The heterosexual

hand-job business has been treated rather differently,
and one can only assume that it was seen to possess some genuine degree of
importance in the national Confucian scheme of things. Most shopping
centers currently offer at least one "health center" - establishments one
could easily take for slick mini-spas, but which in fact exist exclusively
to relieve the paying customer of nagging erections. That one of these
might be located between a Reebok outlet and a Rolex dealer continues to
strike me as evidence of some deliberate social policy, though I can't
quite imagine what it might be. But there is remarkably little, in
contemporary Singapore, that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt
carefully deliberated social policy.