt officials - 95 per cent of whom keep mistresses, according to a 2005 study by a government think-tank - are well-documented. But scholars say their wives, who have chosen in the past to suffer in silence because of how hard it is to convince anti-corruption agencies to act, are now discovering the Internet as a new and effective avenue for whistle-blowing. Not surprisingly, it is the philandering male official who is most likely to be stabbed in the back by an aggrieved wife, sometimes even with the help of their children. A dramatic case in February in Anhui's Dangshan county saw the arrest of local land bureau official Liu Jianghui after his ex-wife and their 17-year-old son called on anti-corruption officials to investigate him for graft. But corrupt male officials are not the only vulnerable ones. In March, a Beijing-based official with the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Ms Li Li, faced allegations of insider trading after she was exposed by her husband. In turning informant, indignant spouses join a long list of close associates, including drivers, maids and mistresses, who have been known to spill the beans on corrupt officials. But some observers say spouses may be the weakest link yet, for two reasons. First, while the other 'traitors' are often motivated by concern for their personal safety, and usually start talking only under the intense pressure of police interrogations, spouses are motivated by spite - their public, out-of-the-blue allegations often forcing the authorities to initiate investigations. Furthermore, spouses usually have access to more private and incriminating evidence. They have produced photos and even tape recordings of damning conversations to back their allegations. Analysts add that this latest trend stems from the fact that sex has become such a common feature in China's graft cases. In what local scholars call quan se jiao yi, or exchanging power for sexual favours, those looking to butter officials up often try to seduce them with women. In theory, whistle-blowing by spouses bodes well for China's war on corruption, a problem estimated to cause economic losses of up to 17 per cent of its GDP every year. It means potential access to an army of millions of ad hoc graft busters, sleeping right next to corrupt officials. It brings to mind a similar phenomenon during the Cultural Revolution, when ordinary people were rewarded for accusing their loved ones of 'thought crimes'. However, the authorities remain suspicious. Quite often they try, in private, to discourage the whistle-blowing spouses from coming forward, as Professor Wang Yukai of the Chinese Academy of Governance points out. Mindful of the far-reaching implications a case involving, say, a high-ranking official may have on its legitimacy, the ruling party is wary of this spontaneous new form of corruption fighting that it has little control over. But determined wives can still prevail by turning to the Internet. Last year, a district party chief in Jiangsu's Xuzhou city, Dong Feng, was sentenced to 13 years in jail after his wife snitched on him. She revealed in media interviews later that after her earlier letters to the local anti-corruption office evoked no response, she posted the allegations on the Internet. This forced the hand of the authorities, which suspended Dong from his duties three days after the online posting and arrested him a week later. Said Professor Wang: 'This is a very good example of how people are holding government officials to account through the Internet.' Dirty secrets exposed by family Dangshan county land bureau official Liu Jianghui ·  His former wife and their 17-year-old son spent eight days holed up in his office after he left them for a mistress in February. ·  Refusing to leave, they physically tied themselves to the safe-deposit box there, claiming it contained graft proceeds and insisting that anti-corruption officials open the box in their presence. ·  Liu has since been arrested on charges of accepting bribes. China Securities Regulatory Commission official Li Li ·  In March, she faced allegations of insider trading after her husband revealed, online and to the media, that she leaked to her mother the annual results of a listed company one day before their official announcement. ·  The two were in the middle of divorce proceedings at the time. District party chief in Jiangsu's Xuzhou city, Dong Feng Last year, his wife posted allegations of his corruption on the Internet after letters to the local anti-corruption office evoked no response. The authorities arrested Dong a week later. He was later sentenced to 13 years in jail. THE STRAITS TIMES CHINA BUREAU BEIJING: The Chinese Communist Party may have found an unlikely ally in its 'life and death' battle with corruption. As a spate of recent cases demonstrates, the angry, estranged spouses of corrupt officials are emerging as a new breed of accidental graft busters - more than willing to expose the dirty deeds of their once beloved as soon as the relationship turns sour. The strained married lives of corrupt officials - 95 per cent of whom keep mistresses, according to a 2005 study by a government think-tank - are well-documented. But scholars say their wives, who have chosen in the past to suffer in silence because of how hard it is to convince anti-corruption agencies to act, are now discovering the Internet as a new and effective avenue for whistle-blowing. Not surprisingly, it is the philandering male official who is most likely to be stabbed in the back by an aggrieved wife, sometimes even with the help of their children. A dramatic case in February in Anhui's Dangshan county saw the arrest of local land bureau official Liu Jianghui after his ex-wife and their 17-year-old son called on anti-corruption officials to investigate him for graft. But corrupt male officials are not the only vulnerable ones. In March, a Beijing-based official with the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Ms Li Li, faced allegations of insider trading after she was exposed by her husband. In turning informant, indignant spouses join a long list of close associates, including drivers, maids and mistresses, who have been known to spill the beans on corrupt officials. But some observers say spouses may be the weakest link yet, for two reasons. First, while the other 'traitors' are often motivated by concern for their personal safety, and usually start talking only under the intense pressure of police interrogations, spouses are motivated by spite - their public, out-of-the-blue allegations often forcing the authorities to initiate investigations. Furthermore, spouses usually have access to more private and incriminating evidence. They have produced photos and even tape recordings of damning conversations to back their allegations. Analysts add that this latest trend stems from the fact that sex has become such a common feature in China's graft cases. In what local scholars call quan se jiao yi, or exchanging power for sexual favours, those looking to butter officials up often try to seduce them with women. In theory, whistle-blowing by spouses bodes well for China's war on corruption, a problem estimated to cause economic losses of up to 17 per cent of its GDP every year. It means potential access to an army of millions of ad hoc graft busters, sleeping right next to corrupt officials. It brings to mind a similar phenomenon during the Cultural Revolution, when ordinary people were rewarded for accusing their loved ones of 'thought crimes'. However, the authorities remain suspicious. Quite often they try, in private, to discourage the whistle-blowing spouses from coming forward, as Professor Wang Yukai of the Chinese Academy of Governance points out. Mindful of the far-reaching implications a case involving, say, a high-ranking official may have on its legitimacy, the ruling party is wary of this spontaneous new form of corruption fighting that it has little control over. But determined wives can still prevail by turning to the Internet. Last year, a district party chief in Jiangsu's Xuzhou city, Dong Feng, was sentenced to 13 years in jail after his wife snitched on him. She revealed in media interviews later that after her earlier letters to the local anti-corruption office evoked no response, she posted the allegations on the Internet. This forced the hand of the authorities, which suspended Dong from his duties three days after the online posting and arrested him a week later. Said Professor Wang: 'This is a very good example of how people are holding government officials to account through the Internet.' stbeijing@gmail.com Dirty secrets exposed by family Dangshan county land bureau official Liu Jianghui ·  His former wife and their 17-year-old son spent eight days holed up in his office after he left them for a mistress in February. ·  Refusing to leave, they physically tied themselves to the safe-deposit box there, claiming it contained graft proceeds and insisting that anti-corruption officials open the box in their presence. ·  Liu has since been arrested on charges of accepting bribes. China Securities Regulatory Commission official Li Li ·  In March, she faced allegations of insider trading after her husband revealed, online and to the media, that she leaked to her mother the annual results of a listed company one day before their official announcement. ·  The two were in the middle of divorce proceedings at the time. District party chief in Jiangsu's Xuzhou city, Dong Feng Last year, his wife posted allegations of his corruption on the Internet after letters to the local anti-corruption office evoked no response. The authorities arrested Dong a week later. He was later sentenced to 13 years in jail. THE STRAITS TIMES CHINA BUREAU stbeijing@gmail.com