The post below is probably the most profound ever posted in this or any other local forum with every sentence loaded to the brim. You got to be more than a digit in this country.
If you already not in the public space enabling progress, you got to be out there. I suspect you are already out there.
I might not agree with some of your views but that bloody mind of yours is razor sharp.
This is the thing that I can't understand about Singapore. We pay big bucks to journalists and academics as political and social commentators but substance is generally mediocre and creative thinking zilch. I have seen such minds in the corporate world and in the international arena. The exception being one economist and one socioloist in NUS.
I however had chats with some good minds but their brilliance seem to come forth when we chat in the canteen during lunch or when it is time for a tipple after a dinner engagement. Not sure if its culture or avoiding conflict.
As the Marxist critic Louis Althusser said, the family is one of the ideological state apparatuses. (Education system is another.)
Nothing quite like a strong family institution (with all the hierarchy and fixed gender roles) to bring society in line, to provide constraints to people's behaviour. Governments rely on it all the time to keep society in check.
Fixed/restricted gender roles are crucial to the proper functioning of families.
The family is also the centre of capital accumulation. So it's central to the nation's prosperity. Women leaving men and being single mothers dissipates both family and national wealth. Singapore's nation-building went hand in hand with stamping out polygamy and developing the nuclear family unit.