There exists a peculiar moral arithmetic which has haunted many Asian daughters since the beginning of their days. Sex with a man will ruin you, failure to eventually have sex with a man will also ruin you. The traditional axiom rules that in any encounter with a man, women must be rendered the suffering party; they risk jeopardising reputation, safety, future marriage prospects, even spiritual cleanliness (whatever that entails)—or some vague, irreplaceable essence of the self. Men on the other hand, shall lose nothing but a few calories. Before the age of twenty-five, sex is deemed a catastrophe; somewhere after twenty-five, it somehow becomes an imperative duty. What changes then, one might wonder—upon the threshold of a ‘respectable’ age—that causes the narrative to pirouette?
How the script gets written: Patriarchy and ‘sex as harm’
At a structural level, patriarchy often establishes itself by organising social life around male dominance, while persuading women to participate in their own subordination. In many Asian contexts, the family does not operate as an ‘affectionate community’ so much more than an economic and reputational infrastructure. A daughter’s body can serve as a profitable resource within that very infrastructure; her ‘modesty’ and eventual fertility are to be assets for preservation, followed by transaction—in exchange for familial status and financial stability (through dowry, ‘bride price’, or family alliances). Control over women’s sexuality, naturally, functions as an effective mechanism for patriarchy. Virginity norms and restrictions on dating are convenient ways of keeping daughters compliant and marriageable.
Slut-shaming, ‘predatory men’, and racialised scripts
‘Slut-shaming’ culture in particular contributes to the system. The same sexual act that would credential a man continuously diminishes, exhausts and downgrades a woman’s reputation. Metaphors weaponised against experienced Asian women are impressively uncreative— ‘second-handed’, ‘deflowered’, the ‘glass that’s already been drunk from’. These dehumanising descriptions share a premise that unlike men, a woman’s value is framed as unitary, fragile, and permanently consumable through sexual contact. Tragically, certain radicalised sexual stereotypes of Asian women are also intrinsically bound to this misconception. Not only are they hyper-sexualised and fetishised in wider society (linked with ‘submissive’ and ‘innocent’ images), they are simultaneously being punished or silenced at home for any sexual self-expression. This creates a painful predicament where a woman may feel like a sexual object in public discourse but a perpetual child/virgin in familial dialogue.
The situation seems to only get gradually worse; if we account the disturbing concept of ‘men as predators and ultimate benefiter’ in all sexual relations. Patriarchal cultures aim to keep the gender order intact; not abolish heterosexuality entirely. So they need a story where the average man is dangerous and uncontrollable in general (so women must guard their purity), but particular men—husbands, insiders, ‘our’ men—are constructed as acceptable recipients of women’s bodies. One might struggle to find this narrative anything but contradictory; men are relentlessly being promoted as dangerous, yet the solution offered is neither female autonomy nor sexual ethics—it is to ‘attach yourself to a man in the right way so his predation is socially sanctioned’.
The Double-Bind: ‘sex ruins you’ vs ‘marry and have sex’
The patriarchal ideology thus proves a contradiction that it much prefers to blur. If sex is inherently ruinous for women, why is it also advertised as her ultimate destiny? Why would a parent who insists sex will ‘destroy’ a girl then anxiously push her toward marriage, where she is expected to have sex, bear children, and attend cheerfully to a husband’s needs? By taking their rhetoric at face value, one would have to reach the conclusion that perhaps they secretly despise their daughters.
The answer actually reveals a far more pathological reasoning in South and East Asian contexts. Sex is not all ‘horrible’ in this worldview per se; only unsanctioned sex is. Sex outside the right institutional containers—marriage, family approval, often religious norms—threatens the transfer of the daughter as a proper asset. It risks illegitimate pregnancy, scandal, and any deviation from the carefully choreographed exchange of women between families. Sex inside those containers, however, is rehabilitated as duty, proof of respectability, and a tool of familial continuity regardless of whether the woman experiences desire or safety. The variable lies not in the nature of the act itself, but the stamp of institutional approval—the ring, the registry, the collective sigh of relief that the woman’s body has been successfully transferred from one patriarchal guardian to another.
The imposed concept of ‘always being the exploited party’ functions precisely to normalise a woman’s suffering in both scenarios. If she accepts from childhood that she is the inevitable ‘loser’ in any sexual relation with a man, exploitation becomes background noise rather than an alarming injustice. Her task has never been about avoiding exploitation; it is about being exploited properly, in a way that benefits the ‘higher good’ that is the patriarchal system.
Internalised Patriarchy: Becoming the Enforcer
Internalised patriarchy produces a generational vicious cycle from within. Women who were once terrified into chastity often become, in time, its most eloquent of evangelists. Early feminist theorists noted that women tend to internalise their own inferiority and proceed to police other women’s behaviour; whether out of jealousy, existential threat or protectiveness. A mother who ‘slut-shames’ her daughter for example, may not act from a place of abstract cruelty but a certain grim, pragmatic pedagogy; she believes the world will punish her daughter more ruthlessly than she ever could. She may have grown up understanding her own purity as the only thin protection against abandonment, poverty, or violence. Faced with a daughter who seeks otherwise—pleasure, experimentation, or simply a less terror-filled relationship to her own body—she fails to see liberation; her ideology compels her to see instead a young woman cheerfully sauntering into a minefield without armour. Their projection can be understood as merely attempting to manage structural violence by overcontrolling the potential victim rather than rebelling against the system.
While this does not absolve the harm, it clarifies the propelling pattern. Many women enforce the very norms that damaged them because the social order has offered them no credible alternative path to security or respectability. When the only apparent options remaining are limited to ‘desirable women who survive via obedience’ or ‘ruined women who deserve whatever dismal future that awaits them’, it is hardly surprising that even victims of the system cling to the former category and defend its boundaries.
Towards a different frame: Erotic Agency
What is conspicuously absent from this entire architecture is the notion of women as erotic subjects. From a feminist and queer-theoretical angle, the essential move is to reject both sides of the patriarchal script: the idea that sex is inherently degrading for women, and, the idea that heterosexuality must mean women’s structural disadvantage. It is also vital to emphasise on sexual agency; on a woman’s capacity to consent, refuse, negotiate pleasure, and set boundaries in line with her own values. In this frame, sex would then not simply be defined by who penetrates whom, but by whether the interaction is consensual, informed, mutually respectful, and free from coercion. This alternative differentiates from the shallow rebellion of ‘to sleep with whomever you like’ —it should also acknowledge that while women have disproportionately borne risks (pregnancy, stigma, violence) resulting from sex, it is still possible to name structural realities without mythologising those risks as natural law or female destiny. Sexual agency should focus on the insistence that consent, desire, and mutual care are non-negotiable criteria for any sexual relation—heterosexual or otherwise. With this logic intact, sex within marriage can be recognised as exploitative, and sex outside of it can be deemed ethical; the moral line shifts from the ring to the relational dynamics between two engaging parties. One way in which some Asian women have described healing from sexual shame is through the process of relearning that their body is not a family asset or a moral project for others, but first and foremost their own—and to reconcile with their power in decision-making.
What feels so enraging in contemporary purity culture—especially in 2026 when we have language, research, and feminist theory at our disposal—is that it clings to the ancient script while pretending it is protecting women. It warns daughters, with melodramatic fervour, of male predation and sexual ruin, only to funnel them directly into systems that normalise their disposability. If there is any hope of escape at all for Asian daughters, it lies in puncturing the inevitability of that story. The real question to ask is whether women are allowed to be something other than collateral in someone else’s drama—whether they can, finally, step off the altar and be protagonists in their own erotic lives.
Image Credit: Photo by cottonbro studio from Pexels