A newly-wed bride on honeymoon put on her sexiest clothes. Her husband reacted in the obvious way — he went home and filed for divorce, alleging “mental cruelty”. Huh? It may seem illogical, but remember: This is Asia. At a court in New Delhi, the man’s lawyer told Additional District Judge Manmohan Sharma: “During their honeymoon, she dressed herself in a very vulgar manner.” Shocked, the judge granted the divorce at once, visions of full frontal nude ankles scandalizing his imagination.

I shared this recent news item, sent to me by an alert reader, at an international business conference the other day. Western executives were amazed. “If Asian women want to inflict this type of mental cruelty on you, send them to us,” they said. “We’ll suffer on your behalf.” Hey, thanks, guys!

But reflecting on this issue later, I realized that Asians better face the hard truth about ourselves. Deep down, many of us don’t like sex. Our region always comes last in the Durex global survey of sexual well-being.

Last month, the Mainichi Daily News reported that more than a third of Japanese boys aged 16 to 19 and 59 percent of girls of the same age were “indifferent or averse” to having sex, according to a survey. David McNeill, a journalist working in Japan, was amazed, responding: “Where I grew up in Ireland, teenagers thought about little else.”

The debate reminded me of a case I once reported on in rural China in which a couple complained that they had no children after five years of marriage. The doctor asked: “How often do you have sex?” The couple replied: “Sex? What’s that?”

Maybe that’s the problem. In many Asian countries today, sex education is strictly illegal. It’s too bourgeois, too Western. Instead, we have to learn about sex from the internet, and so we get put off by all the tentacles and uniforms and stuff.

One Canadian executive at the business conference asked: “If Asians don’t like sex, how do you reproduce?”

Asians have three main methods, I told him. 1) Mosquito Pollination. A mosquito stings a guy, collects male chromosomes, and then stings a woman. 2) Cell Division. This is a convenient asexual reproduction technique, triggered by the powerful chemicals in chicken tikka masala. Men who wish to avoid getting pregnant avoid this dish. 3) Spore Transmission. Asian men release millions of tiny fluffy seeds which float through the air and impregnate women. “If you ever see a woman running down the street in Asia, look out for fluffy spores pursuing her,” I said. (It’s always fun to talk to Westerners about Eastern culture, as they never know which bits to believe.)

After the conference, eight of us went down to the hotel bar for a drink. A trio of young women, as beautiful as they were unobtainable, tottered by unsteadily, their feet clamped in gruesome instruments of torture (“designer shoes”) for which they had paid small fortunes.

The guys instinctively pulled in stomachs and stopped breathing until they had left. Sighing, the Canadian said: “Actually, the Asian definition of women in sexy clothes as ‘mental cruelty’ does kind of make sense to me.”