Marriage...pah
Most of you will know this, but just in case: Malaysia is an Islamic country. This means - amongst many, many other silly things - that polygamy is legal. To be specific, every (Muslim) man can have four wives.
The origins of this pathetic ruling come from a weaselly and deliberate misinterpretation of the Koran. There's a passage somewhere in the Koran that says that during the time of the Holy Islamic Wars, because so many Muslim men were getting slaughtered, the remaining males were allowed to take four wives. This was not to satisfy their sexual drive. They were duty-bound to marry the widowed women (mainly women in their 40s and 50s) whose husbands had died in the war, to take them into their care and look after their children.
But of course, today in Malaysia, it's become an excuse to have a rotating portfolio of 21-year-old beauties in the bedroom. You can have up to four wives at any one time, and, like capital goods in a factory, you can replace them with fresh new nubile machinery once the old ones have been worn out. If you think divorce proceedings in the West are numerous and simple, how's this sound: to divorce a Malay woman, all her husband needs to do is say "Talak" three times to her. Adjusted for modern times, you might even do this over SMS. I kid you not.
Anyway, that was in the papers today, hence my writing about it. Apparently the government is going to make the legal approval process for marrying another wife "more rigorous". This includes (get ready for it) asking the husband whether he will treat his new wife equally to the other/s. Oh, be still my heart. Gender equality in the Islam world has taken a revolutionary step forward.
Oh, and by the way, Muslim women aren't allowed to divorce their husbands.