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By Mihar Dias January 2026
No one wants their underwear stolen. Not in broad daylight, not at 4.25am, and certainly not by a masked man who appears to treat your clothes rack like a boutique sale at a mall.
Yet here we are, confronted by CCTV footage from Tangkak, Johor, of a man who did not break into a home to steal cash, gadgets or jewellery, but lingered lovingly over bras, panties and safety shorts, selecting them with the discernment of a shopper comparing sizes, textures and perhaps colour coordination. If crime is a reflection of society, then this particular incident suggests we are living in an age where even deviance has become strangely curated.
The man didn’t grab and run. He browsed. He circled. He inspected. He made choices. And when satisfied, he stuffed his trousers so full of intimate apparel that he waddled away looking like a walking laundry basket.
This was not desperation. This was not poverty. This was fetish dressed up as petty theft, absurdity masquerading as intent.
Netizens laughed, of course. Some said it looked like shopping. Others admired his “skills”. The victim herself responded with sarcasm, wondering if this was his way of telling her to buy new clothes for Chinese New Year. Humour is often how we process discomfort, especially when the alternative is anger or fear. But beneath the laughter is a question worth asking: why does this nonsense persist, decade after decade, generation after generation?
Because, inconveniently, this is not new.
I say this with some embarrassment, because as a freshie at University Malaya in the 1960s, I was exposed to what was then treated as a rite of passage: the panty raid. Yes, that panty raid. Male students, fuelled by adolescent bravado and group pressure, would be dared—or “encouraged”—to surreptitiously climb over walls into women’s dormitories to steal undergarments. The trophies would then be paraded back like war spoils, accompanied by laughter, cheers and the misplaced belief that this was harmless fun.
At the time, we didn’t call it fetish. We called it a prank.
Looking back with the benefit of age, hindsight and a functioning moral compass, it is astonishing how casually the invasion of privacy was normalised. No one stopped to ask how the women felt. No one considered the fear of discovering your most intimate clothing missing. The act was framed as cheeky, not creepy; mischievous, not violating. Boys would be boys, and girls were expected to laugh it off—or worse, accept it as flattery.
Fast forward half a century, and the walls have been replaced by CCTV cameras, dormitories by porches, and pranks by repeat offences. But the underlying absurdity remains unchanged: grown men behaving like hormone-addled teenagers, except now without the excuse of youth.
The Tangkak thief is not part of a boisterous gang egged on by peers. He operates alone, methodical and apparently serial in his habits. He is described as a “regular”.
This is not mischief; it is obsession. The panty raid has gone solo, and in doing so has lost even the flimsy cover of youthful stupidity.
What makes the incident especially ridiculous—and troubling—is the way it straddles comedy and menace. On one level, it is farcical: a man painstakingly selecting underwear in the dead of night. On another, it is unsettling: someone repeatedly breaching a home boundary for intimate items, undeterred by exposure or shame. Today it’s underwear. Tomorrow, who knows?
There is also something faintly tragic about it. In an era of online shopping, adult entertainment, and endless digital distractions, a man still feels compelled to physically steal underwear from a stranger’s porch. It is low-tech deviance in a high-tech world, analogue obsession in a digital age.
Perhaps what endures most is male entitlement—the idea, conscious or otherwise, that women’s bodies and belongings are fair game for male amusement or gratification. Whether cloaked as a prank in 1960s UM or as a nocturnal “shopping trip” in modern-day Johor, the logic is depressingly consistent.
The difference is that today, we are supposed to know better.
CCTV doesn’t just capture images; it exposes attitudes. And what this grainy footage reveals is not merely a thief with an underwear fetish, but a society still oscillating between laughing it off and taking it seriously. We joke because it’s absurd. We should also reflect because it isn’t harmless.
I can laugh now at the foolishness of my university days, but I cannot defend them. Nor should we excuse their modern equivalents as mere oddities. Some pranks deserve to stay buried in the past, along with the walls we once climbed and the excuses we once made.
Underwear, after all, should remain exactly where it belongs—on the clothes rack, not as a punchline, a souvenir, or evidence in a police report.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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