Singapore, meanwhile, has dealt with its own sex industry in two ways: by
turning its traditional red-light district into a themed attraction in its
own right, and by moving its massage parlors into the Beverly Centers.
Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of
place where one could have imagined meeting Noel Coward, ripped on opium,
cocaine, and the local tailoring, just off in his rickshaw for a night of
high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station
dropped on top of it. "Don't worry," the government said, "we'll put it
all back, just the way it was, as soon as we have the subway in." Needless
to say, the restored Bugis Street has all the sexual potential of
"Frontierland," and the transvestites are represented primarily by a
number of murals.

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.

Take dating. Concerned that a series of earlier campaigns to reduce the
national birth rate had proven entirely too successful, Singapore has
instituted a system of "mandatory mixers." I didn't find this particularly
disturbing, under the circumstances, though I disliked the idea that
refusal to participate is said to result in a "call" to one's employer.
But there did seem to be a certain eugenic angle in effect, as mandatory
dating for fast-track yuppies seemed to be handled by one government
agency, while another dealt with the less educated. Though perhaps I
misunderstood this, as Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to
discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign
visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who
sweated slowly but continuously, like an aged cheese.