Jaga Diri : negotiating sexual abstinence as a sexual script

• Main Author: Abdul Rashid, Farah Izzah
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51709
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper argues that sexual abstinence as a sexual script is changing – first, from how it is taught by Singaporean-Muslim parents to their children, via imparting religious values to their daughters. Parents require daughters to, jaga diri or, “take care of yourself,” and abstain from sex when they enter romantic relationships. “Taking care,” of oneself, is a contradictory and disempowering strategy to control women’s sexuality and intimate practices that may result in strong emotions of sex guilt, that requires further management and rationalization by interviewees. Debunking the idea of sex as natural and smoothly progressive because it is in fact, symbolically layered, shows how sex is a difficult process to negotiate, as meanings between sexual partners are not always mutually shared and may cause a destabilization in an individual’s sense of self, using Mead’s conceptions of the Self and Reflexivity as a basis for analysis as well.