The petition was a way to evidence our claim. Well, because the government justified the law as an expression of societal values, but we were confident that most people had simply never heard of it, and would disavow it completely if they did. We gave our reasons: women have a right to protection from violence, and suspending this based on marital status is demeaning. The journalist interviewing us seemed to be less interested in the law’s grotesque misogyny or the complicity of lawmakers in injustice, and more in the mystery of the three individuals fronting the campaign. It was also quite rare then for anything born on the internet to make its way to print media. In recent years you can’t move for bumping into online petitions, but in 2009, they were still rare. Our effort, which sought to scrap the legal defence of “I was her husband,” would succeed only ten years later. The first time was in 2009, when a journalist was covering a campaign some friends and I had founded for the reform of rape law. Yet there must be something in my road to activism that bears examining, or the question wouldn’t get asked. I fear I am like a frog, a small green bumpkin who, years after leaving the well, still can’t get over the exoticism of the world outside. But to return to the tunnel, to fix attention on it and obsessively measure its dimensions, can look more like another aspect of the trap than any kind of escape. This is a story about escaping the foundational tunnel vision that for a long time constricted my understanding of the society I grew up in and how its members can shape it. The only drama here is the intellectual drama of finding that one’s mind has changed. I’ve rattled my own answer off many times, beginning with “Oh boy-do you want the long version or the longer version?” It seems a natural enough exchange so much of ordinary conversation is swapping biography, and why not? We are interested in one another, we humans.Ĭoming to a written version, though, I hesitate. “How did you get into this?” Anyone involved in civil society in Singapore has probably heard this question.

A Certain Exposure by Jolene Tan