Singapore’s baby making lessons

Bathtub tutorials and a baby-making contest on television? Why not, says Singapore’s self-styled sex guru, Wei Siang Yu, nicknamed Dr Love.

Singapore's requests for couples to procreate fall on deaf ears

As the island-state grapples with falling birth rates, the flamboyant medical doctor is preparing to launch a midnight television talk show which will feature tutorials, hoping it can rekindle passions and encourage couples to have more children. 

Wei said the programme will be launched in the second quarter of this year. 

This will be followed in the third quarter by a reality television programme called Dr Love Superbaby Making Show in which couples from different nationalities will compete to be the first to conceive. 

Firing up libidos

Wei’s unique efforts to fire up libidos come after repeated urgings from Singapore’s leaders for the affluent state’s population of four million people to reverse the nation’s reproductive slow-down.

The fertility rate fell to a historic low of 1.37 a woman in 2002, despite repeated government statements urging couples to procreate. This is well below the rate of 2.1 a woman which demographers say is necessary to replenish the population naturally. 

“We will have people come and talk about their love lives and private lives. We will also talk about their strategies on love, basically allowing them to talk, listen, understand and analyse”

Wei Siang Yu,
Singapore sex guru 

“We will have people come and talk about their love lives and private lives. We will also talk about their strategies on love, basically allowing them to talk, listen, understand and analyse,” Wei said of the TV talk show. 

One of the programme’s highlights will be the bathtub tutorials involving real-life couples and conducted by Dr Love himself. 

“We will teach couples how to massage each other in a bathtub,” said Wei, an Australian-educated doctor whose previous novel programmes to help ease the decline in the fertility rate have gained international publicity. 

No censorship

Wei said he did not foresee any conflict with the island’s strict censorship laws as the tutorials would be carried out with decency by a trained medical professional.

“We will not reveal the breast or the groin. Viewers will only see the back,” he said. “This is not pornography, this is edu-tainment (education and entertainment).” 

Singapore's fertility rate fell to a low of 1.37 a woman in 2002
Singapore’s fertility rate fell to a low of 1.37 a woman in 2002

Singapore’s fertility rate fell to a
low of 1.37 a woman in 2002

The baby-making contest will be launched in the third quarter of this year, said Wei, whose US-based company Meggpower.com is co-funded by American and Asian partners.

“This is a reality TV show with 10 couples from all over the world competing in Singapore to make a baby,” he said. 

Couples will be given a time frame and will be judged on who will be the first one to report a conception.

Seduction strategies

Dr Love will closely monitor the couples’ hormonal cycles and
recommend changes in their diets to aid conception. Seduction strategies will also be featured. “It’s like a baby race,” he said. 

Wei, who is unmarried, shot to the spotlight last year when he launched iDream, where couples finding it difficult to have children board a “love boat” for a luxury resort with the sole purpose of baby-making.

The package, launched in April last year and costing up to 1000 Singapore dollars (US$600) a night, includes sex counsellors on standby to advise the couples, fertility seminars aboard cruise boats, as well as massage and aromatherapy. 

“Money does not solve everything. Somebody has got to look at the emotions of people. It’s about being happy and having some emotional actualisation as a person”

Wei Siang Yu,
Singapore’s Dr Love

Wei said Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) spoiled his business after only three months, as travel demand to Asia grounded to a halt. He plans to re-launch the idea in March. 

Wei revealed plans to follow the “love boat” package with a “love plane” which would ferry couples to romantic hideaways in Asia with the same intention. This would be done through a tie-up with a regional airline. 

An existing service where women receive mobile phone text messages to alert them before their ovulation period, so they can make love during that time, is showing signs of success. 

Wei said he had received emails from some of the women saying they were already pregnant. 

The doctor said a government programme giving cash incentives to encourage couples to have more children was inadequate. 

“Not everything can be addressed by a national kind of policy-making … money does not solve everything,” he said. 

“Somebody has got to look at the emotions of people. It’s about being happy and having some emotional actualisation as a person.” 

Source: AFP