Valentine’s Day. East meets West and creates a cultural train smash. Article by Terrence McCoy in the Washington Post explains it all: basically, Valentine’s Day has been reinterpreted in Cambodia (in Phnom Penh) to mean the day when the boys ask girls for sex. And if they won’t come across they rape them. (McCoy, btw, is the author of The Playground, a Kindle single that’s worth investigating).
It’s a bit more complicated than that of course, but on one side you have ultra-conservative Cambodian tradition, in which girls just don’t have sex before marriage, and a sex-saturated media.
Philip J Coggan 